Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

by Tim Cahill

  John Good and Kenneth Pierce describe what happened next in a nicely compact text with an ungainly title, Interpreting the Landscape: Recent and Ongoing Geology of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Imagine, the authors suggest, a bottle of carbonated water shaken vigorously until the cap blows off. The pressure on the dissolved carbon dioxide (the carbonation) is relieved, and a mass of bubbles and liquid jet up out of the mouth of the bottle. In Yellowstone, when the cap blew, immense fountains of burning hot gases and molten rock and ash blasted into the stratosphere and were carried around the world. (There were likely several years of volcanic winter, when this airborne ash blotted out the sun.) Ash fall covered North America from what is now Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa.

  “Nearer the vents,” say Good and Pierce in a memorable description, “fiery clouds of dense ash, fluidized by the expanding gas, boiled over crater rims and rushed across the countryside at speeds of over one hundred miles an hour, vaporizing forests, animals, birds, and streams into varicolored puffs of steam.”

  Meanwhile, when the underlying pressure was released, what was left of the mountain range between Washburn and Sheridan simply collapsed, slumping into the top of the martini glass. Did the eruption relieve all the pressure? Nope. You can still see evidence of molten activity near the earth’s surface in the geyser basins and thermal features of Yellowstone Park. The hotspot is still there. Pressures may still be building.

  What this means is that when you walk around in the park today, you are, in effect, standing atop the largest active supervolcano on earth. Is there a chance that it will blow again anytime soon, causing a volcanic winter that would decimate crops worldwide and bring unimaginable famine to the world? An eruption that would bury Nebraska in eight feet of ash, as it did 640,000 years ago? A blast that would turn me and everyone I know living in proximity to the park into “varicolored puffs of steam”? Could that happen?

  Oh yeah.

  There have actually been three cataclysmic supervolcanic eruptions in Yellowstone and vicinity in the recent geological past. The Huckleberry Ridge eruption may have been the most massive volcanic event in the whole long history of earth. It happened about 2.1 million years ago. The Mesa Falls eruption occurred 1.3 million years ago, and the one I’ve been describing, the Lava Creek event, happened about 640,000 years ago. Do the math, and you’ll see there were 800,000 years between Huckleberry Ridge and Mesa Falls. About 650,000 years between Mesa Falls and Lava Creek. You don’t have to be especially handy with numbers to see that these eruptions are getting closer together in time. Some texts are willing to say that there’s a cataclysmic supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone every 600,000 years or so. I don’t have to tell you again that the last one was 640,000 years ago.

  Which means that we’re about due. Just to put everything in context, an eruption of Huckleberry Ridge dimensions would mean the end of civilization as we know it. This is something to think about when you’re standing on top of Mount Washburn staring south at 37 miles of mountains that no longer exist.

  The thermal features of Yellowstone are unpredictable, unstable, and entirely fascinating. With this in mind, I don’t really mind sharing the boardwalk. We’re all just potential puffs of steam anyway, and the earth is mighty beyond our imagining.

  Norris Geyser Basin

  MORE THAN LIKELY YOU ARE GOING TO DRIVE to Yellowstone. There are several entrances, several ways to camp, several places to stay, and advice about arriving by car is beyond the scope of this book. For more information on these basics, I strongly recommend the newly released guidebook Lonely Planet Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks (see “A Selected Yellowstone Bookshelf”).

  Because it is likely that you will drive, I am going to suggest the road you want, which comprises the classic tour of the park. It is the drive I use to introduce visiting friends to Yellowstone: it provides a general idea of the area’s geography and geology, the wildlife and the wonder.

  The Grand Loop road forms a kind of figure eight around the park, and was designed in 1886 by Lieutenant Daniel Kingman. I like to think of it as a brilliantly conceived exercise in connecting the dots of Wonderland. This 142-mile road passes almost every type of thermal feature, mountain, and wildlife habitat in Yellowstone. It travels past the Norris Geyser Basin (my favorite boardwalk in the park and currently the hottest, or so I imagine, since part of it was closed to tourists in the summer of 2003 due to unpredictable thermal activity). Grab a free brochure, and read the informative signs.

  In the early winter of 2002 I was treated to an off-boardwalk tour of an off-limits thermal area near Norris. My guide was Patrick Doss, former Yellowstone Park geologist. Walking on the thin white sand, a silica-based crust called sinter, Doss measured the temperature of various hot pools, while I walked carefully in his steps. It is possible to break through the crust of sinter and—worst-case scenario—fall into boiling water below. Mostly, Doss told me, geologists who concern themselves with thermal features can be distinguished by the various degrees of burns on their lower legs.

  If these professionals sometimes miscalculate, visitors—especially first-time visitors—have made fatal errors in the space of a few steps. It really is best to stay on the boardwalk.

  Contemplating the geothermal wonders of Norris can occupy the better part of an afternoon or, if you are Patrick Doss, the better part of a lifetime.

  It’s easy enough to get there, but the Grand Loop can be highly annoying to drive. People who see a moose or an elk or a bear or a bighorn sheep or a herd of bison or a wolf—people who see wildlife—simply slam on the brakes in the middle of the road. For this reason, you want to drive the Grand Loop at a crawl when there is any traffic at all. Anything over 45 miles per hour is both illegal and silly. Creep along. I hesitate to say this in a book devoted to walking, but visitors are likely to see more wildlife from the car than on foot.

  Whenever a creature makes an appearance near the road—especially charismatic megafauna, which is to say, things generally hairy and bigger than a human—there will be a traffic jam of hopeless proportions. You might as well pull over and join the orgy of roadside gang photography taking place. Watching my fellow visitors interact with wildlife is often aggravating. No matter how many times people have been warned about the dangers, they tend to take chances. For a picture. Someone carrying a little snapshot camera will approach a herd of two thousand-pound bison, seemingly unaware that the creatures can outrun a horse in a sprint. No matter. The person will move closer, then closer yet, trying to frame the animal in the camera lens. Such people are going to get hurt. I call the lumps they take “Instamatic” injuries.

  Bison may seem indolent, even lazy. But then they abruptly decide you need to be gored. People are frequently injured and sometimes killed by bison in Yellowstone. Here’s a biologist’s hint on watching bison: keep your distance. Watch the ruff around the animal’s neck: if it rises, that’s a good time to retreat. If the tail goes up, it means “charge” or “discharge.”

  On the other hand, listening to tourists you will sometimes glean information unavailable in any text. I once heard a father explain to a boy I took to be his son that the moose we were watching was a “mature elk.” According to this gentleman, an elk’s horns flatten out as he ages. Still, any sort of misinformation is preferable to the terrifying Instamatic situation in which a parent encourages a child to approach a bison or bear or moose so that both the child and the animal are in the same frame.

  It happens. I have heard one story, totally unconfirmed, of a father trying to place his young daughter on a bison’s back. It is said that the father was injured. I like to think he was beaten savagely by onlookers, but that probably didn’t happen. Another story has it that a young man tried to put a necklace of beer can pop-tops around a bison’s neck. I was never able to confirm this, either. The Park Service is often circumspect in describing how an injury occurred. But for a look at what can happen if you are dull e
nough (or simply unlucky), please read Lee Whittlesey’s book, Death in Yellowstone.

  So my drive along the Grand Loop is always an exercise in wonder at the dull and luckless who, I always imagine, are one charge away from a lingering death in a nearby hospital. It’s the same feeling I get while watching a horror movie, when the frightened young woman decides she’ll hide in the basement. No, no, don’t do that! There’s an ax murderer wearing a hockey mask down there!

  Still, I never tell people what to do—would they listen anyway?—and I generally try to get the hell out before anyone gets hurt. It is a great wonder of nature that more people aren’t injured in Yellowstone. They’re out there trying every day, going down into the figurative basement, where the figurative ax murderer is waiting for them with his figurative ax. Except instead of ax murderers, the dullest of the visitors are dealing with a herd of bison, a nearby grizzly bear, or an enraged moose.

  The Upper Geyser Basin and Old Faithful

  SO YOU’LL SEE SOME INTERACTION BETWEEN wildlife and visitors along the Grand Loop, which will eventually sweep you past the entrance to Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin. Roger and Carol Anderson, in A Ranger’s Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes, say that “geologically speaking, the Upper Basin is one of the most extraordinary places on earth.” It contains over 25 percent of the world’s geysers.

  The basin is worth looking at through the eyes of Nathaniel Langford, a member of the 1870 Washburn expedition to the park: “We had within a distance of fifty miles seen what we believed to be the greatest wonders of the continent.” But they hadn’t yet seen Old Faithful. “Judge then,” Langford wrote, “our astonishment on entering this basin, to see, at no great distance before us, an immense body of sparkling water, projected suddenly and with terrific force into the air.” Langford and his colleagues found “a thousand hot springs of various sizes and character.”

  It was because of these features that the U. S. Congress established the world’s first national park in Yellowstone in 1872. This has been called “the best idea America ever had.” The quote is attributed to several different persons, as great quotes often are. The congressional act resolved that geysers and geothermal features “in the region of the headwaters of the Yellowstone River” should be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale” and “set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

  It is interesting to note that the delegate to Congress from what was then the Montana Territory felt it necessary to draw the bill up in a hurry. We tend to think that it must have been an easy decision to set aside some remote western land that few people even knew about, but, incredibly, even back then commercial pressures were building. The Honorable William H. Claggett, the Montana delegate, later wrote that in the fall of 1870 he knew of two men from the nearby town of Deer Lodge who’d gone into the Firehole Basin, near several of the most spectacular geyser basins, and “cut a large number of poles, intending to come back next summer and fence in the tract of land containing the principal geysers and hold possession for speculative purposes.”

  There wasn’t really any time to lose.

  The idea of Yellowstone National Park may have first been proposed in 1865 by acting territorial governor Thomas Meagher. But the most compelling story is one told by Nathaniel Langford. On September 19, 1870, Washburn’s exploratory party was camped where the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers join. Some expedition members proposed to take up plots of land at the prominent points of interest, whereupon another member, Cornelius Hedges, said there ought to be no private ownership and that the whole area ought to be set aside as a national park.

  Retired park historian Aubrey Haines found no mention of this momentous discussion—the best idea America ever had—in the diaries of any members of the expedition. Cornelius Hedges, for instance, wrote: “Mon. 19 . . . no fish in river. Grub getting very thin.”

  No, this was simply a good idea whose time had come. Yellowstone was the perfect location. While there were some hot springs in California, some bubbling mud pots in Italy, and a few geyser fields in Iceland and New Zealand, there was nothing on earth like Yellowstone. It contains ten thousand thermal features: more mud pots, fumaroles, and geysers than exist in all the rest of the earth combined. Sixty percent of the world’s geysers are concentrated in Yellowstone.

  But in the mid- to late 1800s, few educated people believed that such features existed anywhere.

  John Colter, who left the Lewis and Clark party (with permission), may have been the first Euro-American to set foot in what is now the park. That was in the winter of 1807–1808. His description of the thermal features was generally scoffed at for many years, and the region was known as “Colter’s Hell.” This was the form sarcasm took at the time.

  In the 1830s the tales of fur trappers and mountain men—Jim Bridger and Osborne Russell—were discounted as hyperbole: the exaggerations of men engaged in the continuing western tradition of deceiving the dude. In 1869 the Folsom, Cook, and Peterson party explored the park. David Folsom and Charles Cook wrote an article from their diaries and submitted it to the New York Tribune and Harper’s Magazine. Both publications, according to Aubrey Haines, refused the article because “they had a reputation they could not risk with such unreliable material.” I have always heard that Harper’s responded, “We do not publish fiction.” I have not been able to confirm the quote, but it is still a good story and reflects the general population’s lack of faith in the proposition that there are places on earth where hot water erupts out of the ground.

  The Washburn party followed the Folsom party’s tracks in 1870, and its reports were taken seriously. Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, director of the U. S. Geological Survey, heard Nathaniel Langford lecture on his travels in Colter’s Hell, and was convinced of the man’s veracity. In 1871 he successfully petitioned Congress to fund the first scientific expedition into the region. Along on that expedition, which Hayden led, were photographer William Jackson and the celebrated artist Thomas Moran. Hayden’s report, Jackson’s photographs, and Moran’s painting shredded the fabric of doubt. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the landmark Yellowstone Act on March 1, 1872.

  I thought I was pretty smart moving to Montana in 1978 and buying a house not far outside the park. I also have a cabin on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, which abuts the park. I think it’s fair to say, as I have, that Yellowstone is my backyard. I don’t claim an exclusive on the backyard situation: I’ve also pointed out that, if you are an American, Yellowstone is your backyard as well.

  I thought of that not long ago while reading The Wolves of Yellowstone, a book by Michael Phillips and Douglas Smith. Readers who have not been in a coma for the past twenty years may be familiar with the controversy leading up to the reintroduction of the wolf to the park in 1995.

  Michael Phillips had the tough task of talking to local ranchers, the folks who live and grow stock near the park. Most of them did not support wolf reintroduction, though an enormous majority of Americans did. “Local folks,” Phillips writes, “who have to live with the wolves” believe they should have the final say. Not so, Phillips responded. In America everyone has a vote, “and this right allows ranchers to participate in decisions on resources throughout the United States. This,” Phillips says dryly, “was of little comfort to them.” The ranchers quite sensibly pointed out that they were not so arrogant as to assume they knew what was best for resources and people far away. That’s the crux of the argument the ranchers lost.

  The discussion with the dissenting ranchers, as Phillips describes it, went a little like this. The ranchers were told that “the national voice had spoken loudly in support of wolf reintroduction.” Fine, the ranchers replied, “if city folks want wolves, then you should release the critters in their backyards.” They were not pleased, Phillips notes, “when I pointed out that the nation’s backyard was Yellowstone National Park.”

  It may be useful to define the extent of Ameri
ca’s backyard.

  Yellowstone is surrounded by seven national forests in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. There are also three national wildlife preserves near the park, as well as several wilderness areas that exclude roads and mechanized travel. Some conservationists contend that this is the largest natural intact ecosystem on earth. Some say it’s the largest in the northern hemisphere. In any case, it is a big chunk of land.

  It was revered bear researcher John Craighead who began using the term Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) in the 1960s. In 1987 the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (a cooperative Forest Service and Park Service Group) defined GYE as just under 12 million acres, while a citizens’ advocacy group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (let’s hear sustained applause), defined it as nearly double that, according to the National Park Handbook for Yellowstone.

  Whether a person can live with the definition or not, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, generously characterized, encompasses 43,750 square miles. Is that bigger than Rhode Island? Of course it is. It’s also bigger than thirteen other states and the District of Colombia. It is only 8,000 square miles smaller than all of England, and nearly three times the size of Switzerland.

  That’s some backyard.

  Every year millions of us gather at Old Faithful, the fountain on our property, in the backyard. It’s fine to bump shoulders with others and watch Old Faithful blow, but I’ve also walked to Observation Point, a little less than a mile north, to see the eruption. One night late last October, when I wanted a little privacy, I put on a headlamp and walked up to Observation Point to see an eruption or two under the light of a full moon. It was an experience I enjoyed in utter privacy.