June 14th - Yellowstone - North Loop, Wyoming

Finally feeling close to normal, we decided we would try to see Yellowstone more completely than we had 30 years ago by taking the complete northern loop of the figure “8” road inside the park. We first drove north to the Mammoth Hot Springs area, which we had seen a couple of days back, but this time we attended a Ranger walk on the history of the military post there. The U.S. Army Calvary ran Yellowstone National Park from 1886 to 1916, at which time it was turned over to the civilian agency that became the National Park Service.

The museum in the first and second floor of the Visitor Center was quite interesting. The first floor exhibits contains many photographs and paintings from the 1871 Langford expedition, and the old camera used to take the pictures. It was a glass-plate type, I think, complete with big light-proof bellows and the size of the negative was 8 inches by 10 inches! It produced really great, fine-grain photographs that the expedition’s artist later painted in living color so that the folks back east could appreciate Yellowstone’s wonders. I thought his colors and compositions were quite accurate, almost like color photographs today.

Wandering thru the photographs, I was particularly struck by the one of Castle Geyser. It was so clear and unique that I could imagine the position of the photographer when he took the picture. I later tried to duplicate that picture of Castle Geyser to see how much had changed in 130 years, and you can judge for yourself how similar or different they are.

The first floor of the museum also exhibited various artifacts from the U.S. Calvary days which included the usual gun, saddle and so forth but also had a late 1800s bicycle and a Remington typewriter with the very early “basket” construction. That old type of manual typewriter had the striking mechanisms for all the keys arranged in a circle under the platten, which gives the visual impression of a basket. The second floor of the museum had examples of all the major wildlife in natural settings—they were extremely well done examples of taxidermy. We took time out from the museum for the morning Ranger walk-and-talk.<./P

During his talk, the Ranger gave us a lot more information about the Army days. He explained that from one point of view this could be a really desirable posting because the enlisted men out in the duty stations in the countryside had a minimum of daily supervision and a great deal of freedom. I could certainly see that in the summertime it could have been quite interesting and even fun if you liked the outdoors. But on the other hand I could also see that the long months of winter service would be tough and at times quite grueling given the harsh winter weather of the plateau. And on the negative side, the enlisted men were discouraged from having any wives at the post—that was reserved for officers!

Near the end of the talk, we spotted a bald eagle soaring overhead, so I was quick to take some photographs. The Ranger also talked about the buffalo and brucellosis problem, but mentioned that a quick and accurate test for brucellosis developed to detect biological warfare agents might be a key to solving the problem in a humane way. With an accurate test—the current test is less than 30% accurate—the buffalo with brucellosis can be culled from the herd and given to the Native-American tribes that have small buffalo herds. That way the park’s herd could be kept free of the disease and the ranchers would not have reason to kill them if they wandered from the park. I hope that solution will be adopted to stop the current killing of buffalo when they wander out of the park.

Whenever we met the buffalo on the roads, and we did so repeatedly during our drives, they always appeared to have a good sense of traffic. That is, they literally stayed in their lane and never jerked or veered unexpectedly across our path as we were passing them. Since these are wild and basically unpredictable animals, I was surprised at the degree to which they behaved themselves around automobiles—it’s almost as if they accord the automobile the same space they would another buffalo, but that is pure speculation.

After the Ranger talk we drove just out of the park northward to Gardiner, Montana, which is a town of 3 gas stations and, we were sorry to find, no grocery stores. Gas was, however, relatively cheap at $1.60 a gallon, so I filled up. There were also no no fast food places in Gardiner, so we had lunch at a café that had a daily special on Buffalo burgers. I tried that and found them to be leaner and tastier than normal beef hamburgers. That may in part be due to the buffalo being range fed, but I’m not sure.

Returning to the park loop road, we drove east and visited Wraith Falls and Tower Falls. Both these falls were quite nice and since we were early in the season there was lots of water at both of them. I expect that later in the season they are less impressive. At Wraith Falls we saw a big bull elk with quite a rack of antlers kind of hiding in the trees a short distance away. Tower Falls was a lot bigger, but that’s where we had our first and only experience in Yellowstone of having trouble finding a parking spot—I finally parked illegally beside the road where there was a line of other scofflaws already parked. I expect that later in the season finding parking spaces at many of the scenic spots would become a lot more difficult than it was for us.

Our route back led past Mount Washburn, and on a whim I drove the rough gravel road up the side of the mountain to the parking lot for the trailhead. The wind was icy cold and blasting away at over 30 mph up there, so we didn’t do the walk to the summit, but the view was quite grand. I don’t think there are many places where you can see a ring of snow-covered mountain summits lining the horizon all the way around you, and that’s what it looked like up there. It was awe-inspiring, really, and that was the climax of our day driving around the north end of the park. We later heard there were moose in the meadows up along the way to Cooke City, but we didn’t take that branch. Still, it was a very nice day filled with memorable sights.

That evening we heard about a grizzly being run over by a truck outside out campground, which was a sad thing, but on the other hand we enjoyed a really amusing campfire program called “Prince Charming and His Furry Tales”. The young man basically had a very complete set of improvisational skits about the animals in the park that he proceeded to act out for us. He had derived these skits from parts of old Native American stories and did a wonderful job acting them out. It was really just like “Saturday Night Live” skits and the children simply went wild with laughter.