Day 20: Yellowstone National Park

I drove through the epic countryside between western South Dakota and Yellowstone National Park hoping to make it there by nightfall. I had heard that the road in from the east, where I’d be going, is both dangerous and winding and would learn later that it is also frequented by drunk drivers, a combination I’d hope to avoid. This was another point on the journey that I wish I’d brought someone along for so that I could obsessively snap photos from the passenger side instead of more necessarily concentrating on driving.

I was heading to the park mostly to see it, having never been there, and also to visit my friend Rachel who works at one of the service stations within it, near Old Faithful. I arrived there a little later than I expected and she was worried. I asked why and she told me “This place can kill you so many ways.” Just this season, there have been multiple bison gorings of varied severity, cars crushed by wildlife and rocks, accidental death or maiming by hot springs and geysers, and more random events like falling trees colliding with bad timing. One incident, in which a park visitor decided going in for a quick bison selfie was the best approach, really exemplifies people’s disconnect from the world around them–full of wonderful things to photograph, but that are also real things which perhaps have an agenda of their own. Often, these creatures are also larger than we are and equipped with, say, gigantic horns.

Places like Yellowstone, a mostly intact ecosystem despite human entanglement, are relatively rare at this stage of global industrialization and civilization. Because of the park’s placement outside of the rest of the world and its unique geological features, it is an excellent bellwether for climate impacts elsewhere. In a report released this year, climate scientists revisited their early research into anthropogenic climate change in the park and found that the outlook is much worse than they predicted in 1992. The basic forecast is hotter, drier, and eventually resembling the Southwest U.S. as fires and dwindling snowpack change the vegetation which in turn affects the animal life that the area can support. Natasha Geiling summarizes in her ThinkProgress article on the report,

As future fires become more frequent, dense stands of pine and spruce that now dominate Yellowstone’s landscape could become less common, replaced by young trees, grass, and shrubs. Without time to grow back between increasingly frequent fires, the park’s old mountain forests would, essentially, turn into open woodlands. More frequent fires could also push out native tree species like the whitebark pine, a keystone species that acts as an important source of food for grizzly bears and other wildlife in Yellowstone’s subalpine areas.

In a twisted way, I like to think that the bison’s aggression toward camera toting park visitors is personal. As one of the last five large herbivores on our continent, they have everything to lose if humans continue our industrial and polluting shenanigans and will perhaps descend as Derrick Jensen says, “into that longest night of extinction” whether or not we wise up. In another recent report, projections show almost universal threats to large herbivores–an integral central link between plant life, soil health, and carnivore health–and leave North America completely void of this category of animal in the foreseeable future.

I found myself completely captivated by Yellowstone’s eerie beauty and bizarre happenings, but also felt very conspicuously a modern human in my car and misplaced in time. In the same way I hate feeling like a tourist when I travel, I cringed at being part of a line of cars winding through such a beautiful place. The irony of traveling across the country or the globe to witness the majesty of nature (or whatever people’s reasons may be) only to find that traffic jams, partying, and botched selfies have come to the park, too, was at least interesting and perhaps makes up for my lack of photos due to timing and driving.

I had a near-miss with a bison, in a borrowed car no less, which I came upon as he walked slowly toward my car in my lane. I thought that the best course of action would be to slow, and either gently pass on the left the beast, which out-bulked my car almost certainly, or stop until he continued on his way. Having just heard stories from one of the guys at the auto shop at Old Faithful of side panels crushed in and worse from bison, I was well aware of the possibilities for this situation to go wrong. A car approached in the oncoming lane just as I had a chance to pass and rather than let me through, stopped next to it so the driver could snap photos. Our bison friend then accelerated to a trot, still dead ahead of me, and I motioned to the car the sign language equivalent of “GTF out of the way!”. They finally did, after a few more snaps, and I was able to pass. This encounter turned out to be a mere prelude to more dramatic encounters with nature, which you will soon read about here.

I drove out the scenic route, through Yellowstone Grand Canyon and past Mammoth and made my single stop a short dip in the Boiling River, per Rachel’s suggestion. In retrospect, I should have planned my trip with a bit more time for exploring Yellowstone, but as it was I drove straight through to Calgary the night after I arrived. I was left wondering about the Park. Do people end up appreciating intact ecosystems and learning more about them after visiting? The park provides excellent educational materials, but does that knowledge get snatched up as quickly as gift shop souvenirs do? All I know is that for me, Yellowstone was the perfect blend of breathtaking, bizarre, and frustrating and left me looking for more.