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The Balance Wheel: Summer 2003

[ see also: aci conference nearing | "must see" Wyoming scenes ]

“Contrasts”

By: Chris Madson

Yellowstone offers some strange combinations—
solitude and traffic jams, sagebrush and tundra, predators and prey, fire and ice.
Hoodoo Basin is a quiet place, especially in late June when the snow is still melting and the trails haven’t been cleared of deadfall. I had followed the Lamar valley up through the park, turning left at Miller Creek to get above the timber, then cutting across the flank of Hoodoo Mountain and into the high meadows on the south side.

The view was astonishing, especially for a hiker from the flatlands. The peaks of the North Absaroka were forged in the heat of the Yellowstone caldera, and their ancestry showed— the serrated ridges of volcanic rock were still black from the fire. To the west, the dark timber of the Mirror Plateau stretched twenty miles toward Mount Washburn; in the northeast, the Beartooths brooded on the horizon. And in all that landscape, I couldn’t see a single mark left by a human hand. It was an inspiring illusion.

I was walking alone that trip, over the strenuous objections of the authorities at the Lamar Ranger Station. For five days, I hadn’t seen another soul, until, one morning, I decided I was lonesome. I broke camp, walked down to the Soda Butte trailhead, jumped in my decrepit station wagon, and headed for Canyon Village. As the sun went down that day, I was eating an ice cream cone outside the Hamilton Store, a trail-worn vagrant in a tide of hungry tourists.

It was disorienting moment— the previous day, I had been standing in a place where I could hear the ringing in my ears, where the loudest noise was my own breathing. I could almost see that place from where I sat. And the two places were a universe apart.

If anything, the contrast between Yellowstone as wilderness and Yellowstone as recreational mecca is even greater in the winter than in the summer. In July, a casual tourist can fool himself into believing that Yellowstone is just an overgrown city park— the mid-day sun is warm on his back; the evening breezes are pleasantly cool; the grass is even kept cropped to a civilized length.

In January, there’s little chance of confusing Yellowstone with civilization. There may be six feet of snow on the level, and the landscape is beset with an abiding, unmerciful cold. Twenty below is normal; forty below isn’t unusual, and in 1933, the mercury dropped to sixty-six below near West Yellowstone one frosty February night.

On one hand, the main winter routes swarm with snowmobiles and snow coaches. There are winter speed traps set up around the park to snare snowmobilers who flout posted speed limits. The sound of two-cycle engines and the unmistakably urban perfume of exhaust fumes punctuate a typical day on the main route between West Yellowstone and Old Faithful.

On the other hand, elk and bison are locked in a mortal struggle with savage weather and highly efficient predators. At other times of year, the reality of death among Yellowstone’s wildlife can be ignored. During the winter, it advertises itself. A casual motorist is likely to see one or two bison carcasses between Mammoth and Cooke City on a typical morning. The snow is pink for twenty feet around, and the coyotes, ravens, and eagles fight for the remains with a ferocity born of need.

Occasionally, there’s the chance of seeing the kill itself— an ailing buffalo or elk surrounded by a pack of coyotes, one or two testing the victim while the others lie and watch. At some point, the balance between strength and weakness shifts, and the coyotes end a decline that began with disease, advancing age, or the inexorable attrition of winter. The Lamar River valley on the north side of the park is becoming a favorite winter haunt for several wolf packs, so visitors there may have a chance to see the same job done by specialists with more size and skill than coyotes.

It’s an odd combination— columns of thrill-seekers flying over the packed trails on their Ski-doos set against the grim prehistoric confrontation between predator and prey.

In 1988, an ecological bill came due in the Yellowstone country. For more than a century, well-meaning park managers had struggled to suppress fire in the park, proceeding from the notion that forest fires were natural disasters that should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, trying to stop fire in a mature lodgepole pine forest is a lot like trying to keep the tide off a beach— over the millennia, lodgepole timber has adapted to fire, practically invites it. With the accumulation of decades of fallen logs and insect-damaged trees, Yellowstone’s forests were a powder keg waiting for a match. As the drought of 1988 deepened, several matches were struck.

The resulting wild fires were monumental. Professionals who had spent their entire lives modeling the behavior of forest fires saw things that summer they had never predicted and wouldn’t have believed. The mainstream press reported the event as the loss of one of the nation’s most treasured natural areas, and outraged citizens demanded explanations.

While America mourned, the natural systems in the park quietly responded as they have always responded to fire. Elk, deer, and moose moved back into the blackened timber while the smoke still curled out of the ashes. They nibbled charred bark for minerals and wintered over on the riparian meadows that had escaped the flames. When the snow melted the next spring, there was an explosion of green. Fireweed and other pioneer forbs crowded the burns. Aspens set a huge crop of seed for the first time in living memory. Lodgepole pine seeds, released by the heat of the passing fire, sprouted and created carpets of foot-tall trees. Like Mark Twain’s demise, the reports of Yellowstone’s death were greatly exaggerated.

To this day, I hear park visitors express their dismay at the “devastation” the 1988 fires caused. I look at the landscapes they look at and see nothing but rebirth, an affirmation of the fundamental tenet of all life— that change is the only constant. The difference in attitude is just one more proof that what we see is always colored by what we believe.

As I get to know Yellowstone better, these are the contrasts that haunt me— not the strange juxtaposition of landscapes and natural processes but the intense and often conflicting interactions between people and wilderness. There is a tension in the park we brought along with us, a tension that began with the concept of a national park itself. I doubt we will ever resolve it completely. The contrast between our good intentions and our confusion will probably haunt Yellowstone as long as we maintain it as a “pleasuring ground.” In the end, it will be more than a playground, more than a natural laboratory. It will be the forum in which a nation debates the meaning of terms like “conservation,” “wise use,” and “land ethic.” And, as our demands on the land increase, it may be the place where we’ll confront the hardest decisions in our future and begin to choose the elements of the wild experience we want to preserve and the ones we’ll leave behind.

This article is reprinted from Wyoming Wildlife magazine, Yellowstone National Park 125-year anniversary issue, August 1997.