Leaving and Learning

A few weeks ago, I was standing near one of our law enforcement rangers outside the West Thumb Warming Hut when a visitor disembarked from an in-bound snowcoach, ogling up and down and all around as she crossed the snowy parking lot. “You must feel like this park really belongs to you,” she said to my colleague as she approached. He smiled, “Officially, while I’m wearing this uniform, I will tell you that this park belongs to everyone and I’m just here to watch over it.” Then, leaning in conspiratorially, “But in truth, when everyone leaves the park at night and it’s so quiet and I’m out on the trail all by myself, I do feel like this park is mine and mine alone.”

These words crept back to me last week as I loaded my snowmobile to drive away from the place which has been my part-time home for nearly ten years. In July, when you walk the boardwalks elbow-to-elbow with the American masses, Yellowstone is in every way the nation’s park; but in the wintertime, when not a single vehicle tracks up the Grand Loop road between dusk and dawn, it is easy to mark your territory, claiming the first ski on last night’s snowfall or a private eruption of Old Faithful by moonlight. As with so many things in life, I didn’t realize how much Yellowstone was in my blood until I started my new job here at Canyonlands. I may have to strap an elastic band around my wrist and snap myself every time I mention “the mother park,” for it seems I just can’t stop talking about Yellowstone.

As wrenching as it is to leave a place you love, there is nothing like the process of saying good-bye to polish it up all nice and shiny for your memories. My last week in Yellowstone was crammed with the best the park has to offer, from cozy evenings with friends, to moonlight skis and snowmobile rides, warm conversations around the wood stove, frosty morning walks in the geyser basin and top-notch skiing on favorite trails. Those days of saying goodbye to friends—with hugs and goodies, promises to visit and dreams of returning—solidified my deep gratitude for associations forged during the last four winters, particularly with the guides who have brightened so many of my days with smiles, one-handed waves, pockets full of candy, plenty of wise-cracks, and the unspoken acknowledgment of our shared quest to discover the every-day spectacular of Yellowstone.

Camping out with my coworkers in a historic cabin-turned-warming hut reminded me how fortunate I am to work for an agency where colleagues are friends and the workplace is steeped with adventure and opportunity. My time with this intrepid trio of women was far too short, and I sincerely hope our association will continue in the NPS and beyond. And on my last day in Yellowstone, as I took that final ski up to the Continental Divide and then down the Spring Creek Trail, I realized that if I had one day left on this planet and by some good grace it was in the wintertime, I would choose to spend that day skiing this very trail on a sunny but not-too-warm winter day, topping it off with a Caldera Cake at Old Faithful (hey, if it were my last day, I’d probably eat two or three!) After such a week, my heart was as heavy as the wet, sloshy snow which fell during my last Yellowstone night, but also brimming with sincere appreciation for the privilege of being a small part of something so tremendous and challenging and inspiring as a Yellowstone winter. I have met new versions of myself through my experiences here, and I can only hope my work here has contributed positively to the place which so many others claim as theirs and theirs alone.

After my first winter at Canyon, I scribbled down a list of “Lessons Learned in Winter.” I stumbled upon my notes the other day while I was packing up, and it seems appropriate to share parts of that list now, as I embark on a journey which is bound bring its own set of harried lessons. There are certainly otherslessons I would add today, but to preserve the innocence of those first four months, I will stick to the original list:

Lessons Learned from a Yellowstone Winter:

*Do not fear the snow. (I’m sure that was penned with you in mind, Jen!) After a week in the park I quit kicking the snow off my boots when I came into the house. The snow melts and evaporates away in moments, adding precious humidity to the room and leaving no trace on the carpet. I vacuumed only once during my first winter, for snow doesn’t track like dirt. Besides, it’s going to snow almost every day, so the sooner you accept that, the less time you will spend worrying about it.

*Get a job where you can wear sweats to work. Knowing that you have your fleece pajamas on under your snowmobile bibs will always bring that secret smile to your face.

*The weather forecast will never be accurate. Plan for every possibility and quit worrying about it. Even if it snows a foot, you'll still be able to get there on a snowmobile.

*Cook with what you've got, even red delicious apples. Fresh fruit is rare as gold during the wintertime, and apples snubbed by snowmobilers are a welcome supplement to a diet of packaged foods with six-month shelf lives. While I might prefer a Fuji or Jonagold, an apple means so much more in Yellowstone’s Interior, and homemade applesauce will forever be a favorite food because it reminds me that friends are looking out for me and doing simple things to make my life a little better.

*Go to bed early.  When the sun sets at 4:30 and you have no television, no internet, and few social obligations, sleep creeps in early. And after a day spent shivering in sub-zero temperatures, your tired body can take nine…ten…eleven hours to recuperate.

*Dance with your skis on.  Topping my list of favorite Yellowstone moments is a dance during the Snow Lodge Winter Olympics. In 2008, the hotel company brought in a live band to perform for employees in the Old Faithful pub. Erika and I seized a rare chance to enjoy live music and snowmobiled over for the show. Halfway through the evening, cues were exchanged between the veteran employees who mysteriously snuck out the front door. Moments later, they came clacking in on their skis, stomping in rhythm with the music and pulsing the floor with the most wonderful, vibrant percussion. Those without skis played hop-scotch over their tips and tails in a frenzied ski-dance, a Snow Lodge tradition, unique to a life lived on skis. When I snap my skis on outside my front door, skiing to work, to play, to exercise, to socialize, to take the garbage out, I think of that night dancing in the pub with my skis on, shouting to the world, “This is what it means to live in Yellowstone!”

 Here, we dance with our skis on.

Yellowstone Ravens Addicted to Diet Coke

It is no secret that I have a few Yellowstone Tourist pet peeves. Yes, I hate it when you toss your chewing gum under the boardwalk. I can’t believe you claim at the gate that you don’t need a map and then show up at Fishing Bridge wondering how you missed the road to Old Faithful. This morning, I rode with clenched jaws because I could see the tracks of a snowmobiler who was hot-dogging it all over the road, as if he were driving a bumper car in Disneyland, not a $10,000 machine in the world’s first national park.

It is also no secret that I despise the vending machines in the Fishing Bridge Warming Hut, and not just because I listen to their electric whine for several hours a day. Here I sit, between walls constructed from lodgepole pines which were placed here in a time when less than a thousand people visited Yellowstone every year. People enter the hut, chilled from traveling through the hushed winter landscape, seeing more bison and coyotes than people and vehicles, to be greeted by a cozy fire, a friendly ranger, and a neon banner for corporate America. No person spending eight hours in sub-zero temperatures truly NEEDS a cold soda. Dehydration and hypothermia aside, is there a better time to try out good nutrition than on a day when you are getting all this fresh air and exercise, and experiencing something you’ve never tried before? Not to mention that all that liquid and caffeine is going straight to your bladder and will lead to one very uncomfortable snowmobile ride. And then there’s the simple truth that electronics can be quite fussy in freezing temperatures, and more often than not you aren’t going to be able to get the treat you want out of the machine at all. I watched someone the other day key in every number on the touch pad—A1… A2…, A3…--until the very last slot finally coughed up a package of Juicy Fruit. When the machines don’t work, people get cranky with me, though I know nothing about how to help out (they are operated by the hotel company, who sends an employee over every Saturday to stock the machines). I spend much of that conversation discouraging people from shaking the machine until it spits out the Doritos which are dangling from E3.

But the very worst problem is that most people can’t drink 16 ounces of sugar-water during a twenty-minute rest stop at Fishing Bridge, so they savor the soda for a few moments and then leave 2/3 of the can for me to deal with. Actually, I wish they would just hand their unsipped sodas directly to me, and I would gladly walk over to the outhouse and drain the liquid down the vault, crush the can, and send it to recycling. That is the cleanest, most legal way to deal with the unwanted beverage. But in this case, they never ask the ranger. Instead, they might decide to toss the can into the recycling bin, soda and all. When I pulled the plastic liner from the bin to empty the recycling a few days ago, the bottom of the sack was weighed down by a gallon of “suicide” soda (remember when you used to go through the buffet line and empty one shot of every kind of soda from the machine into your glass? Mmm….) After double and triple bagging the whole thing, I bungeed it onto my snowmobile, and drove at 5 mph to the recycling receptacles in the housing area. I pulled on thin latex gloves and sorted every aluminum can and plastic bottle, until my hands were frozen and I was left with a plastic bag of flat soda.

But I would gladly sort through hundreds of sticky soda cans if it would keep people from making the very bad decision to dump their Diet Coke outside. Now I get that winter is an awkward time and the proper and polite solution of pouring your beverage in the toilet may not be obvious to civilized folks. And I get that when you pour that soda into the snow it truly seems to disappear into four feet of powder. In reality, however, pouring a can of soda into a snowbank is rather like pouring syrup on a snow cone or cola flavoring into a Slurpee machine: the liquid doesn’t disappear, it freezes, making sugar/saccharin ice cubes all around the warming hut. In the evening, when I’m not here to chase them away, the ravens swoop down and dig out these tasty bits of high fructose corn syrup for dinner.

Now, I’m no biologist, but I’m willing to wager that the last thing a bird which sleeps outside when it is ten degrees below zero needs to eat is a Slurpee. Beyond the issue of cold, that bird likely feels the sensation of being satiated—the same reason we drink Diet Coke when we’re counting calories—without actually receiving any caloric benefit. To survive the winter, the non-hibernating species in Yellowstone need to continuously ingest food dense with calories, fueling their efforts to stay warm. After all the talk we’ve heard about the empty calories of corn syrup, it is difficult to imagine what might happen to a bird accustomed to foraging off bison carcasses when it develops a taste for Coca-Cola. But can you blame it? We know that soda is bad for us, but can’t resist swinging by the drive-thru on the way home from work because it’s easier than cooking dinner. Given the option of free handouts at the warming hut or hunting for mice or bison, I’d certainly be tempted by the sugary stuff. And just like us, they’ll probably have no idea what it is doing to them until it is too late.

So every night as I pack up my snowmobile and pull away from the warming hut, I look up at the pair of black birds roosting just above the outhouse. I know they have their eye on the unguarded snow shack, ready to swoop in for a snow cone as soon as my back is turned. I try to resist personifying these intelligent birds, but part of me can’t help but imagine what goes on at the warming hut in the evenings as five-pound ravens get hopped up on Diet Coke. Do they get a little jittery and fly in frantic circles? Does it stimulate their productivity, helping them rip backpacks off snowmobiles with undiscovered strength? With a full belly and a caffeine buzz, who knows what a raven might be capable of? It’s likely my imagination, but as I glance up in the trees I’m certain I see a look so familiar to me after 10 years of graduate school: that crazed, wide-eyed expression which screams, “You’d better get out of my way, lady, because I haven’t had my caffeine today.”

My Favorite Moment of the Day

A magazine I thumbed through in the laundry room yesterday published paragraphs from writers describing their favorite moment of the day. After reading their stories about tucking their children into bed or going out early for a newspaper and pastry, I found myself pondering my favorite moment of a day in Yellowstone. I had pretty much settled on the following, until just this moment. The warming hut is empty after a slow day with just two groups of snowmobilers. I visited with two old friends, and then sat around the fire chatting with one of the new rangers and the wife of another seasonal. I had time to take a lunch break and skied along the Yellowstone River, listening to 43 swans a-swimming in an acre of open water. I’ll head home in just a few minutes, but the crackling fire, the chill on my cheeks, and the quiet of the landscape have a meditative effect, making this a favorite moment of a wonderful day.

My very favorite moment, however, is the final thirty seconds of my morning ski. I rise early this time of year, usually around 5:30 or 6:00 (don’t be impressed; I went to bed at 8:00 the night before), and work on the ol’ dissertation for an hour or so. Just as it is getting light, I head out for a quick spin around the campground, or a skate ski down the untracked-by-snowmobiles roadway. January mornings are cold and dark and it takes more willpower than I usually express at that time of day to drag myself away from my down comforter. Every day I convince myself that I can skip this once, but then I realize that there will be a day not too far distant when I will not be able to walk two steps outside my door and then ski through the best cross-country snow in the Rockies. I layer up, strap on the boots, and head grudgingly out into the sunrise.

The trail from the housing area climbs a slight hill, which inevitably makes me cranky. My blood isn’t circulating yet, so my fingers are cold, and half the time I manage to tangle up my skis in my early morning grogginess. The temptation to retreat is intense, but if I can just make it up that hill, the whole morning opens up to me and the fresh air truly goes to my head. I fall into the rhythm of the ski… swish, swish… kick ‘n’ glide… all those cliched skiing motions. I love the soft whoosh of each ski gliding over the snow, and the quietness of striding without footprints. I love leaving tracks in the smooth road surface: neat herringbones from my skate skis or slightly crooked grooves where my left knee turns out when I try to ski a straight line. The clouds turn pink with the rising sun, casting the brown plywood of Grant’s Mission ’66 structures in a surprisingly romantic glow.

Thirty minutes into my ski I begin cursing my own laziness for keeping me in bed that extra half hour, precious Yellowstone minutes I could have spent skiing. As the pink clouds fade to grey, I know that if I want to shower (and sometimes I do debate on whether that’s necessary after all), it’s time to head home. Now, as I turn into the residence area, that hill I dragged myself up just minutes earlier becomes an exhilarating downhill glide and I kick off down the trail to see how far the snow will carry me. On a cold morning, the momentum might take me right past my front door. I savor those sweet seconds on swift skis—wind in my hair, sun cresting the tops of the lodgepole pines, blood flowing easily now and fingers perfectly warm—wishing that I could ski the day away. For those few moments I am soley a skier and I am in Yellowstone, and nothing could be finer.

And that is my favorite moment of the day.

Sunrise from my front door.

Human Thermometer

When the temperature drops below -20F in Yellowstone, all non-essential NPS employees are ordered not to report to work until the mercury rises. Unfortunately, I don’t have a thermometer outside my house, so every morning I step outside and gauge the air temperature using the following remarkably accurate guide:

You know it’s 30 degrees outside when…

You step outside and think, “Ah, what a pleasant day,” and then look down and realize you’re   wearing just the T-shirt you slept in the night before.

It’s about 20 degrees outside when…

The sky is cloudy and grey, so you pile on an extra fleece, and then five steps outside the door you start clawing frantically at your zippers trying to escape from the extra clothing before your flesh starts to melt inside.

You know it’s 10 degrees when…

You see it’s sunny and lovely outside, so you leave that extra fleece at home, and for the entire forty-minute snowmobile ride to Fishing Bridge you grit your teeth against the wisps of cold air which creep in through your zipper and settle into the space beneath your coat where that fleece should have been. (To fight the chill, you are desperate enough to turn on the seat warmer, which you don’t think is working until you take off your snowmobile bibs at the warming hut and realize you were sweating so much that your fleece pants need to be wrung out.)

You know the thermometer’s sitting around zero when…

You return from a ski to find that the ends of your hair which were poking out from under your beanie are frosted white with the frozen droplets of your own breath.

You know it’s -10 degrees outside when…

You step out in the morning and inhale deeply of that fresh Yellowstone air, and your nostrils pinch together, and then freeze that way. As the cold air rushes through your nose, it freezes each little nose-hair and binds them together, causing your flesh to twinge as a million little nerve endings are tweaked by the icy tug of frozen follicles. Ahhh… breathe deeply.

And, finally, you know it’s 20 below when you drive three miles on a snowmobile and when you stop to wipe away the ice which has completely frozen over your visor, but when you remove your helmet you realize that your mask isn’t frosted so much as your eyeballs have iced over. Miniature icicles dangle from your eye lashes, and when you go to wipe them away, you cause your eyes to water and freeze shut. You’d dab your eyes with your balaclava, only the condensation of your breath has soaked the fabric and then frozen solid, right over your mouth and nose. What can you do, but bat your frosted eyelashes until the icicles tingle, turn the seat-warmer to high… and then boogie home to bed to wait for the temperature to rise.

Breakdown

Every once in a while I get the crazy notion that I want to buy my own snowmobile. Perhaps I want to minimize the odds that I'll smash another government rig into a herd of bison, or so people who come to visit have a sled to ride, or just so I can come and go as I please without worrying about whether a "pool" sled is available. My dreams of free-heeling independence are typically short-lived, however, because every year, just two weeks into snowmobiling season, we enter a period of total equipment failure. They say the four-stroke snowmobiles required in the park are more reliable than your typical snowmobile, which makes me wonder how two-stroke sleds ever manage to leave the parking lot. Drive any stretch of road in the park today and you'll pass three or four snowmobiles, pulled to the side, hoods up, waiting for the mechanics to come tow them out of the park. Guides regularly arrive at the warming hut with passengers riding on the back of their sleds, indicating that they've lost a snowmobile along the way. On a cold morning last week one group started with nine snowmobiles, and by the time they reached Lewis Falls, ten miles into the park, five of their sleds had seized up and stalled on the side of the road. The guide had to borrow a snowmobile from another company in order to continue his trip that day.

 

My first winter, we lost a snowmobile before the park even opened, when the dipstick in the oil pan (I mean that literally) rattled loose and released the oil reserve, leaving my supervisor stranded on his way to pre-season guide training at Old Faithful. Two weeks later I lost a bogie wheel on the way back from West Yellowstone, and when I pulled into the garage to show a mechanic, he told me that someone had put the entire track on backwards. Ten days after that, I picked up a friend whose machine started spouting coolant from under the hood, spraying him from helmet to pac boot with a solution that looked like frozen lime Slushee, taking down yet another snowmobile.

 

Lucky for me, I wasn't the one driving our snowmobile last week when it came down with the early symptoms of 'Mobilitis.  My supervisor was driving to Fishing Bridge and was waiting to pass some bison when the sled overheated. After navigating through the herd, she pulled over to check her coolant levels. When she opened the cap, however, a thick glob the color of a chocolate milkshake welled up inside, suggesting something much more seriously wrong than low antifreeze. She radioed for a ride home, and once again, two weeks into the season, we were down to one snowmobile.

 

The National Park Services no longer owns snowmobiles, but contracts with a company to provide sleds for the winter operations. The lease company supplies us with new and new-ish machines and also takes on the care and upkeep responsibilities. Thus, when a snowmobile breaks down—even two miles from the Lake Garage—our mechanics aren't even allowed to look at it, but we must get the machine to West Yellowstone where the contractor can do the repairs. Which was my task yesterday.

 

Towing a snowmobile is straightforward enough that the guides can rig a tow strap with a couple yards of webbing and haul a broken machine out of the park without missing a beat on their tour. While a 700-pound snowmobile doesn't have enough "umph" to comfortably tow another sled, pulling one snowmobile with another will really just slow you down a little bit. I used a tow bar designed by one of our local mechanics to keep the machine a bit more secure than a rope would, and crept over the pass to West Yellowstone.

 

I believe that West Yellowstone, Montana, must rank as one of the country's quirkiest towns, particularly in the winter. In the summer tourist season, more people enter the park through "West" than the rest of the gates combined, meaning that the town with a few hundred residents accommodates thousands of people every night as they stream back from Old Faithful hungry for dinner and ready for sleep. In the winter, however, most of those beds sit empty as park visitation drops. Most hotels don't even open for the winter season, and the ones which brave the slow season boast five or six cars in the lot at night. With so much unoccupied space, the town seems vacant even on the busiest nights, and though the abandonment is temporary, boarded up hotels and restaurants borrow still evoke slasher movies, particularly when drifted in with snow.

 

Indeed, the second quirk about West Yellowstone comes from the problem of snow. Here in the park where we pack down and drive over the snow, we really have no sense of what it means to have five feet of snow on the ground. But when you try to move snow around so you can drive a vehicle to work in the morning, suddenly even a foot of snow seems huge. In order to keep the roads clear and provide access to the few businesses which remain open, the plows pile snow down the middle of the road instead of pushing it to the side. Thus, most roads in town are divided highways—divided by an eight-foot mound of snow. During the day, large yellow front loaders work their way down each of the two-dozen streets, scooping snow and ice from the sides of the road, and piling it into massive medians right down the yellow line. When these piles become too tall (really, how safe can it be to drive through a tunnel of snow where you can't see oncoming or cross traffic?) they actually truck the snow outside of town where they build a course for the annual late-winter snowmobile X-games. When I was in West yesterday, though it hasn't snowed for four or five days, the tractors were hard at work moving snow from one place to another. Not only was I amazed that they were still cleaning up from the last storm, but I was impressed by the magnitude of such a thankless job—an entire winter spent rearranging piles of snow, only to watch it melt away all on its own come summertime.

 

Fortunately, when those winter storms do hit, you don't have to shovel your car out of the driveway. No, in West Yellowstone you can just crank up your snowmobile and drive right on down to work. During winter, the town's vacant motels echo the whine of snowmobiles from sunup to last call. The main highway through town is marked "No Snowmobiles" (probably to ease the tourists into the quirky traffic patterns), but every other street is open to any vehicle you fancy to drive on it. The roads are "high bladed" by the plows, who set their attachments an inch higher than street level, scraping off the new powder while leaving a layer of packed ice and snow on the pavement. Thus, cars and snowmobiles can share the road, a situation which is moderately unnerving to anyone who took a driver's test outside Gallatin County. While the snowy roads create a sense of anticipation for automobiles every time the driver touches the brakes (I wonder if I'll stop this time…), the snowmobiles dart wildly around town, seemingly fearless of the wheeled vehicles steered by panicked out-of-town drivers. Snowmobiles rule West in winter: they're in the parking lots, on the side-roads, and occasionally on the sidewalks, too.

 

Perhaps it is that hint of danger from sharing icy roads with several tons of steel on wheels which gives me the tiniest little thrill whenever I drive my snowmobile through West Yellowstone. After dropping the broken sled at the Arctic Cat dealer (and spending a good hour trying to fix a helmet before we declared it officially unfixable), I hopped on my snowmobile to take care of the "Things to Pick Up Next Time I'm in One of those Villages Where They Exchange Cash for Goods" List. I rode down to the hardware store, stopped in for a couple groceries, and was sorely tempted by the drive-thru at the bank before I stopped by the visitor center to pack my treasures for the return trip. I carried a grocery bag on my lap, slowed way down at every cross street, dodged the front loaders, and imagined a world where snowmobiles and streetcars could peacefully coexist.

 

Sigh.

 

It's almost enough to convince me to move to a town where everyone drives a (quiet, four-stroke) snowmobile all the time. But then I'd have to buy one, and we'd be right back where we started, towing a snowmobile to West.