Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

I remember visiting Yellowstone Park with my family almost 60 years ago.  The details are hazy, but I have these images of bears approaching cars in the road, and tourists passing food out to them.  I wondered if that actually happened, or if it's some sort of bogus recovered memory. 

On Monday morning we entered Yellowstone park.  The woman at the toll booth told me that my age qualified me for a National Park Senior Pass.  Ten dollars for a free lifetime pass into all US national parks.  There are some advantages to getting old.  Damn few, though.

I drove the motorhome, towing the pickup truck, around the southern part of Yellowstone, which took us to Old Faithful.  While most of Yellowstone turned out to be uncrowded, now that school was in, the Old Faithful facility was almost full.  My memory of 60 years ago was of a modest parking lot and visitors' center, but it's now an enormous installation, with shops, an automobile repair shop, a huge information center, and acres of parking.

Yellowstone has a bunch of geysers, but Old Faithful's claim to fame is that every 60 to 110 minutes, more or less like clockwork, it has a spectacular eruption.  Park rangers calculate the time for the next expected performance, give or take 10 minutes, based on the duration of the previous blow, and post the time at the center.  We saw that it would be about an hour before show time, so we had lunch in the motorhome, walked the dogs, and made our way back, along with hundreds of other tourists.

Sure enough, right on time there were a couple of preliminary squirts, then a column of steam well over 100 feet high. 
 

                          

But after all the anticipation, the show was a little underwhelming.  And I swear that I remember being somewhat disappointed in Old Faithful all those years ago, too.

We stayed a couple of days at a campground on the eastern side of the park. Altogether there were three days with no internet access and no cell phone service.  How do people live like that?

Wildlife viewing is part of the park's draw.  The usual strategy is to drive along until you see a gathering of automobiles, indicating that animals have been spotted.  Several times we came across large herds of bison, the species of buffalo the Indians hunted.  Bison are herbivores who have enormous neck muscles that make them powerful excavators.  They tend to congregate to graze in the fields beside the roads, and they cross the highways without paying much attention to the cars that have stopped to see nature up close.  In spite of warnings, tourists likewise seem to have no fear, and gorings happen every year.  One time we were so close that we could hear them snorting as they ambled past, and our dogs began barking maniacally, which made Nancy fear a bison attack on the truck.
               

We also saw a small herd of elk.  But not a single bear.

Yellowstone is, of course, a wondrous place, with an unmatched variety of attractions.  But a catastrophic fire in 1988 and smaller fires since have resulted in many extensive areas of nothing but dead trees, and have made it less attractive.

But Grand Teton National Park, just south of Yellowstone - now that must be one of the most beautiful places on Earth.  The Teton Range is a series of mountain peaks rising abruptly from level ground, and the tallest, most jagged is named Grand Teton.  These are young mountains, only seven million years old.  I recall thinking, all those years ago, as we drove from Yellowstone to Grand Teton, that the less famous park was actually prettier, and Nancy and I agreed that it was still the case.

Shortly after entering Grand Teton Park, we stopped at a picnic area and had lunch in our motorhome with the most magnificent view I can ever recall - the Teton Range in all its glory, with patches of snow, rising above a lovely lake, and the trees and bushes in the early stages of their fall color changes.         

The valley there in Wyoming is called Jackson Hole, and the town at the base of the famous ski area is Jackson.  We drove there and talked with a lady park ranger at the information center.  When I told her about my bear memory, she confirmed that it was accurate.  She grew up in the area, and as a girl she saw twenty or thirty bears every time she visited Yellowstone, and now she spots one at most, even though there are more bears in the park than ever.  But a decision was made long ago to stop the bear-human interaction by eliminating access to human food, and while it's safer for both species, the magic of seeing those wonderful and frightening animals up close and personal has been lost, and it's sad.