9 - Diego Gets Lost in Yellowstone
After a good breakfast in Red Lodge, Montana, I braced for the Beartooth
Pass to the northeast entrance of Yellowstone Park. So named because it is
jagged like the mouth of a grizzly whose parents couldn’t afford braces. Although I had taken the same route in 1978, I
didn’t see a thing, because it was in the dead of night:
We began climbing the pass at sunset.
The same road had been closed last week due to snow. In some ways we were lucky
it was night because we couldn’t see the vast abysses that lay on the other
side of the shoulder: hairpin turns, sheer cliffs, narrow roads with no guardrail,
dark cloud masses indistinguishable from mountains, views of creeping headlights
hundreds of feet above and below. All this in high winds with occasional snow
squalls.
This time I started in the morning, confidently. I glanced down at the
tiny glass ladybug on my console. A ladybug is my mother’s symbolic form, and
she was there to protect me. Except she was gone! I pulled over and scoured the
car, to no avail. You picked a fine time to fly away, Mom.
Beartooth Pass was in a dense fog. Perhaps I was destined to do this
route twice without seeing a thing. But the fog began to lift, and it was
magical.
So that’s what it looks like!
 |
| A guardrail would be nice. |
Yellowstone was even more beautiful than I remembered - though what did I
really recall? We all know how memory
works in funny ways. You may remember a bit here, a snatch there. Someone who
was with you may remember completely differently. I look at the 1978 journal
and photos and I’m not sure where those leave off and memory begins.
Here’s what I do remember: sitting on the banks of Lake Yellowstone with
my sketchbook, doing a landscape and a portrait of Bruce. Going on a hike with
the sketches in my backpack, and they were ruined from the sweat. Seeing lots
of prairie dogs and buffalo. That's about it.
Journal says:
On entering the park, we got three
pamphlets on the dangers of bears paid two dollars, and entered. (As for what
we saw) … the pictures will describe better than I can.
More 1978 photos:
Yellowstone is huge (larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined). I drove the 150 or so miles of the outer park loop, listened to Michigan eke out a victory over Northwestern, and stopped for buffalo twice. There’s not much you can do when that happens.
 |
Who me? I'm not in a hurry. What made you think I was?
Take all the time you need to cross the road.
|
I went for a hike on the Lost Lake Loop, about three miles. I figured it
would be pretty desolate because it started out behind the Roosevelt Lodge,
which was closed. I am psyching myself up for the Grand Canyon hike later in
October, so I was feeling pretty good about myself hoofing it up the switchbacks
through the woods, climbing 300’. Until I got to Lost Lake, and there was a
large group with lots of little kids, including tiny tots in Batman and
Superman shirts. One man smiled broadly as I approached. “Diego! You finally
made it!” I smiled and straightened that out, I hope, and went on. Then one of the women further up the path waved and called, “Hello Diego!” (Now
I know my don’t-want-to-be-bothered name).
As I moved on, past the petrified tree and up the hills of sagebrush, I
did manage some solitude. Here’s one some precarious balanced rocks took for
me:
Later I caught Old Faithful during an eruption, and had to listen to the
people next to me lament, “That’s it?” Yeah, "that’s it." A circulating hot spring, over an underground volcano, that has erupted roughly every 60 to 90 minutes since time immemorial.
So go ahead and send your shrugging emoji
to your friends.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had planned to take a second short hike to the Grand Prismatic
Spring, the largest hot spring in the United States. The directions were a bit
confusing, but when I got along the trail I saw a crowd of people on the boardwalk
looking at the spring, and figured the trail would get me there. But it took me
further and further away. Finally I said to heck with it, got off the trail,
and made my way gingerly across the fragile geothermal ground. I hopped across streams of water, not sure if it would slough the flesh off my bone, disrupt the park’s
fragile eco-system, or both. I gaped at giant buffalo footprints and looked
warily for bear.
Finally I made it to the boardwalk and hopped on as casually as
someone joining an airplane in midflight. Here are a couple shots:
Getting back was another story. The boardwalk took me to another
parking lot entirely, and I wasn’t sure where my car was. Aha! I turned on my iPhone’s
“parked car” feature. Problem: no internet connection. So I walked in what I hoped
was the correct direction.
It’s one thing to forget where you parked in a parking garage; it’s
another to lose your car in a 2.2 million acre, 3,468 square mile park. I
walked for nearly an hour, occasionally beeping my keys optimistically.
I looked fruitlessly for a park ranger, and even considered flagging down a
passing RV.
Finally, after about an hour, I came around a corner and saw my car. I
got in and headed north.
I continued, in the dark, on roads that occasionally went dirt,
until finally leaving the park into the gateway town of Gardiner, Montana. I
stopped at the first light I saw, the Blue Goose Bar and Casino, and ordered a
cold one. The guy next to me was eating a burger but it smelled different.
Turned out to be elk, and I was starving. I got one too and scarfed it down.
Turned out the guy, Chip from Philadelphia, was also traveling on his
own, back roads in his VW diesel Jetta, and coming from the Black Hills. Not common to run into another solo traveler, so it was good to meet him.
Another night too cold to camp. I drove another hour and half, finally
making it to Bozeman by midnight. Bearmouth Montana, population 2, will have to
wait until tomorrow.
Until then, this is Diego, signing off.
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