March 2012: Volunteering at Yellowstone

Two years ago, we participated in a Road Scholar service program that involved doing volunteer work with a group of about a dozen people at Yellowstone National Park's Heritage and Research Center (our blog post about that trip is here). We enjoyed that experience very much, and when we left, the Center's curator told our group that if any of us wanted to return on our own, she'd be happy to have us. As long as we committed to working a month's worth of four-day weeks during the park's off season, she said, we would be able to stay in Park Service housing at no cost. That sounded like a good deal to us, and ever since then we've been looking for time in our schedule that would allow us to take her up on her offer. We finally decided that March 2012 would be a good time for us, and when we contacted the Center's curator, Colleen Curry, she said that March would work well for her, too.

We flew from San Francisco to Seattle, and then took a connecting flight to Bozeman, Montana, where we rented an SUV and the next day drove to Yellowstone. The Heritage and Research Center, or HRC, is just outside the park's northwest entrance at Gardiner, Montana. Gardiner was the first access point to be developed after Yellowstone was designated a national park in 1872. It's at a lower elevation than the park's other entrances, and is the only one of the park's gateways that remains open year-round. This photo was taken looking south at Gardiner, toward the Roosevelt Arch at the park entrance, with the back of the HRC at lower right. To the left of the HRC is the Gardiner School (serving grades K through 12).

(Click on any photo to enlarge – all photos © 2012 Tom Murray)

Our housing was at Mammoth Hot Springs, a few miles inside the park. Gardiner's elevation is just over 5,300 feet, but Mammoth's official elevation is 6,239 feet, and by the time we got to the house where we would be staying for the next month, our GPS unit gave us an elevation of 6,600 feet. Even though there wasn't much snow at Gardiner, we had about a foot of the powdery white stuff on the path to our unit. We tromped through the snow as we unloaded our car, and when we found a shovel inside, Tom cleared the porch and shoveled a path. We were in a two-bedroom house, with a bedroom on either end with a bathroom and kitchen/living area in the middle. There was plenty of space and it was clean, well-lit, and warm.

We arrived on a Saturday, and didn't start work until Monday, so we had our first Sunday free. Fortunately it was a beautiful blue sky day, so we drove to the Lamar Valley, an area in the northeast sector of the park where sitings of wildlife (including wolves) are common.  We saw several groups of bison along the road, both coming and going. 

Most were fairly predictable in their behavior, but one group of about ten had some young bulls in it who seemed to enjoy butting each other's heads and trying to chase their friends off the road. It took almost ten minutes for us to get past that group. 

We didn’t see any animals other than the many bison, but the nearby  hills and distant mountains were coated with snow and it was a beautiful drive. 

Mammoth has been the headquarters of Yellowstone's managers from the park's earliest years. For that reason, and because of its historic role as the first corner of the park to be opened to tourists, it's more developed than some of Yellowstone's other gateways. From 1886 to 1918, the park was managed by the United States Army, which at one point had more than 300 soldiers stationed here. The red-roofed buildings at lower right in the photo below served as officers' quarters during the last decade of the Army's service here. At far lower left is the Mammoth Hot Springs dining room, and to its right is the hotel. And in the foreground in this view is one of several pools at the hot springs and terraces that overlook the developed area.

When we returned from our drive through the Lamar Valley, we walked around the historic district, where we found the bear sculptures at the post office wearing wreaths and red bows as well as snowy white caps. These were, unfortunately, the only bears we saw during our month at Yellowstone.

We then went to the Mammoth hotel dining room lounge for drinks and dinner. The hotel, which is open for a limited period each winter, was closing the next morning, so we were glad to get to the dining room while we could. Tom had bison sliders, so he was a little concerned when we walked out of the dining room and found these two characters walking along the road between us and our car. Were they out in search of anyone who had been making a meal of their fellow bison? No, they ignored us and just kept walking.

Our lodging unit was located in a Park Service housing and service area just above the hot springs and terraces, so we passed them each day as we drove to and from the HRC, and during our month in the park we took several walks along the trails and boardwalks that crisscross this thermal area. On this sign, the area where we were living is just off the map to the left.

Yellowstone sits atop a giant caldera, which supplies the heat for the park's many thermal features. The best way to describe the features at Mammoth is to quote from a Park Service brochure: "At Mammoth, a network of fractures and fissures form the plumbing system that allows hot water from underground to reach the surface. The water comes from rain and snow falling on the surrounding mountains and seeping deep into the earth where it is heated... Limestone, deposited here millions of years ago when a vast sea covered this area, provides the final ingredient. Hot water with dissolved carbon dioxide makes a solution of weak carbonic acid. As the solution rises through rock, it dissolves calcium carbonate, the primary compound in limestone. At the surface, the calcium carbonate is deposited in the form of travertine, the rock that forms the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs."

The Park Service web site offers an online tour of this area. In the photo below, one of the travertine terraces can be seen at Palette Spring.

Here's a closer view of the Palette Spring area. The colors are attributable in part to thermophiles - microscopic organisms that thrive in Mammoth's hot springs.

From some of the boardwalks, you can get close-up views of the communities created by the thermophiles.

The first several days of our stay were quite cold, so the thermal areas were generating substantial volumes of steam.

Another major terrace is at Canary Spring. Here are a couple of views of this travertine terrace from above...

... and here's how it looks from below.

As we walked around the terraces, we saw evidence that we weren't alone, though we didn't come face-to-face with any large animals here.

Each workday, we drove from Mammoth to Gardiner, and as we approached the HRC we passed through the Roosevelt Arch, erected in 1903 when the Northern Pacific Railway reached Gardiner. President Theodore Roosevelt visited Gardiner when the cornerstone of the arch was put into place.

The HRC has three components: the Yellowstone archives (documents relating to the park's management and history); a research library (containing books, periodicals, research papers, manuscripts, maps, etc., open to researchers and the general public); and the museum collections (natural science specimens and cultural artifacts relating to Yellowstone, including fossils, rocks and minerals, flora and fauna specimens, Native American artifacts, paintings, furnishings, photographs, etc.). 

We spent our mornings helping the staff in the research library, and our afternoons working with the museum people. Marcia's library project for the entire month was making archival storage boxes, custom-sized for books (mainly scrapbooks) in the library's rare books room. Tom's library projects involved the creation of a couple of bibliographies, one from a large group of documents related to bison, and the other for a collection of material from the Fish & Wildlife Service office in Yellowstone. He learned more than he anticipated about bison (and the highly charged issue of brucellosis) as well as about the Yellowstone cutthroat trout.

In the afternoons we worked in the museum area. Our first project was to do an inventory of about 15 boxes of documents: travel brochures, maps, menus, etc.  In the process of doing the inventory, we were asked to separate out the railroad-related items to be housed separately (hmmm, why did they think we would be qualified to that?). We ended up with about 175 railroad items, and in our last few days there Tom prepared a detailed inventory of this material, while Marcia scanned them so that thumbnail images could be added to the museum's computer-based catalog. We also spent a few days taking inventory of 2,500 zip-lock bags containing specimens from an archaeological project.

The museum and library staff are terrific people, and we enjoyed working with them very much. We were happy to make a small contribution to the HRC's mission, and to learn more about the park and its history in the process.

Almost without fail, we saw large animals on our daily drive to and from the HRC. There were, of course, bison...

...as well as elk...

... and occasionally, a few pronghorn would show up near Gardiner.

We had seen big-horn sheep on our visit a couple of years ago, and while we didn't see any in the park this time, we did see some on one of our drives out of the park, just north of Gardiner. This group apparently consisted of younger sheep who had not fully developed the horns that give this species its name.

We frequently saw both bison and elk in the town of Gardiner; here are some elk grazing in the residential area near the HRC.

We used our three-day weekends to explore south central Montana. There was only one way out of the park at this time of year: the 53-mile segment of U.S. Highway 89 from Gardiner to Livingston through the Paradise Valley. This valley, which lies between the Absaroka Mountains to the east and the Gallatin Range to the west, is one of the most beautiful places we can imagine living, and many of the HRC staff do in fact live in the towns along this stretch of US 89 such as Emigrant and Pray. The valley is also home to writers and artists, and to some wealthy folks from out of state who have constructed elaborate vacation homes here. But on the back roads there are many reminders of the valley's history, such as this small schoolhouse, still in use as Pine Creek School. According to one source, its three teachers serve a K-through-8 student body of 38.

Our first weekend trip took us to Red Lodge, where we visited our friends Angela and Michael Beaumont. Angela is the general manager of the historic Pollard Hotel in downtown Red Lodge, so we of course stayed there and had a delightful dinner with them in the hotel's dining room. This was the view of the town's main street (Broadway) from our room, looking south toward the Beartooth Mountains.

Red Lodge is a fun town to visit, and the Pollard is a charming place to stay. We had last visited here in 2009; for more photos of Red Lodge and the Pollard, see our blog post about that trip.

The drive back to Livingston along Interstate 90 was beautiful, with scenes like this one of the Crazy Mountains.

Livingston is home to another lodging place with lots of character, the Murray Hotel.

Of course we had to stay here on one of our weekends, and it lived up to expectations. The lobby is full of animal trophies and other memorabilia...

... and our room had a sitting area, large step-up bathroom and hardwood floors. We enjoyed the ambience in the afternoon, and then went to the 2nd Street Bistro next door for our dinner.

Livingston owes its existence to the Northern Pacific Railway, and the former NP station is a prominent feature along the town's main street. Next to the station is a café, the Northern Pacific Beanery, where we stopped for a late breakfast on one of our trips through Livingston. The town is full of good places to eat, and we plan to spend more time there on future visits to this part of Montana.

Over the course of our month at Yellowstone, we made several visits to Bozeman, home to Montana State University. It, too, has many interesting places to eat and shop, and we enjoyed our time there.

The drive between Livingston and Bozeman takes you between the Gallatin and Bridger mountain ranges; this is a view of the Gallatin Range from Interstate 90.

We stayed in one other lodging place with a lot of character during our trip: the Gallatin Gateway Inn, a few miles west of Bozeman. It was built by the Milwaukee Road in the 1920s as a way of competing with other railroads whose routes gave them closer access to Yellowstone. The Milwaukee's main line came only as close as Three Forks, Montana, 110 miles from the nearest gateway to the park (West Yellowstone, Montana). The railroad built the Gallatin Gateway to serve as a stopping-off place for passengers arriving from eastern points; from here, the railroad provided buses to get its customers into the park.

Being in close proximity to competing hotels in both Bozeman and the ski resort of Big Sky, the Gallatin Gateway has some challenges to overcome in order to attract the kind of patronage that its owner, Charlie White, would like, but it does seem to do a good business serving as a venue for weddings and other social events. The public areas of the property have been beautifully restored, and we wish Charlie every bit of good luck in keeping this wonderful place in operation.

Near Gallatin Gateway, we drove through Ted Turner's 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch in hopes of seeing a portion of the massive commercial bison herd he keeps there. Unfortunately, we didn't see any bison, but it was a beautiful drive nonetheless.

Also quite beautiful was the drive on U.S. Highway 191 along the Gallatin River.

The river was named by Meriwether Lewis in 1805 for Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury in the Jefferson administration and a key figure in making the Lewis and Clark expedition a reality. (Tom wants it noted that among Gallatin's numerous accomplishments, he also founded the predecessor of Tom's alma mater, New York University).

During our last few days at Yellowstone, we got a closer look at the park's bison than we expected. As we packed the car for our last weekend trip, we noticed this guy in our neighbor's yard, enjoying the late-March sunshine.

A few evenings later, we were walking around the housing area when a woman came out on her porch and told us to watch out for the bison. Sure enough, there were three of them strolling around the neighborhood, including this one who was headed for our front yard (that's our rental car).

We knew enough to keep our distance, but even when we got inside the house we could hear the bison grunting outside. That's one of many things that made living in Yellowstone a lot different from our usual lives on the Central Coast of California!

We thoroughly enjoyed our month at Yellowstone, and we've already asked the folks at the HRC to pencil us for a repeat visit in February 2013.

Text and images ©2012 Tom and Marcia Murray 

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