February 2013: Back to Yellowstone

We love being in Yellowstone National Park. We got acquainted with this wonderful place during the summer of 2008, while we were working in nearby Grand Teton National Park. During those months, we spent several weekends in Yellowstone, each time visiting a different corner of the park. We found that, while Old Faithful is the iconic symbol of Yellowstone (and definitely worth a visit) there are less popular areas that offer equal or even greater rewards for the visitor.

We returned to Yellowstone in early 2010 as a part of a volunteer project at the National Park Service's Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner, Montana, organized by Exploritas (now Road Scholar). The HRC is operated by the Park Service, and is affiliated with the National Archives; it serves as a repository of cultural, geological, archeological, paleontological, botanical and other scientific materials related to Yellowstone, as well as an archive of Park Service documents and records. It also houses an extensive research library.

Our 2010 visit led to a month-long volunteer stint at the HRC in March 2012, which we thoroughly enjoyed. When we were wrapping up that visit, we asked Colleen Curry, the curator of the HRC, to put us on the volunteer list for the following season. So, on February 2, 2013, we left California and flew to Bozeman, Montana, where we picked up a rental car and departed for Mammoth Hot Springs, our home away from home for another month of volunteering.

En route to Bozeman, we changed planes in Seattle; on our approach to the airport there, we got a nice view of Mount Rainier. It was a preview of the winterscapes that we would be seeing for the next four weeks.

(Click on any photo to enlarge. All photos © 2013 Tom & Marcia Murray)

As we did in 2012, we committed to spend four days each week doing whatever tasks the HRC found for us. Those tasks could include organizing and cataloging library materials, rehousing museum specimens, or doing inventories of any of the thousands of items housed at the HRC. On the other three days of each week, we could roam around those parts of Yellowstone that are open during the winter, or travel outside the park.

The HRC sits just outside the northwest entrance to the park at Gardiner, and there are often groups of bison and elk in the vicinity, as well as pronghorn, which are similar to antelope, and are said to be the fastest North American mammal.

One morning, we found a pronghorn grazing in the bushes a few feet from the front door of the HRC. We carefully circled around it on our way into the building.

The HRC is next door to the K-through-12 Gardiner School, and the school's athletic field is used by bison as a grazing area on a daily basis; we've also seen elk there. We don't know how the school manages the deposits that the animals leave behind.

Sometimes, when we went out for a walk at lunchtime, we would see the bison marching en masse toward the school yard. Apparently one bison would decide that it was time to move, and the others would follow along.

Our housing was near Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, which serves as the Park Service headquarters for Yellowstone. The first thermal area that we passed each morning as we drove to work was Canary Spring, which in the cold early morning air was always emitting plenty of vapor into the air.

It was a 15-minute drive from our house to the HRC, during which we descended from 6,600 feet of elevation to 5,300 feet. The road took us past scenery like this.

One morning, passing through Mammoth, Marcia spotted this elk feeding on a ridgetop.

In the course of our drive, we crossed not only the Wyoming-Montana state line but also the 45th degree of north latitude. Tom, being a big fan of maps and geography, liked the fact that we slept on one side of this major geographic demarcation, and worked on the other. But he soon learned that Marcia didn't think it was worthy of daily comment.

The river behind this sign is the Gardner River (spelled differently from the town of Gardiner). Depending on how cold it was, the river would often be steaming in the morning, thanks to thermal runoff from Mammoth Hot Springs. We would frequently see bison gathered along the river, especially in the areas where the thermal influence made the ground warm. But after a night in the cold air, the bison's coats would often carry a layer of frost.

Sometimes you could barely see the bison through the steam on the river.

This is the view from the parking lot at the HRC, looking west first thing in the morning as the sun began to hit the mountains.

Over the course of the month, we did a variety of things at the HRC. We spent our mornings in the library, where our major task involved going through box after box of uncatalogued books, reports, magazines, clippings, etc., to see if they were relevant to Yellowstone. Next, we checked whether they were already in the library's collection; if so, they went to the recycling pile. If not, they were set aside for the librarians to make the final decision on whether or not to retain them, and to catalog those that were added to the collection. By sheer volume, most of it was either duplicative or not related to Yellowstone, and therefore went to recycling, so we felt as though we had made some contribution.

In the museum area, which is where scientific specimens are kept, our biggest task of the month involved fish scales. The park is home to many species of fish, and over the 141 years of the park's existence, recreational fishing has been a major activity for visitors.

But as in any place where humans are involved, a few bad decisions have been made, including the introduction of non-native species, some of which have crowded out native fish. Most notoriously, lake trout were introduced to Lake Yellowstone in the early 1990s, without Park Service approval. The lake trout are predators of the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout, which are an important element in the food chain of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

The Park Service has devoted substantial resources to monitoring fish populations to support well-informed management policies. Over the years the park's fisheries staff have amassed a large collection of fish scale specimens, which can be used to help identify changes in fish population and distribution, and are a source of DNA for scientists to study. Those specimens were in the process of being moved out of the fisheries offices and into the HRC for proper cataloging and preservation, and to make them available to researchers.

Our task was to help two biologists from the fisheries office, Colleen and Nate, with the job of taking these specimens, some which were up to 50 years old, out of the boxes they were stored in; putting them into archival sleeves and boxes; and annotating the new containers so that the specimens could be catalogued and shelved in a logical system.

There were thousands of glass slides and 3-by-5-inch cards (like the one below) to be dealt with, and we spent each afternoon for three weeks working on this project.

Even though we were told that this was important and necessary work, we began to wonder whether it all made sense. Would anybody ever look at these fish scales?  But then, during our library work, we came across an article in a professional fisheries magazine about how valuable fish scales are to biologists working in this field. That made us feel better!

We invariably saw large animals on our afternoon drive back to Mammoth, just as we did in the morning, like this bison crossing the road at the Gardiner entrance station to the park.

Another day, we turned a corner just in time to see this bull elk crossing the road.

The male elk lose their antlers in the winter; they grow back in the spring. It was unusual to see a bull elk with its antlers this late in the winter.

Typically, the bison, elk, and pronghorn kept to themselves. But one day we saw all three of these species in one spot, a few hundred feet from the entrance station. The elk and pronghorn were there first. Then the bison decided to move, and the shortest route to wherever they were going was through the spot where the other animals had been standing. But nobody got angry; they just gave each other plenty of space to do what they needed to do.

We felt very privileged to be living and working at Yellowstone during the winter, when there are far fewer visitors than in the warmer months. Aside from the lack of crowds, the special thing about winter in the park is that the condensation from the thermal features is much more visible in the cold winter air than it is in the summer. Our housing was less than a mile from the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces, and even though the boardwalks through the terraces had lots of snow and ice on them, it was a pleasure to walk past features like Canary Springs and Mound Terrace and watch nature in action.

Even at night, Mammoth is a beautiful place, especially under a full moon.

On the first full weekend of our February visit, we took a trip to the Old Faithful area, similar to the one we made on our 2010 trip. At Mammoth, which sits at a lower elevation than the rest of the park, there was little new snowfall during February, and the snow cover got thinner as the month went on. But Old Faithful is roughly one thousand feet higher than Mammoth, making it colder and snowier.

We left the Mammoth area in a Chevy van equipped with tank-like treads (one of several types of vehicles collectively known as "snow coaches" by park personnel). We were following a similar van when, a few minutes into our trip, the lead snow coach went off the road.

After some serious shoveling by the driver, the coach was back on the road and we resumed our trip south to Old Faithful. A couple of times along the way, we encountered bison in the roadway, and we paused to let them pass.

As we got closer to Old Faithful, we passed several thermal features, including this one, Fountain Geyser.

In the Midway Geyser Basin, we saw large clouds of steam to remind us that we were atop an active caldera.

There was more steam along the Firehole River, close to Old Faithful, where these bison were enjoying the warm ground.

We stayed in a cabin adjacent to Old Faithful Snow Lodge, which along with the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, is one of only two lodging places in the park open during part of the winter.

On our first afternoon at Snow Lodge, we could hear hammering on the roof above us. It turned out that maintenance workers were busy breaking up ice dams on the roof, which form when the snow thaws and then refreezes as ice.

On our first evening at Snow Lodge, we took a "Steam and Stars Soundscapes" tour. We boarded a noisy Bombardier snow coach like this one...

... and headed out to the Fountain Paint Pot area, whose thermal features include hot springs, fumaroles and mud pots. The mud pots consist of a clay-and-silica mix that constantly bubbles, creating both a visual and an auditory show.

While we were at Snow Lodge, we took a walk around the Upper Geyser Basin, where we were often the only people in sight. This area has the largest concentration of geysers in the world, with roughly 150 thermal features in one square mile. We got nice shows from several of them, including Castle Geyser...

... and Sawmill Geyser, one of our favorites, which spews out water in every direction as it erupts.

This is a view looking up the Firehole River, with thermal features lining the riverbank.

This is Sponge Geyser, with the Old Faithful Inn, constructed in 1903-04, in the background.  The Inn is closed in winter.

As we were returning to Mammoth, one of the people in our snow coach called out to the driver "there's a wolf!" The driver stopped, and several hundred feet from the coach, we could in fact see an animal walking across the snow that could only be a wolf. Wolf sightings are rare, given the small population of these animals in the park, and in our many visits to Yellowstone this was the first time we had seen one that could be identified without the aid of a spotting scope.

Soon after this, we stopped at Beryl Spring, a thermal feature that emits copious amounts of vapor, which in winter creates a heavy layer of frost on nearby evergreens.

On another weekend, we drove out to the Lamar Valley, in the northeast corner of the park. This is an area with frequent wolf sightings. We did see wolf-watchers, but no wolves. With or without wolves, the valley is one of the most beautiful parts of the park.

And, we were rewarded with our first sighting of bighorn sheep. During our 2012 visit, we had only seen juvenile bighorn, but this time we saw several mature (and very impressive) members of this species.

The weather was quite cold that day, as this bison's breath shows

.

North of Yellowstone is the Paradise Valley, an area bordered on the west by the Gallatin Mountains and on the east by the Absaroka Range. The Yellowstone River runs through the valley, and those fortunate enough to live here get views like this looking east toward the Absaroka in the afternoon.

We had scheduled a free day between the end of our stint at the HRC and our return flight to California. We made use of it by scheduling one night at the Chico Hot Springs Resort, in the Paradise Valley. The hot springs here began attracting visitors in the late 19th century, and the resort opened in 1900.

Its main feature is a pool fed by hot springs, which provides a very pleasant swimming experience even in late February. In addition, it has an excellent restaurant and a unique old-West character.

This is a view of the pool area from the hill behind the resort, looking west toward the Gallatin Mountains.

Before we left Yellowstone, we signed up for another volunteer stint at the Heritage and Research Center in February 2014. And we've already made reservations to spend Marcia's birthday next year at Chico Hot Springs, where we will stay in this refurbished caboose!

Text and images ©2013 Tom and Marcia Murray 

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