Yellowstone--There's Nothing Greater

When I as growing up in Evanston, Wyoming, my parents would gather us up a few times a year and make the drive north to Yellowstone National Park. We frequently stayed in the Old Faithful Inn, although I also have memories of the Lake Lodge and trips to Mammoth at the north end of the park.


When I was 8, Dad and I got up early one morning and started hiking. We set off around the hot springs of the Old faithful geyser basin, tromped through forests and along streams, and scaled up and down all day. Eight hours and 20 miles later, we met up with Mom and my sisters and went back to the lodging, pleased with an epic day of hiking, one that would leave my young leg aching for weeks to come.

Later, as a teenager after we moved to Pennsylvania, Yellowstone became a central part of any good trip West. I vividly recall sitting on the porch at the Old Faithful Inn, reading and waiting for the next eruption, as the sun slowly set behind me.


A few years ago, when Isaac was a baby, we joined my parents for a trip to Yellowstone. We stayed in the cabins at Canyon and hiked down to the Lower Falls several times. It was my first--and, to date, only--trip to the park as an adult and parent, so my memories are a bit heavy on making sure Ryan didn’t fall into the geysers and braking quickly as bison crossed the road a few feet in front of our Hyundai in Hayden Valley.

I am currently reading Travels in the Greater Yellowstone by the tastefully-named Jack Turner, a series of essays about the ecology and geology of the ecosystem of the Greater Yellowstone area. Turner’s writing is clear and poignant as he reflects on a half-century of hiking, climbing, fishing, and fighting among the mountains, valleys, meadows, forests, rivers, and towns of northwestern Wyoming and southwestern Montana.


At the same time, there is a strangeness to the book, which leaves me with a bitter taste in the back of my mouth. Turner decries--as should any responsible lover of this wild land--the environmental degradation of the Great American West at the hands of unchecked mining and drilling, urban sprawl that reaches even places like Cody and Bozeman, poorly-managed tourism, and global climate change, which he details with the technical knowledge of the scientist and the remembrance of the old-timer who has seen Spring coming earlier and Summer growing warmer.

But that’s not what bothers me. It’s the hypocrisy I find in Turner’s attitude. The argument is, much like it is in Edward Abbey, that wild places need fewer visitors, fewer roads, more solitude and isolation. I agree, but it’s hard to make that claim when you live in a cabin in Jackson Hole and make your living as a mountain guide (i.e. dependent on a certain kind of tourist), as Turner does. I find it hard to say “amen” when the preacher says “Do as I say, not as I do.”


Or, more to the point, the preacher is saying “Here is something wonderful--this soul-enriching wilderness--but it is only for some, those who, by my standards, respect and understand it, who get it.” It’s the same attitude that looks down on middle-class, suburban tourists like the family Turner describes in his chapter on fishing the Firehole River: “While I set up my tent, four kids--my neighbors--stamp on every ant in sight. Their parents are figuring out how to erect their tent, a contraption nearly as large as our cabin. In its present state the tent looks like it was struck by a tornado. After watching me set up my tent--one pole, eight stakes, no floor--they glance hopefully in my direction. I ignore them but decide the kids need a sermon on food-chain dynamics.”

As an often-hapless father of small children whom I wish to expose to wild places, and who at times act irresponsibly once we get there, I’ve gotten those looks (more often at the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park in town when one of the little ones shatters the serenity of a hike by chasing after a roadrunner). And I’ve seen the attitude that Turner embodies here--the condescension of the wilderness-sage-in-his-own-mind who has to share his turf with a less-committed hiker or camper.


(As an aside, this is the real weakness of the environmental movement. Forget “tree hugging;” to me the shortcoming is in the environmentalist who looks at anyone who lives on the grid, shops at Wal-Mart, or uses the Internet regularly as a monolithic mass of resource-wasters and ecosystem-destroyers. It’s a good way to alienate potential allies in a quixotic appeal to absolutism.)

However, I find Turner’s expertise in the land he loves, as well as its flora, fauna, topology, and climate, to be enlightening and intoxicating. He’s also a word nerd; he spends time in a chapter on alpine tundra connection etymologically the words “wonder,” “wander,” and “wild.” And his prose captures the power and mystery, the allure and awe, of a landscape I wish I knew more intimately, one that is rooted in my memory and that I hope to instill in my children’s sense of self.

And, in the end, I find the persona that Turner embodies, for all its flaws, to be intriguing. In a chapter on the reintroduction of wolves into the Greater Yellowstone area (a project that Turner views ambivalently), he describes accompanying a female colleague to a meeting in Dubois with ranchers and hunters who oppose wolf reintroduction. She was nervous, so he comes along: "I left a loaded, sawed-off .12 gauge shotgun in the front seat and walked into the lecture hall armed with a 9 mm semi-automatic , extra magazines, and a snub-nosed .357 magnum in a small of the back holster. Not everyone in the environmental movement is a tree-hugging pacifist." (While I don't like guns, this is Wyoming he's talking about; I do wear sunscreen in New Mexico.) A pretty cool guy, this Turner fellow, all thing considered.