Item From the Past: Yellowstone '05

It's been six years since we drove in late July/early August to Yellowstone NP and other western points. How do the years escape like that?

Here are Lilly and Ann, looking a lot smaller, on the banks of the Gardner River, a tributary of the Yellowstone.

Then I turned and looked southward at the river.

The current was gentle, and we were able to wade into the river, which was shallow and rocky at this point. As I discovered by spotting a US Geodetic Survey marker nearby, we were only a few feet north of the Montana-Wyoming state line, which is also the 45th parallel of latitude north.

This is the venting, sulfurous Yellowstone famed in tourist lore.

I think I took this shot at the Norris Geyser Basin, which is traversed by long boardwalks, with plenty of signs warning visitors not to stray onto the terrain or risk being boiled alive.

Less hellish is the cool Isa Lake, a small body of water in the park with the distinction of straddling the Continental Divide, which at that point has a elevation of 8,262 feet.

Isa Lake (wouldn't Lake Isa sound better?) thus drains into both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. According to Wiki, citing pages I can't access tonight, "the east side of the lake drains by way of the Lewis River to the Pacific Ocean and the west side of the lake drains by way of the Firehole River to the Atlantic Ocean. This is the opposite of what one would expect, since the Atlantic Ocean is east of the lake and the Pacific Ocean is to the west."

Red Shale, Yankee Jim

Six nights in a tent, three in motel rooms. I’d say we got our money’s worth out of our new tent, acquired this spring. Especially in Montana. At Custer National Forest just off US 212, there’s a campground called Red Shale, since the soil is redish orange and rocky. At one time the Park Service must have collected a fee for it — I saw a rusty container that once held fee envelopes, for instance. But maybe the regional office decided that collecting fees cost more than was being collected.

Maintenance had also been cut. The water pump was busted. The campsites were so weedy that it was sometimes hard to tell where they were. In fact, it looked like the only attention anyone paid to the place was in the toilet building, which did have toilet paper. But this inattention led to a rustic charm, especially pleasant considering what we paid. It was a cold night and the stars shone very bright. Late at night, while snug in the tent, I was sure I hear coyotes in the distance.

Gallatin National Forest has some campgrounds on the road to the north entrance of Yellowstone. We picked one of them, about 15 miles from the entrance, the better not to deal with crowding in the park itself. A wise choice, because every Yellowstone campground we later saw looked jammed.

The campsite in Yankee Jim Canyon, by contrast, never filled up. About a half-dozen sites were occupied each night, out of 20 or so. Like the Red Shale site, it too was free — quite a surprise so close to Yellowstone. Also like Red Shale, there was no water, no maintenance and no other services except a daily delivery of toilet paper by unseen Park Service hands.

Yankee Jim Canyon is a rocky place. Boulders everywhere, both way up the sides of the mountains and next to the campsites, with a lot of smaller rocks here and there as well, and a handful of gnarly trees thrown in to keep things interesting. At night, a near-constant light wind blew through the canyon, but we pitched the tent — and it was hard to drive those stakes — among some boulders that served as wind breaks. We had the presence of mind to store all of our food in the car at night, in case of bears, but there was no evidence of anything bigger than a rabbit around the campsite during our entire stay.

And the wind blew. Wooooooooooooooo, a relaxing sound to fall asleep to, once we realized that the tent wasn’t going to blow over. It reminded me, strangely, of the night-sounds at the hut we rented overlooking the ocean in Bali, with its constant crashing waves. That was a nearly perfect aural experience. The winds of Yankee Jim Canyon were close to that.

Borders

I’ll pick this up again on Monday, since I have professional obligations to take care of between now and then.

Late in the morning last Saturday we stopped to go swimming in the Firehole River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, by parallel parking along the narrow Firehole Canyon Drive nearby. From the drive, you go down some wooden stairs, and swim in a section of the river slowed — it’s very swift elsewhere — by a upstream narrows that empties into a deep pool, picturesquely surrounded by rocky cliffs on both sides. The current is also slowed by underwater rocks slightly downstream from the narrows. The water’s cold, the sun’s hot in August, and parts of the swimming area have a rocky bottom. But it was pleasant swimming all the same, especially after you discover spots with sandy bottoms. Lilly didn’t want to leave.

While parking the car, I noticed two guys behind us unloading scuba equipment out of a pickup truck. “Are you going diving?” I asked them as we headed for the wooden stairs.

“Yeah, the pool’s pretty deep,” one of them said. “We’re going to look around.”

Yellowstone offers a lot recreational opportunities, as the guide literature notes: hiking, cycling, camping, fishing, birding, swimming, cross-country skiing, and more. But scuba diving isn’t something I would have thought of. As we were swimming, I noticed several other divers going in and out of the deep pool, so there must be something to look at down there.

It wasn’t the only river we experienced firsthand at Yellowstone. Just south of the park’s north entrance, there’s a parking lot next to the Gardiner River. Just beyond the edge of the lot is a path that follows the edge of the river, under some shade trees. The river is very shallow at that point, with a cold current pushing over piles of very smooth stones. Like at Firehole, piles of rock moderated the current a little, so that you could sit in the river and let it wash over you. It wasn’t exactly swimming, but it was refreshing.

Along the road, just at the entrance to the parking lot, there were two signs: ENTERING WYOMING and 45TH PARALLEL of LATITUDE HALFWAY BETWEEN EQUATOR and NORTH POLE. I’d always thought it odd that Yellowstone National Park isn’t quite all in Wyoming, though most of it is — it’s as if the park couldn’t quite fit in Wyoming, so Montana and Idaho got slices. (In fact, Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, before any of those states entered the Union.)

I also hadn’t realized that most of the border between Montana and Wyoming is 45° N., but that’s only because I’d never studied the matter. There’s a large roadside sign in Michigan, along I-75, that tells travelers the same thing: you’re halfway between two spots on the globe that everyone learns about in school, but not that many people actually go to them, especially the North Pole.

Roadside signs of that kind probably aren’t all that precise, so most of the time it’s hard to know exactly where the line is. But I liked the idea, all the same, that we were luxuriating in a cold stream a few dozen yards — at most — within Montana. At some point on the path to the parking lot was Wyoming.

Then, when walking along the river by myself, at a small fork in the path only about 20 feet from the parking lot, I saw a US National Geodetic Survey marker, a little obscured by a nearby bush. But I knew that was it. The actual border, and the 45th parallel as well, precisely midway between the pole and the red line, as close as modern measuring devises can say. Other people were coming and going from the parking lot, and down the path, but no one but me stopped for the little round marker cemented into the ground. Considering that a border of this kind is completely artificial, I don’t know why I got satisfaction standing with one foot in each state, but I did. One of these days, I want to get a kick out of standing at Four Corners.

I stopped for a couple of other borders on this trip as well. On US 212, you enter Montana -- appropriately — in the middle of nowhere. I had Yuriko take my picture under the ENTERING MONTANA sign because I’d never done that before. Montana is my 46th state, and it would be hard to take one trip to visit the remainder: Alaska, Oregon, North Dakota and South Carolina.

In Yellowstone, east of Old Faithful and on the way to Lake Yellowstone, the park road crosses the Continental Divide twice, because that line loops a bit at that point in its bisection of North America. A sign marks the Divide each time, and we stopped at one — next to the small Isa Lake, which a nearby sign said ultimately drained into both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely little lake, covered in this season by lotus pads.