While our expedition leaders set up spotting-scopes at a predawn stop within sight of the Tetons, I wrestled camera and tripod into position focusing on a magnificent sunrise washing across fog-shrouded and the freshly snow-draped Tetons. Suddenly, excited whispers escalated to low voices, then rose to just this side of shouting from the group gathered behind me peering through several scopes: “There they are! Four of them! Wolves! OHMIGOD! There they are!”
It was the first morning of a seven-day six-night Yellowstone winter wildlife-watching expedition enroute from Jackson, Wyoming to Cooke City, Montana. Our group’s primary objective was to observe winter’s Yellowstone wolves in action. Specially equipped snow-track 15-passenger vans transported us by stages across Yellowstone’s beautiful but forbidding winter landscapes.
Paul Brown and Scott Larson, accredited biologist/guides affiliated with Wildlife Expeditions of Jackson’s Teton Science Schools, quickly set up additional spotting scopes beside the highway. Members of our small expedition interrupted a newly learned cold-weather two-step (similar to St. Vidas’ Dance) quickly mastered to keep feet from freezing to frozen ground. With wolf-inspired adrenaline pumping antifreeze through our veins, we steadied down to focus through spotting scopes on four young wolves framed through evergreens on a ridge high above us – mind numbing cold all but forgotten.
I rushed to a turn at one of the spotting scopes. It was bitterly cold - near zero. Frozen snow and ice transmitted a peculiar crunching feel and snapping sound underfoot when dancing on frozen crystals. Those acrobatics were temporarily postponed while watching our first wolves. The latter lay nonchalantly in the snow, sometimes touching noses, tails in perpetual motion, casually regarding the world spread below them.
Through the scope, they didn’t look much different from wide-eyed exuberant German Shepherds gathered in your backyard to play and socialize together. However, these ancestors of the world’s domestic canines make a living by killing. In the process, they heal certain Yellowstone environmental issues that over-burgeoning game populations inflicted on that environment.
The first two nights away from Jackson were spent, first, near the east entrance to Grand Teton National Park and, second, in the heart of Yellowstone National Park at the relatively new Snow Lodge - adjacent to Old Faithful Inn. The latter is undergoing an extensive multi-million dollar rehab. Board and room in Yellowstone’s winter environment is scarce. Virtually 99% of all this park’s facilities close (campgrounds, other lodging, restaurants, gift shops, etc.) starting in early October. Roads from Old Faithful north to Mammoth springs are closed to normal traffic by the first of November.
The park is struggling to determine the needs for growing numbers of winter tourists’ versus its recently reduced ability to provide such services in one of the harshest year round tourist environments in the United States. Federal budget cuts from operating funds that finance the nation’s National Parks handicaps the situation. From the private sector, Wildlife Expeditions has gone far in helping solve transportation logistics safely for Yellowstone’s winter wildlife viewers. They also arranged meals and lodging for our trip.
Watching Old Faithful erupt in a snow-bound winter scene was a striking highlight. As was an early morning trek three of us negotiated around trail loops exploring different thermals near Old Faithful before departing for Mammoth. Clouds of steam from thermals drifted over the trail. Rising mists condensed in freezing temperatures eventually adhering to and coating the elevated walkway with layers of rimed ice. Meantime, snow continually fell on these incredibly surreal scenes materializing in and out of drifting shrouds of vapor that occasionally enveloped us with a weird mix of damp heat and icy chills – fire and ice.
Bison scattered along the trail as it meandered in the general direction of a winter shrouded Firehole River. They quietly, but intensely, munched remnants of snow covered grass and other browse using their big heads as shovels to push snow away from buried nourishment. They paid us little or no attention even though, at times, they were only a few feet away when we cautiously eased pass them via the elevated trail. Thermal pools they grazed so close to provided scant measures of brief warmth in this extreme environment. Frozen mists of rimed ice and snow coated their backs and faces - accumulations insulated from the animals’ body heat by the denseness of their winter coats.
One of my fellow photographers called attention to activity behind me. Turning, I framed a coyote following us on the wooden walkway. Its form alternately materialized and disappeared through drifting clouds of condensed mist and steam drifting over the bizarre landscapes. It trotted nonchalantly by us continuing down the boardwalk till eventually disappearing through vaporous curtains of mist.
Returning to the Snow Lodge, we joined the others boarding a snow-track equipped van. It would transport us over snow-bound interior portions of Yellowstone National Park enroute some 50-miles north to Mammoth Springs. Interior park roads are virtually impossible for park service maintenance to keep clear during winter. A variety of specialty vehicles equipped with tank tread like “wheels” and, in some cases, skis are specially licensed through Yellowstone N.P. to transport wildlife viewers through Yellowstone’s frozen interior during the winter months.
Snowmobiling has become an overwhelming favorite winter sport in many national parks. They were certainly out in force at Old Faithful. So much so, their numbers were limited to a maximum number in the park on any given day. Our groups’ priorities to view and photograph wildlife made us grateful to put the noise and activity of snowmobiles behind us as we headed north across Yellowstone’s winter “wastelands.”
Just after exiting the Snow Lodge’s parking lot, a freshly killed calf bison lay beside the snow packed roadbed. Wolves killed and partially fed on it the previous night virtually within sight of our room’s window. Our guides stopped to drag the carcass further into brush out of sight of the road. Heavy snowmobile traffic in this area probably discouraged the wolves from finishing their meal. Dragging it into the brush, hopefully, would allow them the privacy to come back and finish it. However insensitive the latter may sound, it furnished our first glimpse of unique environmental dynamics we came to this frozen landscape to observe. Yellowstone is not a petting zoo. Today, it resembles how Central Park once functioned before the Dutch traded a handful of costume jewelry for it from the Indians. Only two-legged wolves mug prey there now.
A half-mile further down the road found us in the middle of a wintry traffic jam at the bridge crossing the Firehole River. Yellow Xanterra day-touring vehicles out of Old Faithful Inn’s complex were parked helter-skelter. Numerous people lined the road watching and photographing wildlife activity focused a relatively short distance away on the river’s frozen bank. In addition to the nearby dead bison calf, wolves had killed an elk that died in the river. A bald eagle, flock of ravens, a dozen magpies or more and a lone coyote now fed on the latter carcass. Wolves were nowhere to be seen. But the carcass fed a host of others.
Brown pointed out that before the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, Bald Eagles and golden eagles were rarely seen in the park. With the wolves return to the park’s eco-system, eagles returned also. It was becoming irrefutably evident: Wolf kills fed more than wolves judging from the crowded scene before us on the edge of the Firehole.
As our group stood entranced watching this event unfold, Old Faithful erupted in the background. Old Faithful Inn and the Snow Lodge were visible to the right of the thermal’s venting cloud of steam. Freezing mists drifted from the venting activity towards already heavily snow-burdened architecture. A golden eagle soared overhead.
Without knowing it, our small photography expedition slipping around the thermal trail earlier that morning wandered within several hundred yards of the elk kill now lying before us in the Firehole River. Gradually, we came to grips with another dimension of the message dramatically acted out all around us. Yellowstone was not a zoo. There were no bars between us, the wildlife, and dynamic geologic and biologic events erupting all around us. Nature performed various and complex interrelated roles as if we weren’t there. The effect was inspirational - yet, powerfully humbling.
The road to Mammoth traveled by incomparably beautiful waterfalls scattered down the course of the United States’ last untamed, undammed, major river – The Yellowstone River. Numerous stops were made to observe and photograph several incomparable settings. Otters and little feathered birds called “dippers” cavorted and bobbed in and out of the river’s flow along their frozen banks. They sought sustenance but for both it sure looked like play at times. Wild game abounded on this leg of the trip – particularly huge bull elk in the six and seven point classes. Out west, an antlered animal’s points are tallied on only one side of the pair.
After reaching Mammoth Springs, we transferred to two W.E. rubber-tired vans equipped with pop-up roof hatches. Roads there were maintained to Tower Junction at Roosevelt Lodge (which is closed in winter) and, from Tower Junction, east through Hell Roaring, the Lamar Valley, out the northeast park entrance, through Silver gate and into Cooke City, Montana where we bivouacked comfortably the next three days and two nights.
Highway 212, traversing Lamar Valley all the way into Cooke City from Yellowstone’s Tower Junction, follows a famous scenic route referred to as “The Bear Tooth Highway.” From October 15th till sometime the following May, Cooke City is only reachable from the outside world through Gardiner, Montana, five miles north of Mammoth Springs. The Beartooth Highway is not maintained east of Cooke City after October 15th. Yet half that small resort town remains open through the winter accommodating tourists so addicted to Yellowstone’s siren call that they need a warm room, hot shower and meal at the end of a frozen day in the park.
We passed herds of bison in the Lamar Valley literally shoveling down through drifts several feet high to find nourishment. Snow plastered their faces and accumulated atop their backs. Big horn rams and ewes fed near the Bear Tooth Highway opposite their summer home on Baronette Peak. Huge bull elk were included in the mix.
The next three days touring Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley and Hell Roaring Valley rivaled three weeks once spent canoeing Africa’s Zambezi River and trekking to Zimbabwe hunting and fishing camps strewn from the Mozambique border to Victoria Falls.
Others have compared Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley to Africa calling it, “The Serengeti of the North American Continent.” I haven’t seen Africa’s Serengeti – unfortunately. However, the volume of wildlife noted in winter’s grip in the Lamar Valley from the safety of a W. E. safari style vehicle rivaled that seen making a living feeding down Zambia and Zimbabwe’s Zambezi winter passage. The major environmental difference was, of course, Yellowstone’s seemingly endless snow. And, I was more than a little grateful for the absence of crocs in the Lamar River.
The visual and emotional impacts of the Lamar Valley’s winter environmental dynamics, scenic as well as wildlife, were every bit the equal of their African counterparts on winter’s Zambezi River.
Part II of this series describes the final drama experienced during the last three days touring winter’s Lamar Valley, Hell Roaring and Tower Junction areas of Yellowstone National Park.