Touring – Yellowstone National Park
Steven Richards explores the awe-inspiring natural wonders and wildlife of Yellowstone National Park
In the early 1800s, fur trappers tried explaining the spectacular sights of Yellowstone and were shrugged off as attention-seeking liars. Mountain man Jim Bridger described it as a place “where Hell bubbled up,” with boiling pools of mud and mountains of glass and waterfalls that shot up into the sky. Few believed him until 1871, when then-director of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden led a photographer and a landscape painter on an expedition into the Yellowstone countryside to capture the “remarkable curiosities which have required all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.” Exhibited in Congress the following year, the paintings and photographs convinced politicians to vote in favor of preserving and protecting Yellowstone, and in doing so created America’s first national park.
I hadn’t been to Yellowstone, and my girlfriend, Anna, remembered it through childhood eyes, so we planned a visit in late September, in the shoulder season when it isn’t as crowded with tourists. Anna looked forward to seeing the different kinds of wildlife. I looked forward to the geysers, the geothermal pools, the mind-bending geological oddities, and the Beartooth Highway – a 68-mile road that starts just outside of Yellowstone in Cooke City, snakes through the Beartooth Mountains, and rubs against the firmament when it reaches an elevation of almost 11,000 feet. We flew into Bozeman, Montana, rented a Road King® motorcycle from EagleRider at Yellowstone Harley-Davidson® in nearby Belgrade, and spent a week exploring the most mysteriously beautiful Hell on Earth.
DAY ONE
We pulled to the side of U.S. 191 a few miles short of the town of West Yellowstone to watch a cinnamon-colored grizzly bear dig for grubs. In West Yellowstone, we ate burgers at the Slippery Otter Pub and bought a can of bear mace, which is highly recommended in Yellowstone – the park covers 3,472 square miles and is home to grizzlies, black bears, gray wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, and bison.
Yellowstone sits on top of a dormant supervolcano that last erupted about 640,000 years ago, and a web of fault lines underlies the park and causes hundreds of small earthquakes each year. When groundwater seeps through the area’s deeply fractured crust and spills into one of the two magma chambers beneath the park, the water is superheated and returns to the surface as hot springs, geysers, mud pots and fumaroles. Yellowstone is home to more thermal features than anywhere else on the planet.
We entered through the park’s West Entrance – one of five – and rode to a junction with the Grand Loop, Yellowstone’s main road. We stopped at Fountain Paint Pot in the Lower Geyser Basin to see the mud pots – ashen, gluey stews of bubbling clay and silica – and the fumaroles, which let sulfurous gases leak out from the earth. We then rode to America’s largest hot spring, the Grand Prismatic. The center of the electric blue pool measures 199 F, but the near-boiling water is teeming with life: microscopic thermophiles thrive in the pool’s hot center, and on the cooler outer edges of the spring ancient Eubacteria produce pigments that color the water and ground in rusty oranges and putrid greens.
By the time we reached the exit for Old Faithful – the park’s most popular attraction – the sun had dipped behind the mountains, and the sky had turned indigo. We knew we shouldn’t ride after dark since half-ton bison frequently stand immovable in the road, so we continued to Grant Village on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. On the walk to our lodge for the night, we met an elk cow and stayed with her until she wandered into the thicket.
DAY TWO
Anna looked like an overstuffed teddy bear hobbling toward the frost-covered Harley® in four pairs of pants and all of the sweaters she had packed. We rode to the West Thumb Geyser Basin to visit the sapphire-blue Abyss Pool hot spring and Fishing Cone, a shoreline hot spring that looks like a mini volcano. It got the name “Fishing Cone” because at the start of the 20th century local fishermen would dip still-thrashing trout into the boiling water, instantly cooking the fish. From there, we went to the Norris Geyser Basin to see Steamboat, the world’s tallest active geyser that can spout up to 400 feet into the air.
At a nearby lodge, we ate elk sausage with huckleberry ketchup, and a man at the counter told us how he had spent the morning in Lamar Valley watching a grizzly bear protect its kill from a pack of hungry wolves. Anna insisted we ride there as fast as possible, and I happily obliged. We saw a hundred bison scattered through the grassy valley, and far in the distance we struggled to see the black specks that were the bears and wolves.
DAY THREE
We’d been advised to visit Hayden Valley at daybreak, so in the rain we stood on a hill with a half-dozen others and drank coffee as we watched a gray wolf pick at bloody scraps of meat. We went to leave and found our way blocked by a herd of broad-chested bison, each one drawing in deep, cold breaths and snorting steam through its gaping nostrils. I laughed at the majestic herbivores, but Anna looked scared, squirming in her seat as she imagined one of the cows charging us at 40 mph. I rode wide along the shoulder, and we passed through the herd in peace.
We stopped at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a 24-mile trench along the Yellowstone River with 1,000-foot-tall walls of multicolored rhyolite, and then rode to the Mud Volcano. For most of its existence, a giant cone of mud covered the entire area, but in 1872 a thermal explosion blew apart the Mud Volcano and gave way to hot springs and mud pots producing rotten hydrogen sulfide gas.
Rain came down in sheets, then turned to huge white flakes of snow. We weren’t far from our cabin, so we dropped off the Road King, walked back to the lodge, and spent the rest of the afternoon on barstools. It was 3PM when the bartender told us they were closing the roads inside the park and that Beartooth Highway would be closed, too, and it probably wouldn’t reopen. So, I ordered another beer and cheered my wonderful company.
DAY FOUR
All of the pine trees were painted white with snow, and so was the Road King, but the roads were clear, if wet. An annoying mist persisted past noon when Anna and I finally decided to take a short ride through Hayden Valley to the Fishing Bridge, which was a popular spot for catching cutthroat trout until ’73 when the bridge was closed to fishing because populations had plummeted. We stopped at a general store so I could buy a pair of wool gloves. The guy at check-out said, “You just never know what the weather will be in Yellowstone.”
On a bench outside, I sat on my hands like a mother hen would her egg and talked to two motorcyclists from Minnesota who had ridden from Cooke City. They said that Beartooth Highway was still closed because there was a foot of snow on the road. We wished each other well as Anna and I rode off, and I turned to her and said, “It’s not snowing now, so let’s go to Old Faithful.” Within minutes, the Road King’s windshield had iced over, and a swirling wall of snow hid the road from us. And my overpriced wool gloves did nothing to keep my fingers warm.
When we finally arrived at the Old Faithful Inn, Anna and I ate burgers at the Bear Pit Lounge then walked out onto a timber deck to see if Old Faithful might soon erupt, but were told we had just missed it. When the sun suddenly peeked out from the clouds, we decided to not wait around and rode back toward the Grand Prismatic Spring to do a five-mile round-trip hike to Fairy Falls.
Standing under the 200-foot-tall waterfall washed away all of my lingering disappointment, so when Anna and I walked back to the Road King an hour before sunset I realized how good I felt – ahead of me was 40 miles of dry road through the most alien place in America. It was the Beartooth moment I thought I wouldn’t get, and we ripped down the road. The last light faded from the sky as we pulled up to our cabin, and I spent the next 15 minutes thawing my hands under a hot faucet.
DAY FIVE
After we passed Sheepeater Cliff – where geometric columns of basaltic lava flows are named for Yellowstone’s earliest peoples, the Wind River Shoshone, also known as “sheep eaters” – I looked up, and saw a bald eagle and golden eagle twice its size flying above us.
We turned onto Upper Terrace Drive, a slow one-way road that wraps around the top of Mammoth Hot Springs, where flowing travertine limestone breaks free from the mountainsides. Far beyond the plateaus of bright-white calcium carbonate, we could see Fort Yellowstone, which was originally an outpost for the U.S. Army.
Around a hairpin turn we met a small, sweet-faced black bear, its shiny fur dotted with burrs. For a few seconds we had him to ourselves, and then traffic around us screeched to a sudden halt, and from every car window came outstretched arms holding smartphones. We carried on, riding east through Lamar Valley to the tiny town of Silver Gate, Montana, just a few miles outside of the park, where we checked in at the motel behind the town general store.
DAY SIX
Anna and I figured that we had ridden every paved road in the park and we should spend the day on trails, so we settled on a six-mile hike to a place called Hellroaring Creek back in Wyoming.
On our way back to the motel, we stopped at Barronette Peak and saw five tiny white dots moving across the rocky faces: mountain goats. With binoculars pressed to her face, Anna went through her list of must-see animals, and only “moose” and “bighorn sheep” were left unseen; a park ranger told us that the only moose we would see was on a T-shirt in the gift shop, but that we might see bighorns on the road to the park’s North Entrance in the town of Gardiner, Montana. We stopped there the next day but didn’t see any bighorns, and we rode out of Yellowstone for the last time.
DAY SEVEN
In downtown Bozeman, my phone vibrated again and again – the texts and emails that couldn’t come through without cell service or Wi-Fi – and the anxieties of normal life flooded back in. I imagined what Hayden or Bridger would think of life as it is now, and I tried to take myself back to the prehistoric dreamscape we had just ridden through. I thought about the many people who walked within a few feet of chuffing bison so they could take post-worthy selfies. I thought about how in 1903, at the commemoration of the Roosevelt Arch at the park’s North Entrance, President Theodore Roosevelt called Yellowstone “a national playground” and how unfortunately true that statement now is.
Hayden worried that travelers and vandals would “make merchandise of [Yellowstone’s] beautiful specimens” and that the only way to preserve its beauty was to let the land be “as free as the air or water.” Anna and I experienced Yellowstone as Hayden hoped we would, and we saw the place treated as he feared it would be. I left for home worried that one day when I returned to Yellowstone to feel free from today’s synthetic stresses, its mysticism would be depleted, and I wondered why it is that we can’t appreciate that which once we saved.
Words and photos by Steven Richards
You can follow the route on the Ride Planner here.
First published in Issue 049 of HOG® magazine.
Tags:
