Feb 10, 2008 - 04:05:25 CST
Is there anywhere in America where one can escape the Super Bowl? This year's game was the second most watched event in television history, after the final installment of "M.A.S.H." (Feb. 28, 1983).I actually had considerable interest in watching this year's game to see whether the New England Patriots would run the table and shut up Don Shula. Nevertheless, when good friends from Helena, Mont., asked me to spend the weekend with them at the Snow Lodge at Old Faithful Village in America's first and finest national park, I jumped at the chance. To do otherwise would be to cast a pretty important vote about life. I asked myself, what would TR do?
In the course of my life I have been to Yellowstone National Park a dozen times or so, but never in the winter. So I made my way to Belgrade, Mont., where Gary and Cindy met me and drove us all to West Yellowstone, from which we would be ferried into the heart of the park. They had cross country skis, gaiters, boots, gloves, hand warmers, coolers, cameras, jerky, apples, cheese, crackers, pretzels - everything, in short, that the industrial world can make available for a sojourn into the wilderness.
West Yellowstone is almost certainly the snowmobile capital of the universe.
Contrary to popular belief, Roosevelt did not create Yellowstone National Park. When TR became president on Sept. 14, 1901, there were already five national parks. Yellowstone, created during the Grant administration on April 1, 1872, was nearing its 30th birthday by the time TR became president. Roosevelt played an important role in preserving Yellowstone National Park from the wrong kind of economic development.
At West Yellowstone, we boarded a bright yellow snow cat, which looked like a cross between a surplus tank and an outsized snowmobile. A young, friendly, idealistic, bearded man brimming with useful natural history information, drove us into the heart of the park. He told us that 48 inches of new snow had fallen on the park in the last week, that the snow pack was at 120 percent of average and that we were seeing Yellowstone at its absolute best.
It was dazzlingly bright, squintingly bright, with 10-foot lodgepole pines, half covered with snow, in every direction. One of the rangers offered an essential insight. Yellowstone should properly be regarded as a winter, not a summer, park, and it is best experienced in the winter, which lasts seven or more months per year. The geothermal wonders for which Yellowstone is most famous - geysers, mud pots, fumaroles - are even more spectacular when set off by a blanket of snow.
There is no avoiding the sad fact that Old Faithful is a cliche. Ten thousand, perhaps 100,000 people stand and gape at it for every individual who makes the pilgrimage to the other 300 geysers in the park. Thanks to postcards, View Masters (yes, they still exist), video, posters and the baseline cultural literacy of American life, Old Faithful is by now so obsessively mediated that it is virtually impossible to see it with fresh eyes. Even so, I still get excited, and at times teary-eyed, when I watch it erupt. Four times in two days I found myself drawn like a magnet to Old Faithful, which works its magic, on average, every 76 minutes.
All very well, but when I went on a two-mile cross country ski run around the Old Faithful geyser basin, I saw - for the first time - geysers that filled me with wonder in an entirely new and breathtaking way. I felt a little like Lewis and Clark's John Colter, who stumbled on Yellowstone a year or so after the Corps of Discovery returned to St. Louis. If we all didn't know that geysers and mud pots exist, who would believe us if we returned from a trip to Wyoming with such tall tales erupting in our vacation discourse? Castle Geyser shoots water for more than 15 minutes, and then blasts steam like the fiercest locomotive for a solid hour. Grotto Geyser vents hot water and steam from several ports at the same time. It feels like something out of Disney or a "Lord of the Rings" sequel.
In the course of our walks, rides and ski treks, we saw coyotes, elk, bighorn sheep and bison in such numbers that we felt that we were traveling through a prelapsarian landscape. We narrowly missed a wolf that was seen walking on the road, and just before we came out on Monday morning, we saw a pair of bald eagles at such close range that even our ranger guide was flabbergasted.
It's impossible to visit Yellowstone National Park and not wrestle with the two great issues: snowmobile access in the park and, of course, wolves. Not wishing to sully this reverie with the tawdriness of national park politics, I say merely that I believe snowmobiles have a place in Yellowstone, so long as the numbers are restrained, so long as guides lead every snowmobile caravan, and so long as two-cycle engines are forbidden. I don't see any rational objection to wolves in Yellowstone, especially since the foundation Defenders of Wildlife guarantees compensation to any neighboring stockman who can prove that his sheep or cattle have been killed by wolves.
America, America, my goodness did God shed his grace on thee.
The national parks are just about the finest thing the American government ever did, in my view. Make your shortlist of the most sublime places in America: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Great Smokey Mountains, Bear Butte, Niagara Falls, the breaks country north of Marmarth. Yellowstone National Park has to be at or very near the top of the list.
It was unquestionably the best Super Bowl weekend I have ever experienced, not to mention the healthiest and most spiritually refreshing. Meanwhile, I have the rest of my life to watch replays of David Tyree's fourth quarter "miracle" reception.
(Editor's note: Clay's next two columns will be filed from on board a cruise ship moving between San Diego and Ft. Lauderdale by way of the Panama Canal. He's leading a cultural tour through the canal in honor of Theodore Roosevelt's 150th birthday.)
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Bookworm wrote on Feb 14, 2008 8:08 PM:
REX wrote on Feb 11, 2008 6:22 AM:
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