Yellow Stone — DAVID YARBOROUGH

It’s embarrassing to admit that this was my first visit to Yellowstone. In fact, I had never been in either Montana or Wyoming, the two states that share the grandfather of all the national parks. To be accurate, I should note that Idaho hosts a sliver of the park as well. Our plan was to enter the park from the north, make our way south and west, spending a few nights at one of the inside-the-park hotels close to Old Faithful, before leaving via the southern gate directly into the adjoining Grand Teton National Park.

This proved an imperfect plan. It did provide a central location and opportunities to see most of the features we had in mind, but it did not account for the weather. This was May and spring was late coming. Roads in the easternmost and southern parts of the park were still closed. It also didn’t not account for the National Park Service’s extreme service cutbacks. As a Covid-19 counter-measure, the furnishings had been removed from the lobbies of the hotels. This left nowhere to rest out of the weather and nowhere to congregate with others. It made for an altogether unwelcoming atmosphere.

There was no seated dining in the park at all. It was 100% carry-out. You had to order, wait, trek back to your hotel (or, in our case, a cabin a hundred yards behind the hotel) and eat in your room. Luckily for us, our cabin had a dining table, otherwise we may have been eating our food in bed. Food that is now cold, or at least no longer warm. Food that cost as much as it would in an Upper East Side bistro, eaten with plastic utensils. Oh, and clean up after yourselves since there is no daily service.

Perhaps the culpability is not entirely on the Park Service. I suspect that staffing shortages experienced by the NPS’s lodging and food service concessionaire, Xanterra, are more to blame. Those are in some part due to or exacerbated by the pandemic, but either way it was a fail. I did not notice any reduction in the already very high rates charged for rooms and for food.

Despite all these shortcomings, the park saw a record number of visitors in 2021. We were two of nearly 5 million visitors at Yellowstone that year. Its popularity is only expected to increase as Americans and tourists from abroad seek out post-pandemic travel opportunities. Every staff member we talked to during our spring visit spoke with dread about the tsunami of tourists that were expected in the coming summer months.

Outside our cabin and sufficiently nourished, we found the park spectacular. The one thing Yellowstone is best known for is its bison and we saw them frequently. Many of these encounters with bison also provided comic examples of just how clueless humans can be. Other wildlife was out enjoying the early spring as well. Black bears, elk, prairie dogs—there were abundant photo-ops. The one animal we had hoped to spot but did not was the gray wolf. Despite our patiently scanning long range vistas across their territory in the Lamar Valley, the wolves proved worthy of their reputation for stealth. Peering through binoculars across vast grasslands it was easy to understand why this part of the park is sometimes described as an American counterpart to the Serengeti.

Bison herds are certainly not the only thing for which Yellowstone is justly famous. There are all those geysers. Yellowstone essentially sits atop a gigantic cauldron of volcanic activity. There is an ocean of underground magma that may explode any minute now (in geologic time) in what—whenever it happens—will be one of the most devastating events in our planet’s history. Sometime in the next hundred thousand years or so, we’re in for some real climate change!

Old Faithful proved true to its name. The NPS has a very feature- and info-rich app available free for iOS or Android devices. On this app you can check for predicted eruption times for Old Faithful as well as other geysers in the park. We find it helpful for things like trail conditions and road closures, too. Be sure to check the app and download any maps and or other info you may need before you leave your lodging as cell service throughout the park is sparse.

I’m glad we joined the hordes circled around Old Faithful to view it. As for the many less famous geysers, calderas, springs and other thermal features, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen most, IMHO. Just sayin’, there are more interesting things to do very close by.

Our favorite area of the park was the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The Yellowstone River spills in a waterfall into a dramatic gorge, only a half-mile or so wide, but twenty-four miles long. The morning we visited, we walked the trails in a snowstorm. When we returned that afternoon on our way back to our hotel, there was bright sun. Both experiences were awesome.

Between these visits to the canyon, we enjoyed a snack lunch (there were no other options) in bright sun and warm air on the bank of Yellowstone Lake which was still solidly frozen. The hotel and restaurant were closed, so this area of the park was practically empty of tourists when we were there which made it even more pleasant.

The road through the southern part of the park was not yet open for the summer season, so we had to exit through the western gate, the one most visitors use, and drive south through Idaho. It may have taken longer, but it was a pleasant journey. It allowed us to view the Tetons from the west as we approached Jackson, our next stop.

Update: As I prepared to post this in early summer of 2022, Yellowstone National Park was just reopening following devastating flooding of the Yellowstone River. Areas outside the park that were heavily impacted included Livingston and Gardiner in Montana. The north entrance of the park at Gardiner is closed indefinitely. The forests and wildlife take these outbursts from Mother Nature in stride, but the damage was great to the infrastructure built by humans: the roads and bridges and structures that allow us to visit these remote places of beauty. There will be no tourist tsunami in Yellowstone this summer. While the capacity of the park is temporarily restricted, it should not discourage anyone from going. Even a wounded Yellowstone is still magnificent.