When I worked in Yellowstone, I kept a journal, eventually filling seven spiral notebooks with miles of cramped handwriting (few people brought computers to the park back then. My neighbor, during my first summer, had one of those old Macintoshes with a screen the size of a piece of toast. That was the first computer I saw in the park, and the last one I saw for years). In the early pages of the journal, I sacrificed some ink to the idea that I might someday find the "heart" of Yellowstone, a single location that somehow captured the essence of the place. To my credit, I dumped the idea pretty quickly; Yellowstone is too big, too diverse, too majestic, and too weird for any one spot to embody the whole. I had learned, fairly quickly, a central lesson: the park always confounds your expectations. It never does what the new resident expects it to do.
But it will also confound anyone's expectations. Let me return to our autumn trip to the park, the one I wrote about in my last entry. Again, I was there with our son Dustin. He is already sophisticated about Yellowstone--he's known more about geysers than I do since he was maybe seven--but I still felt like I needed to introduce him to the place, as an expert guide. It was, however, hard to feel like an expert when we so often got the opposite of what we expected to happen.
We expected heat, and instead got a little snow. We expected elk. The park is always lousy with elk in the autumn, big gangs of them chewing up the turf at Mammoth Hot Springs, the males bellowing at each other so lustily that the people who work there can hardly sleep. I did not expect bears, which were rarer when I lived in the park. Instead, we got few elk, and more bears than seemed reasonable.
It was cold enough that we did not expect the fish to be feeding, but during our trip to Osprey Falls, we found that the fish, though the size of those goldfish crackers Pepperidge Farms makes, were hungry. We decided that we would make a trip we had been avoiding: we would go to Slough Creek, in the northeast quadrant of the park. We had been avoiding it only because of the hike; to properly fish Slough Creek, the angler needs to climb over a tall ridge and into a series of broad meadows. With just the two of us, we could more easily make the two-mile hike to the First Meadow--and yes, the First Meadow. Where the fish were the size of the French bread in a Pink Panther movie. The legendary First Meadow, the one I had heard everyone say was the best kept secret in the world of fishing, when I worked here. I had never seen it, except--the secret is out, now--in magazines, where it is sometimes claimed to be the best cutthroat trout stream in the world. We would live the legend.
It was a long drive, and a dispiriting arrival. There seemed to be a hundred vehicles distributed in every parking area, about half in the area for the trailhead. The people we saw going to and from their vehicles were members of the fly fishing aristocracy. The vehicles were all $50,000 SUVs, it seemed. The anglers carried $50,000 fly rods. (I'm exaggerating a little). We persevered. We left the car at the edge of the broad sagebrush flat into which Slough Creek debouches and set out on a trail that is actually a primitive road, climbing up a long, forested slope. The road ultimately serves the Silvertip Ranch, on private land just over the Montana line, in the deepest middle of nowhere. We climbed over the ridge and descended the other side, finally entering a broad alpine meadow, miles long and bounded by serious mountains. It was a magnificent sight.
But something was wrong. We saw a flat piece of water in the middle of that meadow, but it was very small piece of water and very flat. Could this be Slough Creek? My first thought was that this was just a pond, or a bog. Then, as we approached and began to walk along it, I thought it might be an oxbow lake from the main creek channel. The water seemed not to be moving a bit; the bottom was made of mud, and the water was full of moss. At one point we could see where an elk or bison had crossed the creek, an hour or a month ago; it had left tracks like the footprints of a dinosaur in the sludge on the bottom. Dustin wondered why I was not fishing. I still thought there was some mistake. This could not be Slough Creek. It was a real slough.
It was Slough Creek, though. We saw a respectable fish hovering against what little current there was. It was a rainbow, I thought, about twelve inches. Dustin was impressed. But it was just hovering there like a koi carp. To show Dustin that there was no point to this--the fish had seen me, would not be impressed by my performance, would see the line, and looked hopelessly dispirited anyway--I made a cast. The fish of course ignored my offering. We found five or six others, and they were just as dazed. All were rainbows, a nonnative species, about as natural here as koi carp; the National Park Service is actually encouraging people to kill them, to keep them from hybridizing with the native cutthroat.
What I at first thought was a fly fisherman approached. I thought again when I saw that he was not wearing a $50,000 set of chest waders with matching vest . He turned out to be a serious birder, camping somewhere in the area. The birding magazines he read had mentioned the creek in its fish capacity. "So, is it true that this is the best cutthroat stream in the world?"
We did what we were not supposed to do: we went downstream, out of the meadow and into a boulder-choked ravine. Free of the weight of reputation, we found plenty of much livelier fish. Returning a couple of hours later, we emerged from the ravine and saw the creek as it passed through First Meadow. I was even more appalled than before. The banks were all mud; the water was all moss. I had tried to be patient, but now could conceal it no longer. "This is awful. This is like the Los Angeles River." Of course, if we had seen it in the spring....
We spent most of our time hiking. We went to places we had never been before, and they were of course not what we expected. We hiked to a distant point on Yellowstone Lake, and were confused by the hiking guide that we were carrying. It told us that we would first descend into a "fine grove of spruce and fir" dense enough to hide the lake, but the forest instead was a scene of ashen wreckage. It had burned, I recalled, in 2003--we had even seen the fire--and the book was older than that. A few days later, we were at the Old Faithful visitor center when I noticed that the ranger I was talking to was the author of the hiking guide. Walking away, I told Dustin who the ranger was. Dustin looked at me as if I had unaccountably failed him. "What's the matter?"
"We need to tell him that his book is wrong."
I laughed. "Yeah, we should. 'Listen, buddy, your "fine grove of spruce and fir" is toothpicks!'"
We refrained. I hate scenes.
And so on, through what amounted to a typical Yellowstone trip. The place is not perfect in the conventional sense; it's not like a painting or a Romantic poem. That makes it all the more real, and so all the better.
But all this time, I had harbored an ambition. I kept thinking of a hiking destination deep in the backcountry, a place I had seen when I worked here. It was, in fact, the kind of place that only park employees hear about, like a secret garden. I wanted Dustin to see it before something went wrong. Maybe I was still looking for the heart of Yellowstone.
I of course did not expect too much of this place. I did not even expect to be able to find it again. We did find it, however, and the park confounded my expectations one last time. It gave me high drama. It gave me an aesthetic breakthrough. It gave me just what I was hoping for.
But I am out of space. I will have to finish this story next time.
Feeds