Avalanche Peak

As I write this, early in November, the last of the concession employees will have left Yellowstone National Park. The end of the season--October and most of September--was my favorite time of the year in Yellowstone, and nearly everyone at work agreed with me: the crowds that had been so trying in August thinned and finally vanished, and you found that you had this once-riotous place to yourself. This last September, I was able to take Dustin there and let him experience what I had once regarded as a secret to be shared only among insiders.

Yellowstone is a changeable place, as I learned again. During the first few days after we arrived, the sun was breathtaking. I was cleaning a bright white ring of sweat off my hat brim every day when we came in off the trail, and we were drinking gallons of water. On the fifth day of our trip, the wind turned around and started blowing from the east in a way I knew, from experience, would lead to interesting weather. Snow started falling the next morning, and we rose the day after, having spent the night at Canyon, to find little drifts on the ground, and the doors of the car frozen shut. But Dustin wanted to climb Avalanche Peak, so we were going to climb Avalanche Peak; I was determined not to let anything get in our way. When a pre-teen is excited about an outdoor activity, or any activity that has nothing to do with texting his friends, you do it. He was so excited, in fact, that as we drove up into the mountains, he played in the backseat with the bear-shaped bar of soap that we had taken from the cabin we stayed at. He named it "Bearie," and made up an adventure: "Watch out, Bearie! I'll save you!" It was appropriate behavior for a kindergartener, and he had just turned eleven. I should probably have been irritated, but the enthusiasm was also exactly what I wanted.

Avalanche Peak, you should know, is not as scary as it sounds. The summit is something over ten thousand feet. All the hiking guides call the trail "strenuous," but because it makes its two thousand foot climb in two miles, it gets grouped among day hikes, and is more popular than makes sense. However, as our car started up the hills, we saw that it had snowed up here much harder than it had down at Canyon. A white dusting in the hills above the lake turned into actual for-real snow on the ground up by Sylvan Pass. How deep would it be on the trail? Would we even be able to see the trail when it left the treeline? Our experiences over the past few days suggested that we would be the only ones climbing the mountain; the park was that empty. How much should I worry about being so isolated? This was supposed to be safe, I was thinking. It's a heavily trafficked official trail. Why is this happening to me? I have never become entirely comfortable having a child under my sole responsibility in a place so wild, and presently so deserted.

But Yellowstone is changeable in every way. Just as we arrived in the parking lot, two more cars pulled in from the otherwise empty road. One belonged to a couple who signed the trail register with a Scandinavian name and charged up the slope like Roald Amundsen and wife (pat yourself on the back if you get that reference). We would not have to break trail, and in fact, when we started hiking, we saw that another large group was already on the slope.

The snow was a half-inch deep at the trailhead, then two inches, then four. The trail heads straight up a slope through dense forest, emerges from the trees to arc along the south face of the mountain, then finally runs straight up trackless scree to the summit. On that run along the south face, we found the source of all the bootprints we had been seeing: a guided group of eight climbers, average age about sixty, who were doing an impressive job but were going to have to be passed somehow. We kind of threaded our way through, exchanging greetings while we tried to concentrate on not sliding down the icy scree. We left the treeline, and found snow that was now a foot or more deep--all of it, oddly, the granular snow that Midwesterners call corn snow, which seemed, when we ran our fingers through it, less like snow than a confectioner's accident. We had multiple paths through the scree to choose from, and our leaders, the long-vanished Viking couple, chose the best one. Not that it mattered much at this point, but under a gray sky, with the wind off the plateau picking up, we wanted to finish quickly. We were soon on the summit.

Just before we left, we met the guided climbers there, chugging triumphantly up the last hundred feet of scree. They gave us their cameras, and I took photographs of the group with the Tetons in the background, behind iron-grey Yellowstone Lake. Ice dangled horizontally from rocks and, lower down the slope, tree branches, stretched out in the lee of these obstructions like grainy icicles turned sideways. The night before, the weather up here must have been frightful.

During our descent, not long after we entered the trees, I struck a point where the trail dropped three feet or so in an uneven sloppy staircase. I reached out to steady myself on the topmost root jutting from the base of a tipped tree. I recognized that I had used that same tree root for that same purpose on the way up. I also saw that the root was silver with age, and polished to a dull sheen from its use as a handrail by thousands of climbers, literally thousands.

All the way down, I had been thinking of the story behind this trail. When I worked here, we always heard that the Avalanche Peak trail had been constructed single-handedly by a ranger-naturalist working on his days off. I need to research that story some time, which may be a legend, although I do not see why (it is not like he was a Headless Naturalist who took the souls of those who violated his realm, with a Pulaski). What was he thinking as he labored up this slope, so difficult to climb, surely much more difficult to work on, in the summer sun? Why did he do it?

Because he wanted to provide people with an exceptional experience. That was the only reason that made sense. People invariably want to have an impact on the world. Some manipulate the world of things; I myself have always thought that would be easier. In my present jobs—all of them—I manipulate experience, like the ranger: I write, I edit, I teach classes, I counsel undergraduates. It is harder to see the impact; indeed, it is often impossible to see the impact. Note how movies about teachers (Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poet's Society, Stand and Deliver) are always engineered so that the result of the teacher's life work is made unmistakably clear in a final scene. And that's Hollywood; rarely does the created experience come back to the creator in any form. It does, however, happen sometimes, and this worn handle-like root gave a hint of what the ranger had created. If nothing else, it memorialized the hard work of the generations of climbers who had come this way, the hard work that leads to that feeling of well-being afterwards, like the athlete's endorphin rush. The naturalist was probably an advocate for the place, too; they usually are. His theory, I suspect, was that people who had had that feeling would always be fond of Yellowstone. That would be worth any temporary scars on the mountain, which are not always scars, as this handsomely polished root showed.

When I first worked in the park, the people who had been here for a while showed me its pleasures and secrets. I, in turn, passed them on to my employees, and was passing them on to Dustin now. So the chain lengthens. It must, if anyone in the future is going to care much about such places.

And we were pretty happy now. The sun had come out. The wind had turned around to blow from the southwest, as it usually did. As we descended, we found that the snow we had climbed through was now mud. Snowmelt dripped from the trees, and a newborn creek tumbled down a crease in the mountain. When we reached the bottom, we drove to Fishing Bridge and had cheeseburgers and other junk food, as we always do when Dustin's mother is not around.