Initially I had the notion to write this as a travel blog, or at least this would’ve been a part of that blog. I ended up deciding against the travel blog format for this story simply because it felt more important than simply a stop along the chain of several other stories. If this sounds like a bit of a retread simply from reading the title, as someone who frequently reads my blog entries, I understand. I spoke on this story to some degree on my last blog “A Path Of Grays,” but I wanted to dive further into the story & the way it has sat with me over the last couple of weeks.

Back at the beginning of this month my family & I went up to the national parks in northwestern Wyoming to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday. He had specifically wanted to take a trip to Yellowstone, a park that he hadn’t visited since his youth, & wanted to experience again/show all of us. When the idea had been initially pitched, I floated the idea of tacking on Grand Teton National Park since it butts right up against the southern rim of Yellowstone. He agreed & we ended up spending two nights in Victor, Idaho, frequenting Jackson & the national park, before heading up to Yellowstone for what was supposed to have been three nights there, but turned into two.

I know my father was most excited about Yellowstone, having probably not gone into much of a deep dive around the Grand Tetons, but I will say, after the fact, both Evan & I said we preferred the Tetons to Yellowstone. That’s not to say Yellowstone is not without its merits & also not to say we didn’t have an exceptional time in Yellowstone. There was just something so awe-inspiring, majestic, & tranquil about the Tetons, something I feel Yellowstone lacks for the most part in the lattermost category.

Yellowstone, to Evan & me, felt very unsettling. For all intents & purposes, it should be I guess. It’s sat atop an active super volcano which is why it has so much active geothermal activity. There are geysers & hot springs all over the place. In fact, that is the main draw of the park aside from the overabundance of wildlife. That was the aspect of the park that so many of us loved. You’d be driving along the road & pass a two-ton bison just sat on the side of the road or be wandering through Mammoth & stumble into a herd of elk. It’s extraordinary in that aspect. I guess the geothermal activity is also extraordinary. Many of the places in which it occurs are otherworldly. That probably contributes to the feeling of unease that I felt there to be honest. The coolest thing that we saw animal-wise was something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime with my own two eyes. A pack of wild wolves off in the distance in Hayden Valley.

We’re not here for those stories today. At least that was not my intent when I sat down to write today. What I came here to write about instead is an experience that surprised me much more than I had anticipated. It’s something that I think I will think about until the day that I die, & even to this exact moment I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe we’ll sus it out together, & by the end of all this I’ll have an answer for you. Time will tell I guess!

I mentioned earlier in this post that we were initially meant to spend three nights in Yellowstone. That was true. However, as we arrived in Wyoming it became increasingly apparent that the weather of the weekend, which was initially just calling for rain, was in fact going to turn into a full-on snowstorm. My sister, her husband, their three kids, Evan, & I were all meant to leave Yellowstone the morning of Monday the 12th & head to Bozeman, Montana to catch our flights home that afternoon. That was the initial plan. However, the further we got into the weekend, the more we realized that we needed to reevaluate that plan & probably head out earlier than expected to not get stuck in the snow.

We got feedback from many of the park rangers & eventually decided to cut our stay in Yellowstone short one night & head into Bozeman the night before our flight incase the mountain passes out of Yellowstone ended up getting closed down from the 6-8 inches of snow that they were projected to get.

In hindsight we left even later than we probably should have. We took the day to go out to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone (yes that’s a thing) & Lamar Valley in hopes of seeing bears. We struck out there. We ended up leaving the Canyon Lodge around 5 PM. At this point the snow had already started to fall to the point where it was accumulating around an inch on the sides of the road. By the time we reached Gardeners Hole the snowfall was thick. Right about the point where you go over the hill to the Golden Gate & head down to Mammoth Hot Springs & the town of Mammoth, we ran into a stopped line of traffic. Someone had slide going over the pass & was blocking the road going down. Once we were in this line we also found out that they had closed the roads going up out of Mammoth, but there was no word on the western or the eastern routes. It became a discussion of do we wait here for the road to be cleared, or do we turn back & try the other routes, of which we aren’t sure are even still open. We opted to stay & wait which ended up only taking about thirty minutes. We got out of the park in a blizzard as night began to fall, stopped in Gardiner for provisions ( a town I’d love to spend more time in), then my brother-in-law drove us through the snowstorm to Bozeman.

I’ve just laid out that story for you fairly cut & dry & I guess in that format, it doesn’t feel like that much. There are, however, a few details that I feel make this story a bit more interesting & give it a bit more weight. The first is that this was Yellowstone’s first snowfall of the season. They hadn’t had a snowfall since the spring & this, somewhat unexpected one, on a Sunday in the second weekend of October, was to be its first of the cold season. Yellowstone is snow covered about a third of the year. Snow is a major part of its ethos. In fact the park shuts down for a few months in a lot of spots, then reopens late for snowmobiling & skiing. The weekend we were there was the last weekend the lodge & the roads around it would be open until the spring comes again. The second detail was the wildlife. We’d spend two days in the drizzly rain with herds of bison, wolves, elk, antelope, mule deer, moose, pikas, what have you for it to turn to snow on all of us. We drove by the same bison sat on the side of the road, now frosted with a layer of snow, continuing on with life as if nothing were changing. Then you have the eeriness of the hot springs, the geysers, & the vents all being tossed a layer of ice, just to shrug it off like it was nothing. Continuing to churn 100+ degree water out, melting the snow around them instantly. A place that was so wild & untamed all of the sudden felt still, contemplative, & strangely sacred.

I don’t know if my sister & her family share this feeling around our experience. I know she & her husband were stressed out about getting out & maybe it was the benefit of being the backseat passenger princess that I got to leave the park with these feelings that I’ve been carrying with me for the last three weeks now. I don’t know. All I know is that I can picture it, vividly. The trees wizzing by, their boughs covered in a dusting of white when just a day earlier they hung against a backdrop of autumn haze. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it brings up a sense of melancholy, like I’ve witnessed something spectacular & yet altogether heartbreaking because I know that it is a dying thing. That is land used to be this wild, untamed masterpiece of life & the cycles therein, that now we have shoved into pockets of tourism, that even now is losing land & funding from the greediest of us as human beings. It made me incredibly sad but at the same time gave me a deep sense of connection to this earth in a way that felt intensely primal. To witness the first snowfall of the season in this place that holds so much energy & natural chaos just to have it hushed like a candle being blown out at the end of a long day was nothing short of spectacular.

As always, much love to you all,

-C