Yellowstone: The Arrival
This last weekend Sarah roped me into going to Yellowstone to collect thousands of snails for her research project. We left Spokane at nine in the morning. It wasn't until seven or so that we arrived in the park. And we still had a full hour at least before we could reach our campsite.
The one nice thing about the lack of large animals in our countryside is that you can drive at eighty miles per hour with impunity. In Yellowstone you will meet with some combination of cougars, bears, elk, moose, and bison. You drive slowly. At night, when there is no light except from your mostly-inadequate headlights, when the roadtwists as if it were trying to buck you off, and when the wild is most active, you can't go very fast.
I would not suggest passing a bison at 40 miles per hour in the pitch-dark of the wilderness. It is a terrifying experience. Bison are enormous, and they move as though they have an alien number of legs.
We arrived at the Fountain Paint Pots Basin and decided to walk out on the boardwalk in the dark. The least mote of light lingered in the heavens. The eerie bubbling of the geothermic springs was the only sound. The pungent steam hung in the air like a ghost. We walked farther into the realm of the gTeysers and finally came out onto an overlook where a geyser not thirty feet away threw ropes of boiling water up towards the stars. We leaned into the wooden rail.
After watching it for a while, we went on around the loop, now moving into the darkness of some trees. We heard a small rustling sound, perhaps that of a jackrabbit, we thought. We stared into the dark, and out of it lumbered a giant shaggy bison. We backed off as quickly and non-threateningly as we could. It walked up to the boardwalk right where we had been standing, crouched, then heaved its bulk onto the structure. It shifted forward and let its front legs drop onto the ground, then followed with the rest of its body. It continued back into the darkness as Sarah and I walked feverishly back to the car. We could see that the bison were out to get us.
But nothing further happened that night. We reached the campsite, set up the tent and paid, then went to sleep.
[To be continued….]