'Girls, acid, the ocean'. Thus spoke Jim Morrisson of life with the Doors. I was letting go of making it to California this time and anyway I'd have been fifty years too late to turn up asking where's the party? But I was interested in how much music from the psychedelic era was being played in the USA, in shops, cafes and restaurants. Back in Jackson for brunch, I was again hearing 'Riders on the Storm', which took me back to the ocean right enough, not to Big Sur rather to the rainy Pembrokeshire coast and my first real camping trip with three schoolmates. Timeless. Listen to that keyboard solo. No girls by the way, nor acid, but somehow we managed to camp within striking distance of the local pubs. ‘Boys, beer and the Irish Sea’ doesn't quite live up to Jim’s experience, nevertheless it was ours. Some days later I heard Hendrix ... this was in a regular restaurant in Glacier, not some crusty vinyl shop; admittedly one of his more accessible numbers, 'All Along the Watchtower', another classic, haven't heard that in years. And I was talking to a young woman running a cafe back in Colorado who regretted that she'd not seen the Stones nor Dylan in their heyday, and especially troubled that she'd never get to see the late Jerry Garcia and the Dead. What's going on .... is there some cultural time warp, endless nostalgia for the summer of love now that the baby boomers have moved into older age? And are the children of the boomers now bringing up their kids on the same sounds? I can't imagine my daughter listening to Abraxas or playing Jefferson Airplane, where did I go wrong?
Shaking myself out of my own bout of nostalgia I went to meet Mac Dukart of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (see greateryellowstone.org). The organisation has been going for 35 years 'to defend the wild heart of north America'. The area of Greater Yellowstone, which at some 34000 sq miles is ten times the size of the Park itself, and larger than Scotland, claims to be 'one of the largest, nearly intact temperate zone ecosystems on earth'. It's a mix of Wilderness (yes, such a designation exists in the USA, as in Jed’s back in the Teton's), National Forests, State Parks, other public land, native reservations and private properties; it makes the Park functional, in particular as many animals migrate out for the winter to lower ground. As you can imagine, Mac and colleagues are involved with a lot of conflict management in this wider area ... around resource extraction proposals, increasing off-road motorised recreation, road crossing issues and wildlife/human/stock interactions. A particular focus for the latter is around bears, via educational work and negotiating with cattle ranchers to retire or buy out uneconomic range land, especially at higher elevations.
I'd heard that in 2017 the US Fish and Wildlife Service had removed grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone area from the protection of the Endangered Species Act, meaning that individual states could now 'manage' populations; and indeed Mac confirmed that Wyoming had announced a lottery for the trophy hunting of 22 grizzlies in 2018. There was huge opposition to this, including a forthcoming legal challenge, and an impromptu campaign launched by local folk, mainly women, in Jackson, called 'Shoot 'em with a Camera, Not a Gun' encouraging people to enter the lottery and thereby undermine the outcome. Jane Goodhall and Cynthia Moss both bought lottery tickets. I came away from my meeting with Mac again thinking what a divided nation this is. I bagged my own trophy, a GYC cap that I'm looking forward to wearing out in Glen Affric, hoping it will work as a talisman to hasten the return of the beaver, the lynx and, one day, the wolf to Scotland.
Outside there was a tropical downpour and, being in civilization, I decided to head off and get a haircut. The barbers was busy and I waited for over an hour, although there was a good atmosphere and some mags to browse. The men were very particular about the cut they wanted, one guy spending some minutes describing his ideal beard; back home, seemingly more self conscious, we usually mumble something about a trim all over, a tidy up or a number two and leave it at that. Got some more food, Jackson crawling with visitors given the weather, and then caught the last forty minutes at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, including paintings of Yellowstone by Thomas Moran that had had a big impact back east and helped with the creation of the Park in 1872. Regrettably there wasn't nearly enough time to do the place justice but I had a quick look at a current exhibition titled 'Invisible Boundaries,' a mix of photos, paintings, videos and an interactive map all chronicling the challenging animal migrations that I'd just been discussing with Mac. (See wildlifeart.org). Outside there were some life-size bronze sculptures, bison, elk and moose.
I'd wanted to explore the fabulous Tetons further but low cloud remained over the next two days. One morning I got part of the way towards Death Canyon, (an early surveyor disappeared there) up into the cloud, and decided to turn back. Instead I drove through Moose (great name) and went instead to the Laurance S Rockefeller centre. He left his ranch here to the Nat Park who removed a lot of the buildings and other infrastructure and built a very arty, low energy visitor centre, complete with a large resource room of maps and natural history books, comfy sofas and fireplace. I browsed, and along with the identification guides and photo books noticed Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. Where did the dynasty make their money I wondered? ... Standard Oil, real estate investments and Chase Manhattan Bank according to wiki.
It was time to head back north into Yellowstone. One of the renowned wildlife areas is the open landscape of the Lamar Valley in the north-east of the Park and I turned up there early in the morning of the solstice to get a spot at the Slough Creek campsite, a low key place four miles down a rough track, right on the water and with less than twenty pitches. Jack, the volunteer 'host', there for the summer in his rv, decided to call me Scottie even though I can't claim any blood; many folk I met claim some Scots ancestry and reacted warmly when I said where I lived.
By 0630 every morning further up the valley all the roadside pullins are full of cars, rv's and minibus tours, folk with Swarovski scopes and binoculars, which you can hire for $50 a day, scanning the hillsides for that magic glimpse. This time of year there are usually herds of bison grazing the riverside flats below, maybe up to 200 animals, females with calves; what it must have been like to see those great herds of tens of thousands. I listened in to the leader from one of the tour groups who was very knowledgeable; if the wolves don't show up the focus is usually on bears, two distant dots on the hillside above a grizzly and her cub. She explained that during the bears' months of hibernation their metabolism slows right down, they don't eat, drink, defecate or urinate; however, they are still producing urea through fat metabolism but are able to recycle this, using the nitrogen to build protein and exhaling ammonia. Moreover, their bones don't crumble when they emerge in the spring. These wondrous abilities are the focus of interest for potential human application, by medical researchers and space scientists.
At the end of each day, back at camp or in the bar, people compare notes. There's an unwritten league table ... bison score one, elk about two and a half, moose four, black bear six, a grizzly seven, with cubs eight and full score, top trumps, are the wolves at ten. Cougar are off the scale. I was comparing notes with a guy back at camp one evening when he suddenly said ‘He has made everything beautiful in his name’ and asked if I believed in Jesus. He then told me about his 'road to Damascus' experience which occurred at a very dark point in his life, and introduced himself as Paul. Thereafter our conversation, still focused on the wonders of the wilds, was peppered with biblical quotes … ‘He makes me to lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside the still waters’. Quite impressive really, although I tended to steer clear of him after that.
I'd been sharing my own highlights of individual encounters with lesser critturs .... a beaver swimming upstream against the current, close to the bank at dusk; that porcupine back in the Tetons; two coyotes lying low one morning, watching, waiting; even the ubiquitous ground squirrels scurrying about, stopping abruptly to do meerkat impressions. Next day, I had a good hike to see the petrified trees, sequoia, fir and other species, resulting from rapid burial and silicification fifty million years ago. A lone pronghorn eyed me from a short distance, beautiful antelope-like animals these, the fastest land mammal in the world besides the cheetah, and indeed looking like they’d be equally at home in the African savannah. On my way back to the campsite early evening, I stopped to check out the golden eagle nest on a cliff ledge, and then pulled up behind a car parked askew on the track. Sure enough, a black bear was turning over rocks on the bank above, finding some with tasty snacks underneath. One big rock was a struggle but then the bear changed angle and levered it with a great paw. He or she came so close that with my windows open I could hear snuffling and the rocks fall back into place. Now that's been my Attenborough moment so far.
With the approach of the NP Service centenary in 2016 there was a big push to get people to visit the Parks, especially more younger folk. It worked, perhaps too well, as visitor numbers are at their highest ever level and the infrastructure is struggling to cope. In Yellowstone I was told they were looking at record visitor numbers for May and June; when I commented on how busy it was, the reply was 'you should see it in July and August'. All of this against a background of hostility from the federal government; one of the Trump administration's first actions was to cut the NP budget and whilst I was in Yellowstone Ryan Zinke, a senator from Montana and Trump's Secretary of the Interior, removed the respected Yellowstone superintendent Dan Wenk from office, after forty two years of service, seven as superintendent ... the main reason was rumoured to be over a disagreement about the culling of bison as they attempt to migrate out of the Park into the wider Montana area each winter. Zinke and colleagues are the ones responsible for pushing through the pipeline at Standing Rock and are now paving the way for a huge increase in fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, including within some National Parks. I wondered how much of this the visitors know about; Americans love their Parks, hopefully not to death as someone said, rather that folk will stand up to their downgrading and exploitation. I asked a couple of young teachers from LA I later met on a trail in Glacier about this and they said there's so much shit in the news every day they doubted whether the issue got much airtime. (See buffalofieldcampaign.org for more on the bison migration issue).
At Mammoth Hot Springs I joined the crowds to follow the boardwalks over the travertine terraces, amazing creamy-orange deposits of calcite and other minerals, formed as hot water rises through the limestone. Really a visual spectacle, especially one pool of superheated turquoise water perched on a high ledge overlooking the town below and the distant valleys. In town are the old cavalry barracks, restored as Park HQ and there I met up with Roy Renkin of the NP Service. Roy is primarily a vegetation ecologist with forty years at Yellowstone. A very busy man, with a large team to manage, he was involved that week with a series of meetings to discuss how to keep invasive mussels out of the waters in the Park. These are a big problem in the eastern US and if brought into the Park, on angling gear or boats, will have a major impact on the aquatic ecology; additionally, the Yellowstone River flows into the Missouri and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The Park has inspection stations for all angling and boating equipment.
Roy's research interests have mainly been around the ecology of disturbance, although he rarely gets time to pursue them these days, the big three being fire, insect and pest attack, and invasives, all increasing with climate change. This year is the 30th anniversary of the fires of 1988 that burned 36% of the Park; but fire's been a natural dynamic here for millennia and the return of vegetation and trees is well underway. We chatted about how short our human timeframe can be and the difficulties around decisions on whether to let nature run its course; for instance, over the decades he's seen the debate around overgrazing come full circle, with some now arguing there are too many bison, also thought perhaps to be a factor in reduction of elk numbers. In general he's in favour of non-intervention, apart from control of invasives and some of the larger fires. I spotted a file on aspen on his shelf and I had to ask him about that, given our work with the close relative we have back home ... aspen distribution is shifting uphill he told me, probably through climate change, although it regenerated well from seed after the 1988 fire.
I really appreciated him making some time for me and could have talked for a long time more. When I looked back on the meeting afterwards I had a curious recollection of entering his small office, stacked high with books and papers, where after a handshake he sat at his desk. I hesitated momentarily about where to sit myself .... there were two chairs facing him, one high like a bar stool, the other very low like a child's seat. Afterwards I wondered whether this was the usual layout, used as some kind of management personality assessment or whether he'd just grabbed whatever chairs were available for one of his meetings that week. I'll have to ask him. Anyway I'd chosen the high chair and we got on just fine.
I spent my final evening in the Park at the Roosevelt Lodge at Tower, had a nice meal and beer, got talking to one of the waitresses called Kennedy who has some kin on Achill Island, Mayo, and was amazed to hear that I'd been there. The concessioners who run the visitor facilities employ some 3000 people each season, many of them young folk like her from all over the USA. Most of these early lodges were fashioned around a certain ideal of the wild west, built of unpeeled logs in a rustic style, with fixtures and fittings to match. What I really like is that everyone's welcome to come in and hang out, there's usually a big fireplace and some comfy chairs. Teddy Roosevelt was a man who loved the wilds, and spent a lot of time in the west, especially after the deaths of his mother and wife in close succession. He made conservation a top priority. A pity Trump's not in the same mould. I chatted to a couple from Texas and as suspected they didn't know about the grizzly and bison issues, nor about Ryan Zinke's agenda. It was getting time to move on.
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