Travels in the Greater Yellowstone 1. The View from Blacktail Butte Your love of spring is proportional to the depth of your winter. My wife, Dana, and I live with our Australian shepherd, Rio, at the base of the Teton Range, at the edge of Lupine Meadow and along Cottonwood Creek in Grand Teton National Park. It is a place of extreme winters, a place where geography is destiny. Snow often covers the ground for six months a year. Wyoming''s record low temperature is 63 degrees below 0 at Moran, twelve miles northeast of our cabin. Nights in the cabin are cold, often painfully cold. Timbers in the walls crack like a gunshot close to your head.
There is also a blend of silence and serenity that is rare in the modern world. And uncommon beauty: walking in the dark with a headlamp, we sometimes see ice crystals falling from a clear sky. Home is four miles from the trailhead for Taggart Lake, across a sagebrush-covered plain buried beneath deep, windswept snow. For several miles it is flat as a table, bare and uncluttered. Once a week Dana skis home from work at dusk in temperatures that are often well below zero. Rio and I go out to meet her halfway. At times we all break trail for miles through encrusted, dazzling snow. At times the plain is a monotonous gray, dim and dreary.
At times falling snow unifies land and sky into a subtle pale gray bleached of reference and coats us until we assume the hue of the place through which we pass. At times the moon rises above thissnowy plain into a translucent violet sky like a silver orb rising from the sea. When Rio and I see Dana, Rio runs ahead, lunging through chest-deep snow until Dana greets her; then back to me and back to Dana again, back and forth until we--her flock, her family, her responsibility--are together. Dana and I slurp sweet tea from a thermos and Rio dances about, whimpering with joy. In early November, snowshoe hares change into their winter coats and we follow their example. Winter clothes will be standard fare until at least late April. During winter at the cabin we have no running water, no television, and no music; we do have an abundance of solitude and time. Summer returns us to the jet train of modern life.
Color is a luxury in a white world. I fall inordinately in love with my oil paints. Dana, who loves flowers, nurses various bulbs to provide relief from what we refer to as "the great white." Our favorite is a gaudy, shocking red monster of an amaryllis named Zelda that fills half a window and glows briefly in defiance of the colorless world. She dies eventually; the great white lingers. Protesting winter is like beating a stone drum and expecting to hear rhythm. However beautiful our winters, sometime in February we begin to yearn for spring, for color, for something other than the metallic smell of cold, and most important, perhaps, the freedom to walk. By March the bare aspen, cottonwood, alder, and willow bore all but the most devoted skiers.
Then, always suddenly, spring winds shred old, frozen snow from the limbs of conifers and the snow on the ground begins to melt. Every year spring comes earlier. The runoff from western rivers peaks ten days sooner than it did fifty years ago. This year the Snake River in Jackson Hole peaked nearly a month earlier than it used to, and the ice went off Jenny Lake three weeks earlier than it did two decades ago. And the seemingly hard winters that we have known are nothing compared to the epic winters Wyoming once knew. They are history now, and soon the memories of them will be history, too. In April the ski areas close and many restaurants and shops in Jackson follow suit. Locals depart for friendlier climes.
If they arewealthy they go to Baja, Belize, Hawaii, and France; if they are not they go to Arizona, Death Valley, and southern Utah. Those who remain in April inhabit a delicious seclusion unknown in any other month in the ecosystem. We believe that solitude is a function of distance, but it''s more complicated than that in the modern world. Being alone in Greater Yellowstone requires a bit of cunning, the absence of trails, and the absence of profitable recreation. Even that solitude--satisfying, healing, and spiritually renewing--is marked by an awareness of how much care and thoughtfulness is required to find qualities that should, one thinks, be normal in national parks or designated wilderness. As the snow melts off Lupine Meadow--our front yard--we wander about looking at the ground, appreciating dirt. Until you have lived without dirt for six months you do not appreciate its rich hues and aroma, the Godiva-chocolate umber, the gold ochre, the camel tan. Dana kneels and smells the dirt.
It has, she says, "the smell of life." Flowers begin blooming early in the spring, and our appreciation of them is heightened by knowing that trees and bushes will not leaf out until May. Flowers are among the first species to return, beginning the perpetual cycle of return and reinhabitation that permits Greater Yellowstone to flourish each summer in all its abundance and magnificence. Without these returns and reinhabitations, the ecosystem would be impaired and impoverished. We celebrate that homecoming. First to arrive, regardless of fluctuating weather patterns, is the sagebrush buttercup. Finding the first one is a pleasant game. It usually appears along the edges of receding snow, sometimes even piercing a thin layer of ice.
The lemon yellow petals are so bright you neglect its green leaves--the first new green of the year, earlier than the grasses. We walk toward Jenny Lake and search a favorite area for orogenia. Orogenia is not ubiquitous in Jackson Hole, but where it occurs it is prolific. The umbel of white florets is so inconspicuous among the glacial grit and cobbles of our meadows that many residents nevernotice it at all. The flower is rarely two inches tall, and it tends, like many spring flowers, to droop. Each floret is smaller than a pin head. From it rise diminutive anthers, which, together with the top of the ovary, are a rich, dark purple. Its name is from Greek: oros , "mountain," and genos , "race," so: "of a mountain lineage.
" I like that. The local names are equally charming: turkey peas, snowdrops, Indian potato. As the last suggests, the root is edible, crisp and tasty. Slightly later, fields of pink and white spring beauties bloom, interspersed with an occasional steershead. Steershead also droops and its hues are so akin to the spring beauty that one wonders if they are a camouflage. Yellow fritillaries boast a delicious petal, enjoyed raw, and edible bulbs the size of rice. Yellow violets appear, a few lavender waterleafs, and, alas, swarms of dandelions, the earliest blooming of many alien species that have invaded the ecosystem, much like viruses invade a body. Dana forgives them.
"We are rich," she says. "We have flowers." The return of other species is reassuring because many species avoid Greater Yellowstone''s winters. Our winter birds are few in kind. Chickadees, both mountain and black-capped, spend so much time at our feeder one wonders how they get along without us. A few ravens are about, Clark''s nutcrackers, several Stellar''s jays, blue and ruffed grouse, great horned owls, and our favorites, a pair of white-breasted nuthatches. Along the creek--never away from water--are dippers and belted kingfishers. Mergansers, an occasional mallard, a few swans.
Goshawks cruise the winter forests like ghosts. Snow buntings, wintering here from the Arctic, flutter about in groups, feeding on windblown seeds. Mammals are also rare. Moose, coyote, pine marten, snowshoe hare, sometimes a wolverine just passing through. Shrews, mice, and voles move about under the snow; picas live deep in the talus, eating grasses they collected all summer. Insect species are uncommon or absent. If we could be said to have companions, they are moose. They seem not only tolerant of our presence but interested.
Nor does Rio''s growling intimidate them. After she charged a moose when she wasa puppy, she decided she was not cut out for herding moose. She sits on the porch and growls; the moose ignore her. Sometimes they are indifferent to our presence. Once when Dana was meditating out on our picnic table, a bull moose walked past, perhaps five feet in front of her. She remained still; the bull studied her and went his way. At other times they seem genuinely curious. One moonlit night we heard a moose walk by the cabin on frozen snow until it reached the window next to our bed and stood towering above us, the bottom of its chest level with the sill.
Slowly its head dropped down until its face appeared next to us, perhaps eighteen inches away, the massive nose quivering as it sniffed, an enormous eye reflecting moonlight. Rio, on the bed as always, growled softly, her most serious warning, but the moose paid no mind. Then ever so slowly it backed away and wandered north a few yards to feed on branches of subalpine fir. In the morning we found a shallow depression where its warmth had melted the snow. The depression''s depth and shape showed that it had spent the night watching us. Despite the presence of winter residents, tens of thousands of other beings must return if this island of Greater Yellowstone is to flourish. Each returns in its own manner. Ground squirrels and bears have been here all winter--in hibernation.
Ground squirrels return, so to speak, from the dark, digging out from their burrows to the surface of the snow and braving long journeys across unmarked expanses to feed on new greens. Great gray and great horned owls await them. Grizzlies and black bears leave their dens when melting snow reveals winte.