Old Faithful: It Sure Is

Finally made it to Yellowstone on a two-week Grand Circle Tour of National Parks in the West. I hate being committed to one bus full of seniors, but I hate driving in the mountains more. Actually, it wasn’t the geezers that bugged me, but the logorrheic Pat Buchanan of a tour leader who regarded us as all on the brink of Alzheimer’s, repeating the next day’s schedule so often I was ready to scream. And he was obsessed with shopping, not with museums as I am. So we unconverged in too many ways. And the hotels we stopped at were far from prime choices. Next time I think I’ll wing it on Greyhound.
 
Still, Old Faithful was a gas! Literally, as I later found out, reading a marvelous follow-up book, Jim Robbins’ Last Refuge: the Environmental Showdown in Yellowstone and the American West (Morrow, $22.95). It is an up-to-the-minute analysis of the policy issues and alternative solutions to the problems of mining, logging, ranching and water rights, as well as the downsides of the burgeoning tourism. It is a tasty mélange of curious anecdotes and deep thinking, the “dulce” that keeps you sticking through the sometimes complicated “utile.”
 
Actually, Old Faithful pales by comparison with the 10,000 other thermal features clustered in the park’s two million ample acres, “the Firehole,” a glassy river of gray-green water—until it picks up hot water that bubbled from geothermal springs. The heat and chemicals enrich the water, and the steam is superabundant with plants and insects.
 
But backward runs the Firehole. When most rivers are locked in ice, steam hovers over the free-flowing Firehole and things keep growing. Rainbow and brown trout grow a remarkable inch per month for nine months, then stop growing in July and August because the stream is too hot—90 degrees. That’s when the fish in other streams have their growth spurt. While rainbow trout usually spawn in May and June, the Firehole trout spawn at Christmas-time. There’s a tradeoff: Firehole’s superheated trout live only three years, while their cooler peers in Yellowstone Lake live to be 11. Talk about burning at both fins.
 
Another anecdote bemusing to this non-fisher was the datum that cutthroat trout, considered terminally dumb by tourists, get caught on average of nine times a year during the five years of their catchability under the catch and release regimen which now prevails. Each one of these too-suggestible critters would cost $48 to raise from a hatchery.
 
Here’s another anomalous discovery from the fish hatchery folks: They discovered, more or less accidentally when trying to understand river-flow effects, that rainbow trout raised in a hatchery disappeared shortly after stocking. Seems being raised in those crowded concrete raceways ill prepared them for ducking under cover in the wild for protection against predators. The otters and osprey were making out like bandits on these too too-civilized hatchery fish.
 
Tourists were not all that civilized either. The Radersburg party (they were unlucky enough to run into the Nez Perce fleeing to Canada) spent the first part of their vacation in 1877 “geyser jamming,” which consisted of “stuffing Old Faithful full of stones, tree branches and rubbish and sitting down to watch as the geyser blew the detritus high in the sky.” These Ur-Tourists also used the geyser to clean their dirty socks and underwear which exploded into the fresh air as “nice and clean as a Chinaman could wash it with a week’s scrubbing.” Heh, there wasn’t any television.
 
Which reminds me—we overnighted the evening Cheers was melodramatically ending itself. It seemed to me the next morning that half the staff had driven into Cody or Mammoth Springs to catch it. (I was miffed, until a few days later I caught the dull rerun in my Salt Lake Hotel.)
 
We also hear of U.S. Grant’s denominating the first National Park in 1872 as some great noble gesture. Alas, Nathaniel Pitt Langford, the 38 year-old former Montana territorial governor who led a party there to explore the Plateau in 1870, came to have two nicknames: National Park and Northern Pacific. It was the great railroad which raised the first two hotels: One on the lake shore began as a huge shed but was zooted up with Ionic columns and humungous pediments in 1903 by NP’s young architect Robert Reamer, thereby spoiling its outdoorsy image; and the Old Faithful Inn, which is a very satisfying evocation of the out of doors with a tremendous four-sided fireplace and gigantic gnarled beams. I loved it on sight and regretted that our chintzy tour company plopped us in the fake Colonial on the lake.
 
I also relished the Colter Bay Visitor Center, named after the first white man (in 1806) to see the sights—John Colter, a trapper with the Lewis and Clark expedition, who first ran into the tradition of skepticism about Yellowstone with his stories of “rivers that ran so fast the bottom got hot.” What was a non-science major to do, explaining the tall-tale truths of this unique environment?
 
David T. Vernon (1900-73) left his Indian collection, courtesy of a Laurence Rockefeller bequest, and it is mounted in a most satisfying manner, worthy of much longer than the half hour pitstop our hyperactive leader allowed us.
 
My favorite was Philadelphian George Catlin’s 1832 celebration of the Mandans: “…the several tribes of Indian inhabiting the upper Missouri are undoubtedly the finest looking, best equipped and beautifully costumed… they are the most independent and happiest race of Indians I have met with: they are all entirely in a state of primitive rudeness and wildness, and, consequently are picturesque and handsome, almost beyond description…”
 
I’ve always admired the benignly obsessed painter, doing the portraits of hotsy-totsy Phillies in the winter back below Broad and Market to finance his Injun savouring trips. He would have loved the Yellowstone injunction, “Take Only Photos, Leave Only Footprints.”
 
He also would have enjoyed Jim Robbins’ careful but still catchy exploration of the dilemmas facing Old Westers (loggers) and New Westers (Earth First! monkeywrenchers), who both find it hard to compromise for the kind of Next West Robbins is hoping for in the 18-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. (In the paperback edition, I hope he can persuade his tightwad publishers to expand the duplicated endpaper map, which I went partly blind trying to read. And unless I flunked 14-mile hike as a Boy Scout, several of the out-of-ecosystem allusions have flipped their quadrants.)
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, May 4, 1994