Driving up through the park today to reach Gardiner, MT reminded me of how much I like this place. It has a feel. Despite the tourists who think it’s ok to stop in the middle of the road to look at an elk (I mean and ELK, really?), there is a definite energy, a combination of excitement and relaxation and overwhelming, and overwhelmingly underpaid, knowledge and expertise. Its natural and political and a force to be reckoned with. It’s a smell, of evergreens and scorched earth and brisk mountain air and dust from buffalo hides and the steeping bad eggs smell of the hot springs. Even the rocks seem to emanate an entire mood. Everyone is happy in the park (note: happy does not necessarily equal smart). The rangers are here not for the marvelous pay but because they love it. The tourists are here not because it saves them money on their family vacation, but because it is one of the coolest places on earth. Every parents should be able to show their children how big bison really are when they stand next to your car and stare into your windows (with the windows rolled up, of course). Wolf hunts and bear dens and boiling mud pots and geysers and elk fights and eagles… this is what my life had been before Scotland, and what I hadn’t realized I wanted it to be again.
We saw pronghorn for the first time in a year as we came up, grazing in the endless yellow pools of grass and grain in the high desert plains of Wyoming. We saw a moose luxuriating in a river in Grand Teton, canoeists looking either terribly surprised or ceremoniously awed by the sheer size of the almost comical-looking ungulates. It was a large female, happily munching on whatever it is they find so tasty in river muck.
We also saw a stately osprey perched on a tree along the Gibbon River near Madison. I saw another one with a fish in its mouth swoop hungrily over Shauna’s place (our friend Shauna just got a new house right on the Yellowstone River in Gardiner and generously offered up her basement bedroom for us on our visit).
I didn’t realize how much I missed Gardiner and Yellowstone until I got back.
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