We got a last-minute invite to spend Christmas in the interior in Yellowstone at the Buffalo Ranch, a Yellowstone Association campus that doubles as a horse corral for the park service in the summer. It used to be an old buffalo ranch (clever, right?) during the time when NPS was trying to reestablish the bison population in Yellowstone. We know people who know people, so to speak, and got to stay there for free for a couple of nights. My recommendation: use the bathrooms man. If you aren't a fan of radiant floor heating now, you certianly will be afterwords. Do you know how nice it is to get out of the shower and stumble on a nice, toasty floor?
At any rate, we got there Christmas Eve and spent the afternoon showshoeing around Lamar Valley. Mostly, it was Kat and the Blustery Day, so we couldn't stay out long, and being several hundred miles north of The Fort, it gets dark earlier.
Yellowstone inspires poetry in most people, poetry of words or song or painting or photograph. It should inspire such in me, but it also brings with it a sense of melancholy. So many people spend lifetimes searching for a place that feels like home and rejoice when they find it. I found that place a couple years ago, and when I return to Yellowstone it feels that way always, but it is accompanied by a sense of loss knowing that at the end of the day, or the vacation, or the dream, I have to leave again. Like somehow, it's all fake, a blind, a movie set made to look real so you act naturally.
This is what happens when you take an overexposed picture and it turns out cool anyway!
At the Buffalo Ranch looking over Lamar Valley
The classic buffalo skull (everyone out west needs one!) on the door of the YA mini-store at the Ranch... open upon request
This was our little cabin at the Buffalo Ranch
Me goofing off in the snow
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