While we were wandering among the world's largest collection of geysers, we saw much else besides Old Faithful and Morning Glory Pool. Scenically, I think the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, with its Upper and Lower Falls visible from Artist Point, proved to be the most breathtaking, a view many artists have painted, including Thomas Moran, whose paintings and drawings are among the best versions of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon (we have a large Moran of that here in Joslyn), Yosemite. With the early photos of William Henry Jackson, Moran's art helped popularize our best western sights and persuaded politicians to create that first national park. I've been thinking perhaps we didn't take pictures because we didn't have color film and our usual custom was to buy scenic postcards, just what I did decades later when I went to Europe. I can't find any postcards of the 1948 trip scenes, however, as I can of other excursions.
I know we saw the Fishing Bridge with its line of men perpetuating its name, and I'm relatively sure we saw Tower Falls and the Petrified Tree, but the sight that riveted my rock-hunting sense--I would have been extremely happy to be a geologist--was the Obsidian Cliff. its ancient lava petrified into glittering black glass. I do admit picking up a small chip of it, my most prized souvenir of the trip, about the size of an arrowhead, with the sharp edges the great Mexican civilizations of the Aztec and Maya prized for their best knives for their ritual human sacrifices.
I saw my first elk herds along the Firehole River, as well as bison grazing in meadows between aspen stands. This was long before the efforts to restore one of my most revered animals, the wolf, to the area, and so that other extremely intelligent animal, the bear, took the spotlight to such an extent that every time we met a line of cars, we'd nod, "Must've seen a bear." It happened so often--apparently there was/are a surplus of black bears, as opposed to the dangerous brown/grizzly with its distinctive shoulder hump--that it became a stale joke.
Well, not so stale, for there are four photos of panhandling bears, one of a man trapped outside his car by two small bears (yearlings?), three of an adult bear approaching us from a line of cars, a thematic cluster that demonstrates some definite fascination with them. And I'm going to assume that I was the one taking the pictures, being the one who could run the fastest. The last of this photographic trio of the same adult clearly shows the line of the (back) window glass, apparently from my looking out of the car. At this time these bear beggars were black bears. Recently I saw a documentary on the Yellowstone grizzlies, restored to such numbers that now the auto gridlocks are for seeing them too up close and personal, creating severe crowd control problems for the rangers, who know all too well the speed and volatility of grizzlies. I could not believe the stupidity of tourists. Well, I take that back. One can never underestimate the stupidity of tourists with cameras. Later in the entry Zoo Afternoon I juxtapose photos of the grizzly and the American black bear, and those alone tell you why I'm glad we had only black bears.
I have told what happened on one occasion before but repeat it here for whoever missed the anecdote. Gram ordinarily kept a box of Ritz (preferred) or saltine crackers for snacking between her and me in the back seat, as I have mentioned previously. We had our windows down, watching some bears and people foolish enough to be out among them. A loud snuffle as a big furry head came in Gramma's window set off her shriek as she went airborne and landed on the crackers and me, Mom and Grandpa shouting to "Roll up the windows! Roll up the windows!" Which I suspect Grampa did under the bear's paws, reaching back from the front seat, Gramma being half on my lap. Biggest excitement of the whole trip and good mileage for vacation telling back home.
I should add hear that bears and rattlesnakes were the only wild creatures who unsettled me when I was hiking, especially since I was ordinarily by myself. I got used to registering at the trail stations so that, in case of mishaps, rangers would know I was somewhere on a particular trail. With its unhappy publicity from rare, fatal bear attacks, Glacier National Park almost stridently warns tourists about grizzlies, extremely intelligent, with volatile tempers, amazing speed (up to 35 mph for miles at a time), and massive claws, teeth, and muscles to be our most fiercesome wild creature. Any doubters are referred to Doug Peacock's 1990 book, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, or Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, about the lives and grisly deaths of grizzly bear activists, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, as disturbingly close a look at spooky grizzlies as one can bear. (The pun was unintentional, but I'll let it stand.) I, of course, am all for grizzlies and wolves over men, but I am not for close encounters with either. I found the bear bells--think sleigh bells on ankle straps on people--that Glacier's rangers want hikers to wear annoying and surefire devices to scare off any other wildlife. Since I was ordinarily solo, for the required noise, I sang, usually Rodgers & Hart or Cole Porter, until I heard other hikers approaching. But the possibility of a bear and being the last hiker out on a particular trail off the Many Glacier road one afternoon spooked me back to my car, and I was not particularly happy to find huge tracks and fresh (steaming) scat on the shore of Avalanche Lake, though I was too tired and wet, from falling repeatedly between boulders hidden under alders and other shrubby trees and nasty prickly devil's club near the lake when I lost the trail, that I couldn't have run if I'd wanted. (I dutifully reported the bear dung and tracks to the rangers back at the highway.)
The final two photos from this trip, not finished yet, are of me in my suspenders and Mom with aspen and conifers in the background, still in Yellowstone.
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