A Voyage of Discovery: Betsy and Bubba on the Road

Our season has been beautiful but dry and warm, even at this elevation. At lower elevations, in and outside of the park, there have been fires: to our north, west, and south. Many days on my weekends, as I was driving north to see Ms. Maybelline in Gardiner, the air was thick with a smoky haze, and I would find myself with a constant dry tickle in my throat. One of the fires, known as the Derby Fire, erupted near Absorkee, MT , several weeks ago. It has now burned more than three hundred square miles, and has destroyed homes, rangeland, livestock, and forests. It even caused a closure of the Interstate from Livingston to Columbus a few weeks ago because of the thick smoke. Two fires are burning in the Paradise Valley, not seeming so much like Paradise these days. My friends, the Doolittles, are wending their way west from Portsmouth RI to their new home in Pray, MT, and will turn into their lovely valley now full of smoke and haze on their arrival. Fire is so much a fact of life here that people seem relatively unfazed by their occurrence, except when evacuations are called for and homes are lost (something we’ve seen much of in recent weeks). At least with a hurricane, I have some sense of what to expect. I find the fires a frightening unknown.

Even with these warm dry days, we’ve had frosts nearly every night for a month or more, beginning during Maggie’s visit. And, as the days shorten and the air is colder, a young man’s fancy, in the bison and elk world, turns to lust. It all began in early August with the rut of the bison bulls. As Maggie and I emerged from the woods on our hike out to Storm Point, she was wondering about what sounded for all the world like motorcycles revving (and, a few weeks after the gathering at Sturgis, we did indeed have a lot of them in the park!) Instead, we emerged from the woods onto the verge of a meadow chockablock full of bison. The bulls have a unique snort, takes on a timbre and resonance unlike anything I’ve ever heard!They spend their days separating the cows from the calves, or trying to, intent upon bending them to their own desires and needs. Not all of the cows are prepared to be quite so malleable, so there’s a whole lotta snortin’ going on. For the past five weeks, a lot of that activity has taken place in the middle of the road, any road, utterly without regard for the line of cars approaching in each direction. We’ve all heard the stories of cars being charged and gored, and some of the photos have been great; I’ve been trying to picture the face of the insurance adjuster reviewing these pictures in preparing his documentation for a customer’s claim!

As the weeks have gone by, some of the bison bulls have returned to their torpid cranky selves, and are currently drifting back across the central plateau to the west side of the park; a drive through will usually mean an encounter with a lonely bull strolling up the street alone. The cow and calf herds are still hanging in our area, but some of the big boys are still engaged with them. This morning, Bubba and I were walking back from throwing a load of wash in the machine. Bubba was in one of his rare off-leash moments, as I’d left the leash in Andra’s car in Bozeman and was trusting to his voice recall–not a reliable tool. We came into my campsite through the trees and there was a small herd in residence around the car, including a bull busily trying to separate out his main squeeze for the day. We had a few minutes of watching them mill around the camper and the car; the young’uns watched us with dull-eyed puzzlement while the bull continued with his business at hand.

Our nights are punctuated by the sound of the bull elk in their rut. It’s an eerie call, and frequently triggers the calling of the coyotes. As I drove out of the park last week, I saw a bull elk standing alone in a sunlit sage brush meadow, bugling his dominance and lustfullness to the neighborhood. I couldn’t stop there to get a photo, and thought the picture I would have taken would never have done justice to my picture of that powerful animal, with a gravity-defying spread of antlers, calling through that sunlit afternoon.

The harlequin ducks are back on LeHardy Rapids; I watched 9 the other afternoon preening themselves on the rocks in the middle of the Yellowstone River.

And last night was our first real snowfall. Just a dusting here at Lake, enough to ice the roads and bring out a spirit of congeniality on the part of many of the guests gathered in the lobby. But the Beartooth Pass was closed yesterday, Dunraven Pass, last night, and heavy snows in the Tetons all day. Preceded by rain, the snows have done a great job knocking back the fires, although they still require monitoring. The concern of the local folks is now erosion: with all of their ground cover and forest burned, there is little to hold the soil this winter.