wildlife guide: cougar/puma/mountain lion/panther/catamount/painter/screamer/sneak cat/deer tiger/long tail/catawampus/fire cat/quinquajou edition, ten fun and/or gruesome facts

1. My roommate's father's chicken was killed by the only one in North Carolina.


2. On a wildlife field trip in sixth grade, the caged cougar meowed. Hannah Gunther was there. She can attest.


3. They are very difficult to taxiderm.

(Or so it would seem.)

4. They are said to inhabit Yellowstone but no one ever sees them because they are too stealthy. They are the ninjas of North America.


5. They have the widest range of any animal on the continent, from the Yukon to the Andes. Some people try to distinguish them ("Well, Holmes, that is an south-by-south eastern western wildcat"), but they are deceiving themselves. No matter what you call one, it is tantamount to a catamount.


6.



7. They hold the world title for Animal With Most Names in A Single Language. There are 40+. I was going to put them all in the title, but my interface balked.


8. My neighbor once hit one with his car. (!!!)


9. Roommate's father's chicken's death notwithstanding, they have been declared extinct back east.


10. 

They are beautiful.

oh, mountain-locked gem of the entire world!

that day when i drove through grand teton national park and left my camera at home and then cried

It was beautiful.

my job

K: Okay. What is the reason for this cancellation?

G: I heard it's colder than hell up there!

K: Well, most things are colder than hell.

G: ......

K: I imagine.

G: Well, it's too cold for us.

K: All right. Let me give you your cancellation number.

i've been dead for decades, my dear, but if you insist

I would like to introduce you to the man I want to marry. Unfortunately, he died before I was born.

His name is John Muir. Here he is:

I picked up a collection of his Yellowstone musings my first week here. He loved Yellowstone, also the West, and comes closer to doing its beauty justice with mere words than any other prose I've read.

Take, for example, what he says about our geyser basins:

"In these natural laboratories one needs stout faith to feel at ease. The ground sounds hollow underfoot, and the awful subterranean thunder shakes one's mind as the ground is shaken. In the solemn gloom, the geysers, dimly visible, look like monstrous dancing ghosts, and their wild songs and earthquake thunder replying to the storms overhead seem doubly terrible, as if divine government were at an end.

"But the trembling hills keep their places. The sky clears, the rosy dawn is reassuring, and up comes the sun like a god, pouring his faithful beams across the mountains and forest, lighting each peak and tree and ghastly geyser alike, and shining into the eyes of the reeking springs, clothing them with rainbow light, and dissolving the seeming chaos of darkness into varied forms of harmony."

What a treat! An absolute feast of words. He gives good advice as well:

"Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

Everything the man writes is like this: informative and rich and rhythmic and deep. Friends, if you come to Yellowstone, read some John Muir,

"Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterward chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy to your wanderings in the blessed old Yellowstone Wonderland."

cowboy convert

The Old West cookout at Roosevelt Lodge is the most popular activity in Yellowstone. On the phone, guests consistently ask me to book them a seat, and often hang up disappointed, as it sells out every night of the summer.

This puzzled me for the longest time. I could not understand why someone would shell out $60 a head to ride in a wagon, eat potato salad, and listen to some guy drawl. I could not understand the popularity of a cowboy fantasy. It seemed the ultimate tourist trap.

On Friday, however, Reservations and Front Desk staff carpooled out to Rosie, as the locals call it, to experience the activity we are told to recommend and give the staff a practice run. I had a change of heart.

There is something so marvelous about those wagons, rolling through runoff streams under an open sky. The teams of beautiful horses, the imperfect reality of their sun-bleached mane and jangling leather straps and rippling muscle beneath. Their satisfying names: Tango, Oscar, Cash, Felix*. The charms of young ruddy wranglers from across the country, helpful and sweet and genuinely enamored with their job and this place. Rolling across the valley, grass and sky and bison all around.

It makes one feel happy and clear and alive to do this, to get in touch with another time, when the pure unspoilt experience of the wilderness was all-encompassing. When this was life: sweat and hard work and fresh air and weather. This is why people visit this place by the millions each year and the cookout books up. This is why people fall in love with the West - we are hungry for a taste of the tangible.

2000-pound Belgians pulled us out to to Pleasant Valley, a piney, grassy nook that swallowed 200 of us whole. We milled about waiting for the dinner bell, marveling at the loveliness of the scene, the abundance of the sustenance** to come, our luck to be part of it all.

As for the designated cowboy entertainer, this was not some drawling imposter. This was The Man. The Man, a Genuine Cowboy from Texas, seventy or so with a sweat-stained Stetson brim, the Voice of the Frontier. He sat up there with his baby Taylor and microphone, a deep, gentle source of croonery, playing simple melodies and songs not-quite-forgotten.

Listening to him, I was nostalgic for a time and experiences I had never had: a world where dusty horses were comrades for weeks under starry skies, a world of chivalry and simplicity. It was magical and beautiful and so terribly happy and sad.

Sentimental? Yes. Romanticized? Of course. But what good is history, the progression of time, if we can't long for the "good old days," another era, another life lost? The cowboy mythology deserves to be celebrated and mourned, and there is no one who does it better than Bob Sawyer. Legend.

Too soon, I was filled. Too soon, the sun set. Too soon, the spell ceased and it was time to go home. "Easy, boys," our driver repeatedly said. Our horses were eager to get back.

I wasn't. I wanted to stay here forever - in this summer evening between times, with this blend of rugged comforts that stirred and soothed my soul. I wanted to wrangle at Rosie, not answer the phones at Mammoth.

But, here I am. With my cubicle and headset and $7.50 an hour. So I'll sell this activity, all right. I'll encourage you to roam the Yellowstone, to eat outdoors, to saddle up and go riding. I urge you to listen to Cash and Autry and Sawyer. I'll tell you to lay in the grass, to hit the trail, to put the pot on the fire and listen to the old wrangler's stories. Even if the Old West cookout is sold out from now til the end of time, I want you to take a guitar out under the stars and never, ever let that cowboy dream die.

Love.

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*CORNBREAD. So buttery yellow and soft and crumbly and just the right spot between savory and sweet. I'm marrying cornbread.

**Felix IS a great name. For the record.

WORTH IT

Pumping away my paycheck in Gardiner, I stumbled across a marvel. A miracle. A sweet milky dream in recyclable foil. Purple ice creaminess encased in chocolate graham--an eatable catalyst for world peace. The label calls it Wilcoxson's Huckleberry Ice Cream Sandwich.

Friends, this was only the best thing ever. Only God's Gift to Montana. Only 79 cents. I wept for joy, and again when it was gone.

With one bite, I was swept away in a New Life Plan: marriage to Wilcoxson, whoever he is. And his cow. We'd have fat Violet Beauregarde-esque children, churning up ice cream and gathering huckleberries and rearing bison while we're at it. We would live in Lolo, Montana. Mr. Muir would come back from the dead and sit on our front porch eating the stuff, watching the bison graze peacefully and using his most beautiful words to describe the scene.

One day I'd be killed by a mob of angry anti-bison activists. Authorities would find me dead and tubby, purple-stained lips in a contented smile. At my funeral, they'd release a thousand lavender balloons, and in lieu of flowers, my widower (Wilcoxson) and widow (the cow) would accept donations toward a cure for lactose intolerance.

Forget college. Forget career plans. Forget writing and dating and money. The important thing in life is huckleberry ice cream, and a life with more purple is a life well-lived.

the fool on the hill

What she said: "If you could climb that rock, it would make a cool picture."

What I heard: "I bet you can't climb that rock!"

Stubborn fool.

the wildlife guide: pensive edition

I saw some bighorn sheep today.

I like how even with horns nearing thirty pounds, they hold their heads up high.

snow. and snow.

Have you ever wondered what Yellowstone looks like in April? It looks like this.

Only more so.

And also this:

That's Lake Yellowstone. I feel a fool complaining about Utah-Siberia all those years when the East Entrance has a May avalanche and collapses the Lake visitor center. Layers cannot protect you from a snow-nami! But.

Isn't it lovely?

to his credit, he did use the phrase "somnolent vagaries"

Mammoth is all in a flurry for opening on Friday. Mattresses crowd the hallway and paint chips flutter from the ceiling. Fire alarms went off all day yesterday, and a man's been shoveling buffalo chips and elk scat off the lawns. I'm dreading the onslaught of tourists.

But. As promised, here is the story of Truman Everts. Get ready. It's a crazy.

Truman Everts Delaware III has the notoriety of being lost (and alive) in Yellowstone National Park the longest. He was expediting with the Washburne-Langford-Doane expedition in 1870, and, being near-sighted, he wandered off with his pack-horse to be lost. His 37 days in the wilderness went something like this:

Day 1: Lost.

Day 2: Pack-horse spooks and runs off. (See inset.) He is left with an opera glass and the contents of his pockets.

Day 3: Having eaten seriously nothing, he feasts upon some "palatable and nutritious" thistle-roots. (This thistle was later to be named after him.) "Glorious counterpoise to the wretchedness of the preceding half-hour!"

Day 3 1/2: He scrambles up a tree in order to avoid a screeching mountain lion. After a tussle, cougar avoided.

Day 4-5: Snowstorm. He eats a raw bird. Feet frostbitten.

Day 6-13: Hunkers down on some hots springs to stay warm, cooking thistles in a hot-pot. After three days, his hip is badly scalded. After seven days, he decides to make a fire with his opera-glass.

*Meanwhile, Washburne and/or Langford and/or Doane has realized Everts is missing. They search for him for about twelve days, then offer a $600 reward for their friend's rescue. This will be important later.*

Day 14: Leaves the hot springs. Hallucinations set in.

Day 15: Burns hand badly.

Day 16: Loses a shoe. Despairs. Finds it.

Day 17: Inadvertently sets the forest on fire. Loses knife, fishing line/hook, and hair to the flame.

Day 18ish? A vision of a friend appears to him and gives him directions.

Day 20... something...: He loses all sense of time, and therefore so does this account.

Day __: He eats some minnows, and throws them up.

Day __: He spies an abandoned tree stump/former bear den and decides to sleep in it. As a precautionary measure, he lights three fires around the stump to prevent the bear's return. Unfortunately, as he puts, it,"I rose the next morning to find that during the night, the fires had communicated with the forest." Forest fire the second.

*Meanwhile, $600 is quite a bit of money in 1870, and two mountaineers decide to have a go. They head to the spot where he was last seen and start the search from there.*

Day __: Everts climbs down a treacherous cliff.

Day __: The opera glass! She is lost! Everts retraces five miles to find her.

Day __: Several storms. Like snow, guys. Serious cold. All kinds of wandering 'round in misery.

Day 37: The man is barefoot, frostbitten to the bone, emaciated, and has claws for hands. Yet when two rescuers ask him if he is Mr. Everts, he still has the cheek to say, “All that is left of him.”

The rescuers are Baronet and Prichette. One hikes 75 miles for help. The other nurses him back to help. Turns out, ye life-sustaining thistles are wreaking havoc on the digestives. Until a mountain man has the now fifty-pound Everts drink A PINT OF BEAR OIL.

(Stop. Take a moment. Imagine bear oil. Imagine a pint of it. Imagine drinking a pint of bear oil. All at once. Have you considered it thoroughly? Have you? Okay, we can resume the story.)

Perhaps as a direct consequence of drinking sixteen fluid ounces of raw fat, Everts gains thirty pounds and sets off to join his abandoners in Helena. They name a mountain after him and are presumably very happy to see him again.

HOWEVER. No one will give the money to Baronet and Prichette. No one ever does. The expeditioners won't pay up and Everts flat-out refuses. (Had I a time machine, I would show up in 1870 Montana with $600 for EACH of them and possibly be lynched for wearing pants.) The mountaineers shrug off this heinous display of ingratitude eventually. Hard times are hard times. Possibly Everts was broke. BUT. Years latair, Baronet visits Everts to see how his rescuee is doing and is received so coldly that Baronet said he “wished he had left the son-of-a-gun to roam.” Whoa. Make of that what you will.

Anyways. After recuperating as best as one can from such an experience, Everts himself went on to marry a fourteen-year-old girl at age sixty-five, father Truman Everts Jr. at age seventy-five, and die peacefully at age eighty-five, leaving behind two bereft rescuers and a thirty-something widow with a ten-year-old. And that is the story of Truman Everts. (And also how this mountain got its name .)

This place is a magnet for madness. Chock-full of crazy people and stories and things. I kind of love it. Maybe next time we'll talk Superintendent Norris or tackle Teddy Roosevelt.

Much love!

wildlife guide: the bisonry

BISON. Bison, collectively, are my Yellowstone crush...

...bordering on monomaniac obsession. Every time I see one my heart about jumps out of my chest. You would think after seeing them a million times a day for a week my swoonery would cease some, but it hasn't. Nor has my excitement about living near them lessened, even after getting trapped in the Mammoth Hotel by them* or bushwhacking an uphill path seventy-five-foot-safe. Nay. I am straight-up crazy about the bison.

A bison is not a water buffalo. Nor is it a cow. 'Tis a gloriously hooved, horned, sloping-shouldered mini-mountain of snuffly herbivore wildness. They amble over miles with their friends and kin. Their foraging is endless and unceasing and epic. They Are Yellowstone. They Are the American West.

They are also HUGE. And huge. Like, 1500 pounds worth of huge. I think if they hadn't been most unfortunately largely killed, we would all have to live in forts so as not to be trampled by their thousands. This time of year their ribs stick out and they're having BABIES. YES, BABIES. BABY BISON.

I TOOK THIS PHOTO. Also this one:

Bison like to wander upon the road. Perhaps it gives their hooves a break. By and by they realize there is still nothing to eat on the asphalt, so then they wander off again. In the meantime, traffic jams and panic and photographic frenzies abound. Whenever I get on a bus, I secretly pray I will encounter some bison on the road very closely and therefore break the 25-yard-distant rule, but also not get tossed.

A tossing, depicted.

Unfortunately, everyone outside of the Park hates bison and considers them the devil's own ungulates. Bison are democratically regarded as a menace. State senators call them "a creeping cancer," "woolly tanks" "in need of management." Montanans are dying to shoot them. Tourists are gored by them annually. In the West, bison are almost as controversial as wolves. And when you are stopped in your little tin car waiting for the biggest, blackest, massivest bison in Yellowstone to step off the road so you can drive on but instead he is ambling right for you, your liver can't help but produce liquid nitrogen.

But guess what? When you live in a place with snowdrifts thirty feet deep, and grizzly bears and black bears and wolves and mountain lions all lust after your flesh and the blood of your offspring, and the times and the foliage are changing fast, and you are poached on an unrelenting basis and scopeless scale, you have to be tough. And so? They are. And that is why I love the bison.**

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*Because when you are sketching something and suddenly you realize a herd is closing in around you to snuffle the lawn and the 25-yard rule is consequently violated and you accidentally make a noise and that big one there looks at you alarmed, you have to go and hide out in the Mammoth Hotel. Even if it's closed for the season. Until you realize twenty minutes later there is a back door that has been unencumbered with bison all this time and you can go home safely.

**And also because I saw one scratching itself on a post in a parking lot today and a guy driving by stuck his head out the window and said, "I thought that spot was handicapped only! Does he look handicapped to you?" (He didn't - the bison was fully intact, just itchy.) People in Wyoming have a good sense of humor, now that spring is here.

the kate update

(I hope this will answer some questions I've gotten of late regarding my situation.)

By day, I answer phones in an office in a haunted hotel, navigating a 1980 program in a Pong color scheme to reserve Roughrider Cabins and photography tours. Sometimes I shell peanuts.

(Said hotel. Plus some landscape and thermal features.)

I live in a dun-colored dorm upon a dun-colored hill. I have a roommate - an avid knitter with a nose stud who lets me wear her yarny hats. Bison and elk often come to visit us.

(My dining room adjoins the bisonry's, but they're just here for the herbage.)

Unlike my hoofed neighbors, I do not eat grass. I take my meals in a staff cafeteria, discussing Minnesotan politics or the evolution of the blunderbuss with my seatmates. The fare is fair, and there is perpetual granola.

(A blunderbuss. Its predecessor was the hand cannon, and it was succeeded by the flintlock.)

The nearest movie theater and Wal-Mart sort of store are eighty miles away. There are exactly two receivable radio stations. But about 100 yards from my house is a place to buy sardines, Stetsons, and bear spray. And one of said stations is National Public Radio. So, I am set for the summer.

Please give me your mailing address so I can send you a postcard! I love you!

CHECK IT

yellowstone: a brief overview slash geohistorical explanation

Yellowstone is basically a giant volcano. A supervolcano, even. There's still ash in Ohio from when it exploded last time, and the next eruption is overdue. I've told my family, if this thing blows, cut your losses and run, because I am all kinds of dead.

Geologically speaking, however, this makes the place very interesting. It's over the top of three massive calderas (which sounds like the name of a telenovela star, but isn't. It's a concave receded volcano-hole.). All the lava and gas and pressure comes steaming up through the snow to make cool things like geysers and hotpots and vents, and people and ungulates keep falling through them and being boiled to death. New cracks still open up today, even. Like, a hotpot opened up in the middle of a parking lot recently, and the Park Service just kind of gave up and put a fence around it.

Anyways. Historically speaking, the whole thing is kind of hilarious. For years there were all kinds of crazy stories about that Yellowstone River area. Jim Bridger, especially, would talk about "man-eating mud" and everyone would roll their eyes and say, "Yeah Bridge... and then it bit a great white shark in half" but then an expedition or something finally came out and stood at Old Faithful. They were so excited when it erupted that they "threw their hats in the air!" and promptly went back to Congress, who was super stoked to the point of declaring the area America's first national park. (This was in 1872. Wyoming wasn't even a state yet.*)

However, since the Park Service hadn't been invented yet, the U.S. Cavalry had to come in and protect the place from poachers and squatters and stagecoach bandits and the usual 19th-century kind of vagabonds. The king's horses and men were stationed in what is now known as Mammoth Hot Springs. (Literally a couple hundred yards from where I live now.**)

Eventually, though, they got rangers to do their job, and the stagecoaches turned to automobiles and snowcoaches, and then there was electricity and running water, and millions upon millions of tourists came. (And there is still zero cell phone coverage or WiFi, but to be honest, I kind of like it that way.) And so much history happens here that they actually have an official Yellowstone Historian, whose job I covet. And the whole park covers like a third of Wyoming, with a teense of Montana and Idaho, and except for the fact that it's haunted†, I like it here very much.

Next time I will tell you about all the surprising ways to snuff it in Yellowstone and about my unhealthy obsession with bison. Also the story of Truman Everett.

我想你们!

Kate

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*By the way, who was president in 1872? That's right. It was Grant. Not Roosevelt. Ahem.

**I finally figured out what state I live in. It's Wyoming. I'm a little disappointed, because I, like Captain Borodin, really wanted to live in Montana. But I'm very very close. I go to church and buy detergent in Gardiner, even.

†Yes, haunted! There is a whole book called Ghosts of Yellowstone. I'm kind of terrified to read it because my work is in the old Mammoth Hotel and there are three cemeteries within walking distance of my house.