The politics of wildlife

We left the shore of Lake Hebgen, Montana, and drove up a dirt road toward a compound of buildings at the edge of a forest. A large log cabin, several outlying cabins and teepees and numerous vehicles occupied the clearing with a view of the lake.

We were there to spend a day with the Buffalo Field Campaign, a grassroots group of activists working to protect America’s last wild buffalo. We’d discovered the group years ago in Yellowstone and have supported them ever since.  The scent of soup wafted from the kitchen and a dog snoozed on a broken-down couch as introductions were made and we were given a tour of the premises.

Sleeping lofts were built into the rafters of the rooms to accommodate the volunteers who live here year round. A gear room held rows of heavy winter boots and jackets and other equipment needed for winter forays on skis. In the media cabin with its computers and phones, an art instructor from Manhattan worked on the graphics for the newsletter and a piece of paper taped to the wall noted recent media contacts: a German film crew, Nat Geo, a local TV station. We met Mike Mease, BFC’s affable co-founder, who told us about recent operations.

Unknown to most tourists who visit Yellowstone and snap photos of buffalo jams on the roads is the fact that the Yellowstone herd consists of the last remaining wild buffalo in the United States, a genetic remnant of the great herds that once darkened the plains and were all but extinct by the beginning of the 20^th century. Also unknown to most is that in the winter, when the tourists are gone and buffalo migrate to their traditional grazing grounds outside park boundaries, they are slaughtered by the hundreds.

And in the spring, at the peak of calving season, the wandering herds are hazed back into the park by helicopter, ATV and riders on horseback, across busy road

s and through forests thick with fallen trees, in operations financed by citizens’ tax dollars. The reason, as with most issues in the U.S., is economic: the powerful cattle interests in Montana view bison as competition for grass, even though cattle and bison don’t even occupy land at the same time. Unable to survive the brutal winters, cattle are trucked out in the cold months and returned to the area in June, when buffalo have returned to graze within park boundaries.

The official excuse is brucellosis, a disease infecting much of the local wildlife, which causes cattle to abort their calves. The disease originated in cattle and there has never been a case of its transmission by buffalo. Elk frequently are infected, but they are free to wander, being a valuable hunting commodity.

Little more than a scare tactic, brucellosis was enough for ranchers to convince Montana to place the regulation of wild buffalo under the Department of Livestock, rather than wildlife. DOL continues the hazing, capture and killing, working by mutual agreement in concert with the National Park Service to contain these naturally migrating animals within the confines of the national park.

BFC volunteers – there have been over 5,000 since the group began in 1997 – monitor the buffalo year-round, videotaping hazing operations, informing the public and even coaxing errant animals back to the safety of the park, strapping on skis in the pre-dawn darkness of winter, when temperatures can plummet to -50. Their passion and dedication have drawn support from Patagonia and celebrities like Bob Barker, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, who have donated clothing, vehicles and computer equipment.

With dark clouds gathering overhead, five of us, including a newly-arrived volunteer from Santa Cruz, CA, went out on patrol, our driver adroitly steering the Subaru around deep ruts of Forest Service roads. We encountered a small herd of buffalo cows and calves who’d wandered back outside park boundaries and probably faced hazing the next day. The DOL had been free to round up buffalo on private land despite homeowners’ wishes, until the governor issued a directive this spring that prohibited such activity without permission.  (For more information, click here.)

We took a stack of BFC newsletters and spent the rest of our Yellowstone stay distributing them to fellow campers and visitors, doing our small part toward telling the tale of the buffalo.

Other iconic wildlife face an uncertain future. The grizzly population is up, and the Wyoming governor has prevailed on legislators to delist the bear from protected status.  Wolves were delisted by the federal government in 2011. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming all encourage the hunting of once-protected wolves who stray beyond park boundaries. Often they are the collared wolves that have been providing biologists insight into the ways of their clan. Hunt limits have increased.

 Indeed the glory days of the wolves, reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, are past, their population down 50% since the days when we first witnessed the famed Druid pack of Lamar Valley. Hunting, disease and decreasing prey are all at fault and ranchers play a highly vocal role.  Public lands that belong to us all provide cheap livestock feed for those who raise domestic animals. Economics takes priority over the creatures that call the wild lands home. We feel fortunate to be viewing these animals while we can.

Last of the Yellowstone photos:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115498465022511925235/albums/6024533520930525105

  

Moments in Yellowstone

-- A newborn pronghorn antelope struggles to its feet to stand briefly at its mother’s side before crumpling back into the grey sage, hidden from sight. Seeming to ignore her offspring, the mother moves away to distract potential predators, but returns at full gallop when a raven swoops by to investigate the calf.

-- Dark clouds over the mountains portend coming rain as we stand on a hill above the sweeping Lamar Valley, hundreds of buffalo and their calves dotting a valley turned golden with dandelions, an American version of the Serengeti. The dark adults rest with legs folded under them, their humps appearing as giant boulders, while the calves lie on their sides, sturdy red legs stretched out in the afternoon sun. I inhale their warm, sweet, animal scent.

--Middle-of-the-night tremors shake our campground in seismically active Norris, setting unseen wolves in nearby forests to howling.

-- Joining 40 other spectators, I stand in stinging hail in Swan Valley, futilely attempting to capture photos of a mother grizzly and two cubs in high sage through a fogged lens. I give up when the hail increases to olive size, shredding two photographers’ umbrellas and driving all but the most dedicated to the shelter of their vehicles.

--A mountain bluebird nest occupies a hole in the tree across from our campsite, the parents popping in and out to feed chirping nestlings and the cerulean blue male keeping watch. A little squirrel who blunders onto a neighboring tree trunk is swiftly chased off the tree and far down the road by a flash of brilliant blue.

--Black bears graze like cattle in lush spring grass, tearing up giant clumps with obvious relish. A young bear near Phantom Lake draws the usual squadron of onlookers, who chatter excitedly at his proximity to the road. A barrage of shutters clicks each time a bear’s head is raised, since much of the time, like resting bison, they’re indistinguishable from boulders, heads lowered and spending up to 20 hours a day eating.

We’ve seen a number of black bears at fairly close range -- a sow with three cubs, solitary blacks and a gorgeous cinnamon – and one large grizzly boar who moved much too close to the road, causing the rookie ranger’s voice to crack with anxiety as he ordered us all into our cars.

Black bears are forest dwellers, tiny cubs scampering up tree trunks with ease, while the long claws of grizzlies are made for digging, not gripping bark, and these bears tend to appear in open spaces, usually at a distance.

--We spot two just-born elk calves our last day, one born into the resident herd at Mammoth, where elk lounge on lawns outside the historic military residences. We saw the Mammoth mother moments before she went off into the sage to give birth. The new calf entered the world while we were watching a great horned owl mother feed her two remaining nestlings and coax them from their nest, the third sibling watching intently from a nearby tree.

--As we prepared to move on, the new elk mother appeared with her long-legged calf, sporting Bambi spots for camouflage and blinking huge brown eyes in the bright spring sun. Meanwhile in Swan Valley, a grizzly sow fed her cubs the remains of a stillborn elk calf. And In Lamar, a young wolf learned to hunt by capturing a newly-born pronghorn.

The snow melts, buffalo shed their winter wool and wildflowers emerge from the mud in this season of beginnings and endings. The young that survive grow stronger. 

Photos:

https://plus.google.com/photos/103909884233134954214/albums/6023354059463841969

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Teton Spring 2014

Snow! The Tetons were December-white in May as we approached Jackson Hole, while warm temperatures and residents in shorts said July – for once, the perfect weather for the Wild West parade and Beer Fest.  Under persistent high-altitude sunlight, we watch the snow retreating further up the mountains each day, feeding muddy, swollen rivers that ignore their banks, creating lakes where scrawny sage grows.

And in this extraordinary springscape, the first wildlife appeared as soon as we hit the county line: two scrawny young bighorn sheep, showing the deprivations of winter. Then, a moose on the Gros Ventre river near our campground, following by welcome news of newborn-calves and a rebounding population. Pronghorn antelope and elk mingle on the meadows with our beloved bison, who marked our first day in camp by meandering through as we drank our morning coffee. The behemoths are molting the heavy winter coats that allow them to survive the brutal cold of winter, rubbing on trees (and the edge of the neighboring picnic table) to lose the woolly tatters. A lone bull visited at cocktail time, but the bulk of the herd roams the open spaces of Antelope Flats, redheaded calves keeping up with the herd as they cross roads at will.

A massive array of vehicles near Jackson Lake marked our first bear sighting on day 3: the famous Grizzly 399 and her yearling cubs. A third cub had been lost over the winter, but this much-photographed sow is a highly experienced mother at age 18, and the remaining cubs looked healthy and strong. Unfortunately for us, they remained mostly in the brush, offering only the occasional tantalizing glimpse, but no photo opps for my amateur camera.

Jackson is an affluent town with residents like Dick Cheney and Harrison Ford, but its public face is young, friendly and super-fit. It’s an incongruous island of tree-huggers who shop organic in a state whose residents disdain climate change and hunt the wolves visitors travel thousands of miles to see. We break up our own wildlife hunts with visits to the history museum and Pearl Street Market for grass-fed local rib-eyes and the Snake River Brew pub for happy hour ales and a two-foot loaf of Zonker Porter bread. What other store carries Perigord truffles and bear spray belts?

Europeans and, recently Asians, flock to this area to enjoy the incomparable scenery and wildlife. We’ve had some fun neighbors at the campground, arriving in psychedelically-painted campers from a New Zealand-based rental company catering to young travelers. The first couple were Aussies who worked at wildlife rescue centers and we stayed up past midnight learning about the secret life of wombats and Tasmanian devils. Last night it was two young Brits from Bristol, who brought us cookies in thanks for a pot of boiling water to make tea after their stove failed.

Our best bear sighting happened yesterday, when we parked at a grouping of cars – the best way to know a bear is near – to see Grizzly 399 and her cubs at Pilgrim Creek. Amid an excited babble of Italian and German, and the enormous lenses and tripods of the Americans, we watched the cubs play in a snow bank and all three bears take to the water, where they wrestled and grunted in obvious enjoyment. The show lasted over an hour, with rangers directing traffic and attempting – not always successfully – to keep visitors at a safe distance. (Visitor safety is a challenge: In another scenario today, two Frenchmen standing five feet from a bull moose at the Snake River said they were unafraid because the animal “had a kind face.”)

The day’s local newspaper brought news that the Wyoming governor wants to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list, a move that could threaten not only 399 and her daughter 160 – who has her own cub this year – but the booming local tourist industry based on viewing wildlife. 

This morning brought pups at play, when we viewed a coyote den under an historic cabin on Mormon Row. One by one, the 9 pups emerged blinking into the sunlight; then the mother burst from the den to go off and hunt, leaving me with a headless photo and the pups to tumble and explore in the warm morning sun.

On the way home we passed the pronghorn we call “Scar,” a mature male who’d obviously encountered predators or perhaps stronger rivals, and emerged not unscathed, but alive and still strong. A survivor grazing this morning in a meadow of wildflowers.
Pictures here:  https://plus.google.com/photos/103909884233134954214/albums/6018920186183846833

Washington: Lighthouses to Lichen

First stop was the coast: lighthouses and bobbing boats and foggy fishing harbors and ferries to nearby islands. The water world of Washington is magnificent and bountiful. We bought fresh albacore off a boat in Westport and Quilcene oysters for dinner that night. In the National Historic Register town of Port Townsend, we camped at the water's edge, watching ferries and yachts ply the calm waters just outside our door.
One foggy morning, we got an early low-tide start on a trek to the distant Dungeness lighthouse, perched at the tip of a curving spit of sand on the invisible horizon. It was my just-turning-70 right of passage and a 12-mile test of my often problematic knees.
Stopping along the way to photograph hot pink seaweed, darting shore birds and giant driftwood, we took our time, then spent an hour exploring the historic lighthouse and keeper's home, chatting with the friendly volunteers who manned the site.
The sea didn't wait for us. As the incoming tide covered ever more of the hard-packed sand we'd come out on, the hike back to camp became a real slog through soft sand, rocks and kelp. There's only one way in and out and we were grateful not to be those hikers who've been caught on extreme high tides, forced to cover the miles crawling atop stacked driftwood at the high tide mark.
The sun shone on the sea stacks in the picturesque town of La Push, where we bought smoked salmon from a young Makah fisherman who sold it at his backdoor in the tribal subdivision as a blond nameless cat wrapped herself around our ankles. Earlier, we'd visited the Makah natural history museum, an incredible display of native artifacts buried under a coastal mudslide and unearthed mostly intact, a Pacific northwest version of Pompeii.
The fog rolled in like meringue, nourishing the trees and undergrowth and thick emerald mosses. A visit to a big cedar felt like a visit to the Hobbit world, the giant's gnarled and twisted roots and sister trees making a cozy home for a forest elf. Heading to yet an even bigger tree -- the reputed largest cedar in the world -- we were stunned at the clear-cut hillsides, deforested of all life and a jarring contrast to the lush green stillness of the living forest.
A drive over bumpy logging roads took us to the "biggest cedar," spared by loggers who were impressed by its massive size. Saw marks at the base of this 178-foot specimen indicated it was saved at the last minute. But now, deprived of the communal shelter of neighboring trees, this monarch stood exposed to the elements, without bark and showing little green at the top -- a gray ghost nearing the end of its life.
A herd of Roosevelt elk raised ears in alarm before bolting into the forest as we headed toward the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park, one of planet's best examples of a temperate rainforest, receiving up to 14 feet of rain a year.  Moss grew thickly atop a phone booth at the entrance to this World Heritage site, an indication of things to come. Breathing in the cool, fragrant air, we hiked along the misty Hall of Mosses trail, enveloped in emerald stillness, feeling we should speak in whispers in the midst of such grandeur. If ever there was a place to become a tree-hugger, this was it.
iPhone photo gallery at:http://www.photoshow.com/watch/fr3Ka5zY

Keeping It Weird

We never realized just what an interesting place this is.
It’s illegal in Oregon to:
--Pump your own gas;
--Feed canned corn to fish;
--Strap a child seat occupied by a baby to the top of your car and drive down the highway.
Our "Secrets of Portlandia" walking tour guide vouches for these and other fascinating snippets of local trivia going back to the city’s earliest days.
Among the few explorers who arrived to this location in the 1800s, two in particular thought it a practical location for a town. One hailed from Portland, Maine; the other from Boston. Each wanted to name the new town after his East Coast home, but in the end, the Maine resident was more persuasive.
The site of the new city was heavily wooded, save for a clearing that is now Pioneer Square. Cutting down massive trees to build a city was one thing; but removing the stumps a far more difficult task, so city founders left them rooted in place, giving rise to the name "Stumptown," a nickname that endures today.
Early Portland was a rough-and-ready place where men outnumbered women six to one. When two brave women answered a call for teachers at the newly-built school, they were greeted by dozens of randy lumberjacks running eagerly toward their ship, a sight that drove the terrified women back onboard, never to re-emerge.
Portland today is a young city, heavily pierced and tattooed, welcoming hair of all hues and residents of all genders. Residents are unfailingly cheerful, even chipper, with servers and shop clerks greeting customers like friends.
Women own 50% of the businesses and there is a feminist bookstore where parents can purchase fairy tales rewritten so the princess is the heroine who comes to the rescue. Seniors can ride every form of public transit all day for $2 with a ticket stamped "honored citizen." Dogs are highly respected beings, with their own block parties, Halloween bash and Santa Paws party.
The city boasts both the nation’s largest city park – Forest Park at 5,000 acres – and the world’s smallest: tiny Leprechaun Park in the middle of a street, no larger than the lid of a garbage can. Unlike other cities which post "Keep Out" signs, Portland’s been known to design public fountains to accommodate both children and adults who might wish to take a dip on a hot summer day.
The massive statue of Portlandia holding her trident -- a copper repousse statue second in size only to the Statue of Liberty -- is not a city landmark, but instead is barely visible and scarcely known to most city residents. The sculptor who created it wants to keep it that way.
Portland was the first city in the U.S. to draft a climate change action plan, reducing its carbon footprint by 12% during the last two decades, a period when the nation’s rose by the same percentage. Solar-powered parking meters and compacting trash cans are found on city streets, and electric car charging stations are provided free of charge.
The city is green in all respects, with tree-lined streets, verdant parks and shady neighborhoods of shingled bungalows. Farmer’s markets are well-established, organic produce plentiful. Twenty-five percent of commuters ride bikes to work, a figure expected to climb to 33%. And yet, a Californian is struck by the number of people who smoke cigarettes.
Happy hour is revered, sometimes starting as early as 2 p.m. and offering foods such as truffle fries and water buffalo burgers for $4 and artisan cocktails with intriguing ingredients like cucumber-infused gin and smoked ice cubes for $5. Residents of Portland have long enjoyed imbibing and early pubs had floating bars to allow regulars to paddle by for a pint when the mighty Columbia river flooded the streets.
And beer? Portland is second only to Belgium and the Czech Republic in the number of micro-breweries relative to the population. My favorite brew was Mcmenamins Pomona’s Blush, a fruity ale flavored with 126 pounds of apricots. One carbon-neutral brewery has a bike bar with parking for 60 bicycles.
Quirky Portland is deemed such a cool city that its population has mushroomed like a northwest forest after the first autumn rain. Jobs, however, have not kept pace and the city’s unemployment rate is second only to Detroit’s. So strong is its siren song that college graduates move to Portland to retire at the age of 23.
Lack of employment opportunities and a lively entrepreneurial spirit have fostered the proliferation of the city’s latest draw for food enthusiasts: the food carts. Miniscule and mobile, the popular food shacks have grown in number from 100 to over 700 during the economic recession of recent years. Situated in pods on the perimeter of parking lots where they pay monthly rent and are subject to unannounced health inspections, the carts operate in a multinational harmony that would be the envy of the UN: Egyptian shawarma abuts Czech schnitzel; Vietnamese pho is a neighbor to Mexican burritos. The food is delicious, fast and inexpensive, offering both entrepreneur and customer an affordable alternative to a bricks and mortar restaurant.
For their part, Portland’s restaurants increasingly attract big-name chefs from across the nation, making Stumptown an exciting foodie destination. Winemakers are moving in from the Willamette Valley to set up wineries downtown.
It was this entrepreneurial spirit that created one of the city’s quirkier attractions. Weary of working until 2 a.m. closing time each night, two local bartenders were drifting down the river in fat inner tubes – a popular summer pastime – and pondering a new profession. Noting its resemblance to the pastry, one of them looked at his inner tube and said, "That’s it! Doughnuts!"
Thus was born Voodoo Doughnuts, a wacky city institution that draws Food Network celebrity chefs and long lines of customers for such creations as maple-bacon bars, voodoo dolls filled with raspberry jelly "blood" and doughnuts shaped liked the nether regions of the male anatomy. With its bawdy slogans and off-the-wall creations, Voodoo captures the spirit of Portland and brings in $8 million a year.
Waiting in line for Voodoo, a visitor can glance across the street at a sign on the wall that says it all: Keep Portland Weird.
Portland photos are here: https://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/Portlandia?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLmL6MfwmeyVfQ&feat=directlink  
Click on first photo to initiate slide show.

Wild Kingdom

Our routine in Yellowstone is always the same: arise early, pack a lunch and hit the road. We’re off on the daily hunt, never knowing what we’ll see.
Terry compares it to fishing, and it’s the element of surprise, and serendipity, that keep it interesting. With over 2.2 million acres of heavily wooded territory ranging to nearly 9,000 feet in elevation, it’s a miracle that we humans, driving along the road that lassos the park in a figure 8, ever see anything at all.
The best clues to the views are the traffic jams with rangers that indicate trophy animals: wolves and bears. But a moose, uncommon in Yellowstone, created a jam, as do most any animals seen for the first time by newly-arrived visitors. On several occasions, we’ve been the first to spot a bear, quickly creating our own roadblock. The sightings we’re all here for are fleeting, and those who arrive even five minutes later may miss it all.
Two days ago, it was a bear jam prompted by a mating black bear pair, a big cinnamon male and a smaller black female. Earlier arrivals had seen a potential rival male amble into the scene of domestic bliss, where he was swiftly chased up a tree by the cinnamon, who swatted him with huge paws as he scrambled skyward.
Seemingly oblivious to the drama she inspired, the female wandered off to graze, while her conflicted mate tried to keep an eye on her and the treed rival as well. The rival shifted his position near the top of the tree, draping legs over limbs like a floppy stuffed animal, knowing he’d be there for a while.
In Lamar Valley, we watched a foolhardy young wolf attempt to take on a bison herd, repeatedly charging toward a little red calf, only to be repelled by a pair of large bulls. Alone and unschooled in the ways of hunting, the hungry black yearling showed remarkable persistence, giving us wolf-watchers a real show before ultimately abandoning the chase.
On a morning that began as sunny, we ascended the grade toward Dunraven Pass, watching the sky darkening from smoky gray to nearly black as we climbed. Rounding a curve, we came upon a lone bison, molting winter coat hanging in tatters from his sides, limping badly on an injured rear leg as he moved toward the summit.
To his left, the snow-covered hill was nearly vertical; on our side of the road was a sheer drop-off. The wind picked up and sleety rain pelted the windshield, while the bison lowered his head and continued his slow journey toward the top, facing traffic and following the white line at the edge of the road. There was no exit from the asphalt and it would be five miles before the terrain afforded any level spots at all.
Knowing this area to be thick with both grizzlies and wolves, I burst into tears. We stayed on the other side of the pass most of the day, and never saw the bison again.
Sometimes the sightings are of smaller animals: a nesting peregrine falcon tucked into a crevice of a cliff, a yellow-bellied marmot sunning on a rock, a raven in a tree with a ground squirrel.
We looked down on the stick nest of an osprey atop a rock above the river, while the bird oddly sat at the edge of the nest, gazing at two tan eggs. A bystander told us she’d seen the eggs dusted with snow days earlier. On our second visit, the osprey was attempting to incubate the eggs, fidgeting and chirping and leaving the nest for short periods of time. On the third day, the nest was unoccupied, eggs baking in the sun.
Among Yellowstone wolves, internecine warfare is diminishing their numbers. The famed Druid pack was lost three years ago, when the pups died of mange and adults were killed or dispersed. A new group began forming in Lamar last year and now is an official pack, with a mating alpha pair and a litter of pups. But the Mollies are changing the landscape, killing most of the neighboring Agate pack and threatening the newly-formed Lamars.
A loose grouping of a dozen or more mostly yearling wolves, the Mollies have no alpha pair and, lacking leadership, roam the area like a rogue teenage gang, killing at will. Last week their victim was a handsome five-year-old Agate male loved by wolf watchers, who’d named him Big Blaze for his striking markings.
None of which concerns the locals. From a Montana great-grandmother to the mild-mannered manager of a park cafeteria, it seems everyone we talk to who lives in the vicinity of Yellowstone wants the wolves gone, blaming them for the decrease in elk, which now number 4,500 in the region.
While biologists acknowledge wolf predation, they also cite recent droughts, which severely decreased forage, and increased hunting as factors in reduced elk numbers. But hunting is big in this neck of the woods and locals want elk bountiful so they can kill them themselves.
As always, humans tip the balance of nature. Wolves were exterminated in the early 20th century and the elk population exploded beyond the region’s ability to feed it. Wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and a natural balance returned, benefiting even local trout. As streamside vegetation returned, so did the insects which feed the trout.
Everything’s got to eat. Grizzlies take many elk calves. Everything eats ground squirrels, from grizzlies to coyotes, foxes, weasels, badgers and birds of prey, which keeps their staggering numbers under control. Otters eat the protected cutthroat trout, but so do the big introduced lake trout, which the Park Service is trying to control. And so it goes.
And we humans come from all parts of the planet to watch this diorama unfold, to know that here, at least in Yellowstone, mostly removed from cell service and wifi, a place exists that is truly wild.
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https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=happytwo.mcwilliams&target=ALBUM&id=5750392329709065425&authkey=Gv1sRgCKjT6fm66e2UkAE&feat=email
and, for part 2:
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Never the same

Each visit to the Grand Tetons is unique. On this one we were introducing two sets of California friends to the area we love so much. They’d read my blogs and seen pictures of the scenery and wildlife and said they’d like to join us. We were delighted.
There are practically no animals this year.
It’s snowed nearly every day, except for a few hours of sunshine at Wild West days that must mean the Jackson Chamber of Commerce has a direct line to the weather gods. Most days the mountains aren’t visible, so you wouldn’t even know you’re in one of the most visually spectacular places in the country.
We’re having a great time.
Our camp hosts tell us 80-degree weather in April drove most of the wildlife to the upper meadows near Yellowstone. Our beloved bison were missing from Antelope Flats. Still, we managed an exciting spotting of a moose in the willows on the Gros Ventre river, white-rumped elk in a frosty meadow, a few skittish pronghorn antelope and mostly faraway bison, dots in the distance.
At the peak of spring, we’ve seen no young of any kind, except for six goslings waddling behind behind their parent across the highway near the visitor center and squealing kids in cowboy hats grabbing candy tossed from floats in Saturday’s Wild West parade.
But a chorus of robins greets first light, the beers were stellar at the brewfest, and who can complain about the truffle fries with a view at the Jackson Lake Lodge? Each evening has brought cozy shared meals with bountiful wine and camping camaraderie, and we all seem well-adapted to adapting.
When we awoke to four inches of snow on the morning of our planned breakfast cookout on the Snake River, we all sat down to homemade hash, eggs, bacon and a steaming pot of grits in Happy, watching fat snowflakes swirl past the window.
Thus fortified and ready for adventure, we packed up bubbly and orange juice after breakfast, for frosty mimosas on the banks of the snowmelt-swollen river.
Terry built a campfire in driving snow on our last evening before we left for Yellowstone, determined to make Dutch oven potatoes with onions and bacon. The snow morphed from flakes to pellets to sleet and back again, while the pork loin sizzled on a grill protected by our awning.
Campground manager Shannon, who’s become a friend over the years, joined us for dinner and we happily learned Happy can accommodate at least 7 for dining.
As conversation and wine flowed, darkness began to close in and Terry yelled “Look!” Out of the shadows and within yards of our big view window, two bison bulls appeared, strolling by in a fitting farewell to Gros Ventre campground.
We’re happy campers.
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