Yellowstone National Park - You can't walk 20 steps in Yellowstone without seeing the warning: “Be Bear Aware.”
There are other signs instructing you to never hike alone or even in a pair but always with a least three people in the hiking party. You must make noise, such as by clapping or singing.
You must always carry bear spray and know how to use it. Bear spray is sold with a holster, for the Wyatt Earp quick-draw on the charging bear.
Except this is all absurd. For starters, three is not a natural human grouping. Two is a natural human grouping. Maybe you could persuade a child to be the third in your party, but I'm not sure how that makes sense in Grizzly Country. Unless the child was a kind of designated offering to the monster.
Bear spray costs $45 (about R500) in the Fishing Creek General Store. I'd rather die. The sign says no refunds. You have to wonder how many dutifully purchased, never-used cans of bear spray fly every summer out of Jackson or Bozeman, eventually reaching Atlanta, Boston, London, Tokyo and other locales where the bear attack rates remain historically low.
The problem with clapping and making noise is that this takes some of the serenity out of the hike. One feels self-consciously human and not of-the-woods. Experts suggest shouting “Hey, bear!” but, again, one doesn't imagine Daniel Boone (who once carved “D. Boone Cilled a Bar” on a tree) saying this.
Also, if you're making a racket it's difficult to keep your ears carefully attuned to the telltale snapping of twigs that precede the bear attack. One day I dared to make a short hike on a welltraveled path through the woods near Yellowstone Falls. In fact the path was paved, just to give you a sense of how not “backcountry” it was. Still, I was alone, without spray, armed only with my smartphone, from which I blasted the Allman Brothers in the hope that this would dissuade a bear attack. I did some clapping too, and singing, and was trying to get completely comfortable with my little trek through the woods when suddenly the wilderness made a noise, what can only be described as a high-pitched chirping.
I jumped so violently I nearly reached escape velocity and went into orbit as a human satellite of the Earth. I'm surprised my startle reflex did not catch my clothes on fire.
It was, of course, a fearsome chipmunk.
Back at the cabin, I was tempted to tell my wife, “I survived the chipmunk attack.”
The vacation remained pitched to that very modest level of adventure. Mostly we were Beer Aware.
The window seat in the Old Faithful Lodge is a fine place to watch the eruption. True fact: One day, two bison emerged right before the eruption, seemed to strike a pose in front of the geyser, then went back to the woods right afterward. On staff??
But I did see a grizzly up close. One morning right after dawn in the Hayden Valley I went looking for wildlife and saw a scrum of tourists with cameras, collectively gazing into the wide channel of the Yellowstone River. I sauntered up and asked what the fuss was about. Bear, someone said. Grizzly. Sure enough, there it was: a tiny dark shape in the distance, rooting around in the sand close to the water.
Then it started coming our way.
The grizzly reached the bottom of the hill. One could now hear murmuring among the tourists. It was still several hundred yards distant, but it was decidedly still on the move - toward us.
I surveyed the other people on the hill. You know the old joke about not needing to outrun a bear? Yep, I'm good: Definitely lots of others here whom I can outrun. (Pro tip: Go to Yellowstone after Sept. 1 when the kids are back in school and you'll be surrounded primarily by retirees, also known as bear chow.)
Dang if the bear didn't walk right up the hill and scatter everyone.
“Don't run!” a professional photographer shouted as everyone ran.
I swear, if you look closely, there's a grizzly bear coming up that hill. My phone suddenly ran out of storage right when the bear “attacked.”
I found a spot next to a pickup truck and prepared to bound into the back of it, reasoning that bears don't like pickups. (Have you ever seen a bear in a pickup?) The bear, a little over 100 yards away, walked right between two cars parked along the road and crossed to the other side to graze and grub in the meadow beyond for the next few hours. You always hear that bears shy away from humans, but this one seemed to disregard us entirely, as though we were invisible.
Had this bear become acclimated to tourists? The skeptical visitor to Yellowstone understands that nothing is purely natural here. All those bison? Come on. The place has a ridiculous number of them and apparently they breed like rabbits (of which I saw none; the Yellowstone rabbits probably breed like cows). And there are elk that loiter on the lawns of the park buildings at Mammoth, as if picnicking. It feels a little zoo-ish.
Amid much controversy, park officials reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, a bureaucratic attempt to restore the ecosystem to something more like its “natural” state. But that's a bit like reassembling an egg that has dropped on the kitchen floor.
Early one evening, my wife and I raced down a boardwalk in the Upper Geyser Basin to catch the eruption of the Riverside Geyser. We wound up walking back to the Old Faithful Inn in the dark. Suddenly, just ahead, something grunted. It was a bison. No, two. They were right next to the path, about 100 feet away. We considered going down a different, woodsier, even darker path, which would have been a mistake, as the two giant animals moments later decided to crash through the brush and across what would have been our escape route. It was all very exciting, but one guesses that the bison have learned to play dodgeball with tourists in the dark.
I'd argue that Yellowstone has three great virtues:
1. Wildlife run amok.
2. Hydrothermal features (also running amok). If you've never been, please understand: Old Faithful is just the tip of the fire-berg.
As for No. 3, no, it's not the scenery. There's awesome scenery all over the Rocky Mountains, and Yellowstone is arguably below average on that score. (For scenery we spent a couple of days in the Tetons.) The Yellowstone caldera explosion 640 000 years ago blew away the mountains in the core of the park. From the right vantage point (say, Mount Washburn), you can grasp that the park includes a giant crater nearly 40 miles across. The northern part of the park, outside the caldera boundary, has some spectacular (bison-filled) valleys, and I'm not sure there's a better swimming hole in America than the one on the Firehole River. But landscapes aren't the third virtue. Instead, it's this:
3. Old-fashionedness. This is one of the few tourist destinations in the country that hasn't been slathered in commercialism. There are gift shops, but you don't really go to Yellowstone to buy things. The place has a decidedly middle-class, unglitzy, 1950s-era feel to it. You can't even find a television. The guy at the coffee shop in the Old Faithful Lodge said people always ask him: “Is there a TV around here?” He says, “You gotta go to West Yellowstone for that.” Which is outside the park. One guy recently asked him: “Is there a KFC in here?” He answered, again, “You gotta go to West.”
The cellphone service is spotty at best. Over the course of six days I barely made a call. I told bosses: “I'm going to be in Yellowstone,” and they all seemed to grasp that this was akin to being on Mars.
It's not hype to say this: Yellowstone is its own separate world. The rules are different. It's a strange mix of wildlife, humanity and geology. There's no other place like it on Earth. It's our country's oldest national park, and they don't need to change a thing.
* Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk and on the Achenblog.
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