Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park Read Online Free PDF Page B

obviously the boss bear in the neighborhood. No one challenged him for his meat, even though dozens of lesser bears must have smelled the carcass. Our griz ate for hours: he ate until his stomach became visibly distended. At about noon, in the heat of the day, he climbed into the empty grave, which must have been cooler, and took a nap. All I could see of him was his silly-looking bear-nose pointing up at the sky and a great curve of distended bear-belly projecting out of the hole.
    Because I’d spent an entirely sleepless night, slumber beckoned. It was almost seductive. I could feel my eyelids flicker. After an hour of watching the bear sleep, I myself—this is hard to admit—I myself fell asleep no more than 200 yards from a grizzly bear.
    I told my new friends about this incident as if it were a joke. It was supposed to be a funny story, but the young couple did not laugh. Rather they regarded me in a silent and suspicious manner. I am not sure whether they thought I was a moron or a liar. In any case, we continued on, trudging along silently.
    Relatively few people visit Monument Geyser Basin, but not, I think, because of all the signs warning of bears. There are many such signs located in dozens of “bear frequenting” areas in the park. No, the reason you can often have Monument Geyser Basin to yourself is because it is a stiff uphill climb, rising 640 feet in about half a mile. People would rather be mauled by a bear that take a stiff forty-five-minute uphill hike, or so it would seem.
    The first half-mile or so, before the trail turns uphill, we all looked out into Gibbon Meadows, where the deer and the antelope play. Actually, I’ve never seen an antelope in Gibbon Meadows and doubt they exist there. The antelope is the fastest animal in North America: they’ve been clocked at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. They naturally prefer open fields and meadows—in such places they can see for miles and simply outrun any approaching predator.
    What probably limited the antelope in the area is that this meadow of the Gibbon River, like the Hayden Valley, is full of little hillocks of marshy ground. It’s a bad track for a fast antelope. These speed demons can’t put the pedal to the metal on ground that quivers like jelly under the foot. Or more properly, under the hoof.
    The fact is, at Gibbon Meadows, hikers who are not busy encountering bears are more likely to see herds of elk and bison. Sometime there are moose. Late in the day sandhill cranes can often be heard making their eerie “loon on amphetamines” call. It sounds a bit like ululations of Arab women at war, that odd thing they do with their tongues.
    This is what I especially like about Yellowstone: the conjunction of meadow and mountain. It is a place where wildlife congregates. Part of the reason Yellowstone is the Serengeti Plain of North America is that all the creatures of the plain and the mountain converge in this landscape of marvels, a wonderland originally preserved solely for its thermal features. Back in 1872 no one knew that wildlife itself would eventually become so scarce that some folks would value it even more highly than all the thermal features contained in the park.
    The couple and I walked along the trail to Monument Geyser Basin, which moves parallel to the immense meadow for half a mile or so. Nearby fumaroles howled and flushed, belching out their distinctive villainous odor. We turned left and began the uphill grade that led to a long narrow basin filled with fumaroles and bubbling thermal ponds. The fires of 1988 had been particularly fierce near the basin, and whole forests of standing dead trees, either charred black or weathered gray, leaned against one another at odd angles.
    The eponymous Monument Geyser, which looks a bit like a Thermos bottle and is often called Thermal Bottle Geyser, is ten feet high. The cone of the geyser was formed from silica, rock dissolved in the molten bowels below Yellowstone, and then