Sunday, September 23, 2007
OK, I'll supply the photos from the August vacation, and let my son Matt supply the text. Looks like that will come in five or so emails, from time to time, that I will post here. The first one came today:
We had hiked barely a mile when Roy came nose-to-nose with his first bison.
Our family – Paola and me, Roy and Alice, and my dad -- were walking
single-file high into the back-country meadows of Yellowstone National Park. Roy was
marching point, came around a corner and stopped dead. The bison grunted. We stood
close enough to see its nostrils twitch.
Bull bisons do charge. A few days earlier, back in the relative civilization of the Bridge Bay camping area, a sign on a bathroom wall informed readers that bisons “have gored visitors” and will charge “without apparent provocation.” It bears emphasizing here that bisons are big. This one stood many hands taller than a horse and weighed hundreds of pounds more. His powerful rear legs, tight hips, massive shoulders and big round head gave him the exaggerated masculinity of a football player, while his curly beard and the shaggy mane flowing carelessly over one flank lent him the cuddly but fearsome look of a motorcycle outlaw.
Roy did everything right. He stood still and raised a hand to stop the rest of
us. The bison snorted but then raised a back hoof to scratch his chin, which
didn’t betray much interest in running us through. We detoured 25 yards around
him, snapped some pictures and continued our hike toward Crystal Lake as dark
thunderclouds blew toward us from the northern horizon.
This summer brought our first camping holiday since the kids became old enough
to carry their weight. We bought Alice and Roy, who are nine and twelve,
sturdy little backpacks and made them tote their own sleeping bags, bedrolls, and
canteens. They washed dishes and filtered our drinking water through a pump. We
taught them to yell and clap their hands to ward off predators. When the food
ran low we helped them survive on pine sap and grubs. Okay, we didn’t go that
far, but this summer was without doubt our most extreme outdoor experience to
date as we set out east from Seattle on our own little reverse Northwest Passage.
We camped, trekked and climbed in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In particular,
we spent three weeks in two American wonders, Glacier and Yellowstone National
Parks. Glacier, which borders Canada, is known as the “Crown of the
Continent.” It straddles the continental divide, meaning two raindrops could fall next
to each other and one would flow east through the Mississippi and into the Gulf
of Mexico while the other would flow west through the Columbia and into the
Pacific. The park is called Glacier not because it has glaciers, although it
does, but because its mountains were carved by glaciers. The river valleys there
dead-end in colossal box canyons.
America’s oldest national park, Yellowstone, is most famous for its geysers and mudpots, including Old Faithful, which visitors quickly learn to call “hydrothermal features.” Before the 1980s, Yellowstone was known for grizzly bears that lined the roads begging for candy wrappers and rooted through the garbage bins behind the Yellowstone Lodge. So many people gatheredto watch these scavenger bears that at one point rangers even built grandstands above the lodge’s rubbish pile and charged admission. The park’s successful don’t-feed-the-bears campaign has since made the bears wary of 
humans, a process called
“de-habituation.” After a few weeks in the parks, you start talking like a
biologist.
As usual, I did most of the holiday planning. This has become something of an albatross to me. The smooth and well-planned vacations we’ve enjoyed in America over the past ten years have thrown into relief my lack of planning in areas like, say, personal finance and home ownership. Our holidays have become like the great leap of Neil Armstrong, whose maiden step onto the moon became the counterp
oint to every human failing ever since. (Can put man on moon / Can’t make crumb-free Twinkie.)
Fortunately, this year I ditched the albatross by messing up right at the
beginning. We sent the kid to summer camp on Puget Sound for two weeks before leaving on our camping trip, and I wrote down the wrong date to pick up them up. The camp director called after all the other kids were gone and Paola and I had to jump into my brother-in-law’s car in Seattle and race for three hours to pick them up. That was a fun drive; Paola was very understanding. The valuable lesson: blow something important early in a trip to make all other plans look efficient by comparison. Neil Armstrong might be a happier man today if he’d hit the moon face first.
Our family – Paola and me, Roy and Alice, and my dad -- were walking
single-file high into the back-country meadows of Yellowstone National Park. Roy was
marching point, came around a corner and stopped dead. The bison grunted. We stood
close enough to see its nostrils twitch.
Bull bisons do charge. A few days earlier, back in the relative civilization of the Bridge Bay camping area, a sign on a bathroom wall informed readers that bisons “have gored visitors” and will charge “without apparent provocation.” It bears emphasizing here that bisons are big. This one stood many hands taller than a horse and weighed hundreds of pounds more. His powerful rear legs, tight hips, massive shoulders and big round head gave him the exaggerated masculinity of a football player, while his curly beard and the shaggy mane flowing carelessly over one flank lent him the cuddly but fearsome look of a motorcycle outlaw.Roy did everything right. He stood still and raised a hand to stop the rest of
us. The bison snorted but then raised a back hoof to scratch his chin, which
didn’t betray much interest in running us through. We detoured 25 yards around
him, snapped some pictures and continued our hike toward Crystal Lake as dark
thunderclouds blew toward us from the northern horizon.
This summer brought our first camping holiday since the kids became old enough
to carry their weight. We bought Alice and Roy, who are nine and twelve,
sturdy little backpacks and made them tote their own sleeping bags, bedrolls, and
canteens. They washed dishes and filtered our drinking water through a pump. We
taught them to yell and clap their hands to ward off predators. When the food
ran low we helped them survive on pine sap and grubs. Okay, we didn’t go that
far, but this summer was without doubt our most extreme outdoor experience to
date as we set out east from Seattle on our own little reverse Northwest Passage.
We camped, trekked and climbed in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In particular,
we spent three weeks in two American wonders, Glacier and Yellowstone National
Parks. Glacier, which borders Canada, is known as the “Crown of the
Continent.” It straddles the continental divide, meaning two raindrops could fall next
to each other and one would flow east through the Mississippi and into the Gulf
of Mexico while the other would flow west through the Columbia and into the
Pacific. The park is called Glacier not because it has glaciers, although it
does, but because its mountains were carved by glaciers. The river valleys there
dead-end in colossal box canyons.
America’s oldest national park, Yellowstone, is most famous for its geysers and mudpots, including Old Faithful, which visitors quickly learn to call “hydrothermal features.” Before the 1980s, Yellowstone was known for grizzly bears that lined the roads begging for candy wrappers and rooted through the garbage bins behind the Yellowstone Lodge. So many people gatheredto watch these scavenger bears that at one point rangers even built grandstands above the lodge’s rubbish pile and charged admission. The park’s successful don’t-feed-the-bears campaign has since made the bears wary of 
humans, a process called“de-habituation.” After a few weeks in the parks, you start talking like a
biologist.
As usual, I did most of the holiday planning. This has become something of an albatross to me. The smooth and well-planned vacations we’ve enjoyed in America over the past ten years have thrown into relief my lack of planning in areas like, say, personal finance and home ownership. Our holidays have become like the great leap of Neil Armstrong, whose maiden step onto the moon became the counterp
oint to every human failing ever since. (Can put man on moon / Can’t make crumb-free Twinkie.)Fortunately, this year I ditched the albatross by messing up right at the
beginning. We sent the kid to summer camp on Puget Sound for two weeks before leaving on our camping trip, and I wrote down the wrong date to pick up them up. The camp director called after all the other kids were gone and Paola and I had to jump into my brother-in-law’s car in Seattle and race for three hours to pick them up. That was a fun drive; Paola was very understanding. The valuable lesson: blow something important early in a trip to make all other plans look efficient by comparison. Neil Armstrong might be a happier man today if he’d hit the moon face first.
