September 6, 2012

WE LEFT CANYON VILLAGE TODAY and headed to Grant Village, another village which is not a village. In Yellowstone, the word “village” refers to a place which has lodging, a ranger station, a learning center, a general store, a restaurant, a post office, a gift shop and a campground. Our forty mile drive to Grant Village was mainly through forests of Lodgepole Pines, the main tree in Yellowstone. Evident all along the road during our drive were the results of the forest fires of 1988. There are fires in Yellowstone every year, but the fires of 1988 were especially destructive Nearly 1/3 of the park burned, and alarmist reporters reported that Yellowstone was completely destroyed and would not recover for a hundred years. Park naturalists futilely attempted to explain that the fires were part of nature’s way of destroying old and sick trees, and that the park would rebound within a few years. Surprisingly, very few animals perished in the fires. Unlike movies like Bambi where wide-eyed and panicked animals fled from a fire, the animals in Yellowstone simply moved out of the way. We were able to see today that the naturalists were correct in their predictions that the fires would release billions of seeds from the pine cones on the Lodge Pole Pines; and those seeds would lead to new growth. On our drive, we saw numerous places where new growth trees and flowers were interspersed among the burned trees.

We are staying near Lake Yellowstone, a forty mile long, extremely clear lake. Its maximum depth is over 240 feet, but its average depth is around 140 feet. Good for fishing, but not for swimming; its surface temperature is around 50 degrees.

We thought we would kill some time until check in time at our lodge by listening to another ranger presentation. To date, the ranger presentations we have attended on our trip have been extremely well done. We encountered our first poor presentation today. Our ranger, actually a part time seasonal ranger, billed his talk as an introduction to the habits of the local elks. He appeared to know his subject, but somehow had gotten the idea that his comments would be more effective if he hopped around holding antlers to his head while pretending to engage in elk conversations. He lost me at the first hop. Before we attended a scheduled ranger presentation in the evening, Carole asked if "the hopper" would be giving that presentation.

Like every place in Yellowstone, almost everything you can buy is from Xanatera, a company who has somehow obtained a monopoly in most of the federal parks.  In the fashion of all monopolies, it gouges the captive audience in the park. Teddy Roosevelt must be spinning in his grave. One clerk told us privately that the usual markup in the gift store is around 40%. Aware of our mutual penchant to buy a large number of books when we travel, Carole figured out a way to deal with this monopoly. She took down the names of the books we found interesting, and will order them from amazon.com. When I found a copy of Burton Harris' classic biography of John Colter in the gift shop, I ended up paying Xanatera’s exorbitant price for it. In some gift shops, the clerks provide a classic example of chutzuh by cheerfully asking if you would like to make a donation to the park.

After we learned that the Mad Hopper was not going to handle the evening ranger talk, we decided to take in the talk - a presentation on the animals in the park. It was well done.