“How great to see a wolf in Yellowstone”

The park in winter offers the magic of wildlife and other creatures

January. Yellowstone National Park. Floating Island Lake.

Midwinter is simultaneously a very bad and very good time to visit our first national park. It’s bad because the cold and the snow restrict your activities. Most of the park hotels, restaurants, and other tourist accommodations are closed. Most of the park roads are closed. Snow coaches offer supervised, tourbus-like access to Old Faithful, but other major destinations such as the Lake and the Canyon are effectively off-limits.

The only open road, from Mammoth Hot Springs east across the northern part of the park, dead-ends at Cooke City. You can drive the road. But when you get out of the car—and if you’re enough of a national park aficionado to visit Yellowstone in the winter, you know that you must get out of the car—what do you do? The snow is too deep to wander aimlessly. The air is too cold, conditions too dangerous, to go more than a few yards without extensive preparation. Many people rightly enjoy snowshoeing or cross-country skiing, but they have to bring a lot of gear a long distance to see only a tiny sliver of the park.

Nevertheless, here I was, on a January afternoon several years ago, driving that road. I’d been doing some research at the park’s archives in Gardiner, Montana, just north of Mammoth. I hadn’t brought the equipment to get very far from the car. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to catch at least a glimpse of the great aspect of Yellowstone in winter: the way it belongs to the animals.

On a summer visit to Yellowstone, you’ll experience a bison-caused traffic jam. You may also see elk, moose, bear, or on rare occasions (and usually through binoculars) a wolf. The way to find them is to watch for cars pulled off to the side of the road—other people watching them. Indeed, one of the pleasures of summer wildlife-watching in Yellowstone is sharing the experience with strangers.

Midwinter, without crowds, I gain more intimacy with the wildlife. A herd of bison crosses the road in front of me, and I stop, roll down the window, and listen to their huffing. There are no other cars, no exhaust fumes, no impatient drivers. Of course my own vehicle does provide some mediation: a space I control, set off from the bison’s space. Safety. The car means that I am not truly alone with nature. But it does allow me the illusion that I share a certain solitude with the bison.

A few miles later: a hillside full of elk. Snowbanks on the side of the road mean that I can’t pull over. But the lack of traffic means that I can slow to a crawl in the middle of the road. I try to guess at the number of elk in view. Perhaps sixty? And just one of me.

Finally, at Floating Island Lake, a plowed pullout. I can stop the car and step outside. This lake is scenic in the way everything in Yellowstone is scenic: trees, grasses, hills, mountains, everything covered in snow. But it’s a small, shallow, fishless lake; really its most remarkable feature is that it’s right next to the road. Still, my eye is drawn to activity on the far shore. A small, brown, four-legged animal. Playful.

A sporty car with California plates pulls up next to mine. An attractive, well-dressed woman steps out. For a while we watch the creature together. It pounces in the snow. It is surely trying to catch small, hidden prey, but the pouncing is cute, like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. All is silent.

Yellowstone in winter. Even when we experience it as solitude, we bring our stories with us.

When I think back on that moment, I remember feeling the presence of the woman nearby. Even amid winter solitude, there’s something special about sharing wildlife encounters with others. Even strangers. At the time I was romantically unattached, and I briefly imagined this moment creating an emotional bond between the two of us; we might agree to meet later for a drink in Gardiner, and then…

She breaks the silence. “How great to see a wolf in Yellowstone.”

I respond that I suspect it’s a coyote. Wary of being the “Well, actually…” guy, I omit my reasoning (it’s small, it’s brown, it’s hunting alone after mouse-sized creatures rather than in a pack for bigger game). I’ll just offer an invitation to conversation—maybe she can convince me of her view. I once made this same mistake myself, wishing a coyote into a wolf. Then twenty minutes later I had an experience where no wishing was required. And when I think back on that moment, what I remember most is how I shared that emotion with my companion. The wildlife in Yellowstone is extraordinary, but as humans we are drawn to our own kind.

“I say it’s a wolf,” declares the woman at Floating Island Lake. She will not brook me throwing water on her bucket-list item. We have had the same wildlife-watching experience, yet because we arrive here with different stories, we experience this moment in different ways.

She has now seen a wolf in Yellowstone. She gets back into her car and leaves for civilization.

Discussion:

• I tell the story of wishing a coyote into a wolf in the Prologue to Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon. If you buy it from my page on bookshop.org, a local bookstore and I get a slight bonus from the referral.

• In the comments, I’m especially interested in your thoughts on how human backstories influence how we experience nature.