It is the 5th of May and a blizzard is raging in
the Gardiner Basin. And while the
accumulation of wet, quarter-sized snowflakes will complement our 75% Upper
Yellowstone Watershed snowpack, and yield great fecundity to the Yellowstone
River in the months to come, I am ready for a steady dose of sunshine, calm
winds, and predictable temperatures.
Being ready for something—hopeful, even—and actually
believing that your readiness will produce what you yearn for are two very
different things. Yellowstone is a place
where dreams are made and crushed in the same breath. The first week of May in the Yellowstone
ecosystem can deliver magic days filled with 70 degree temperatures, sunshine,
dancing bison calves and prowling grizzly bears; but it can also present a week’s
worth of temperatures struggling to breach 40 degrees, hovering instead around
the freezing point, with limited visibility—days that are more brutal than
magic.
There is perhaps no better month the entire year to view Ursus arctos horribilis (the grizzly
bear) than May, and when the winds are down and the weather stable, wildlife
viewing during this epic month can produce observations of a lifetime. At the same time, there is arguably no month
less predictable in its weather patterns than May, and what began as a long
anticipated journey to the world’s first national park can easily turn into a
barren and desolate sojourn to a harsh landscape.
Though there is no time of year that is entirely predictable
in Yellowstone—last July and August presented us with wet days and temperatures
barely reaching 50 degrees and nighttime temperatures below freezing—the
shoulder seasons (spring and fall) offer the most precarious journeys
imaginable. One never knows quite what
to expect when traveling to the extreme NW corner of Wyoming in search of
wildness. And while a journey to
Yellowstone during the fifth month of our calendar year is a risk of enormous
proportions, the audacity to gamble in the face of uncertainty can provide
courageous adventurers a glimpse into a wildland Mecca unknown by most.
You will have to forgive me for my seemingly dramatic prose
in previous paragraphs, but Yellowstone is a dramatic landscape that encourages
extravagant expressions. To illustrate
my point, let us venture to a boulder-lined bank on the Upper Yellowstone River,
where I wetted a line on our last mild afternoon, roughly nine days ago. I couldn’t have been happier. With comfortable temperatures and a slight
breeze at my back, the fish were eager to take my double rigged offering, which
consisted of a #8 olive Wooly Bugger and a #14 New Nymph (a local pattern tied
by a man we refer to as the “Hoover” for his fish catching prowess).
But all of this joy suddenly changed when what appeared to
be a harmless cloud hovering over the shoulder of Cinnabar Mountain brought
with it a gale force wind, which turned my relaxed and effortless casting into
a battle of heroic proportions. Even
though the fish continued to eat and rewarded me with a tight line, I no longer
felt at peace and instead felt that I had entered a war. The fish still provided beauty in the midst
of chaos, but the struggle overwhelmed the joy.
Even with my deep reverence for the finned creatures giving
life to the waters of the Yellowstone, the honor of holding their belly in my
hand before gently releasing them back to their home was not enough to endure
the battering winds weakening my shoulder and rattling my brain. But this is Yellowstone, and this is spring. In my seven years working as a ranger
naturalist in Yellowstone National Park, I cannot remember one training
week—which always occurs the third week of the month —without at least one day
where falling snow welcomed some rookie from Florida to the Northern Rockies.
The dark and ominous
clouds now blanketing the Blacktail Plateau to the south, combined with the two
inches of fresh snow garnishing the landscape all around us feels like we are
retreating back to the colder and darker days of winter after an abnormally warm
and pleasing March. It’s as if the random
70 degree days in March, when Yellowstone shared her glorious bosom, were
nothing more than a taunting tease never to be seen again. Now she is all covered up, and the dark fog
currently lingering over the horizon would never allow anyone without intimate
knowledge of Yellowstone’s secrets to fathom the beauty that is now hidden—but vibrantly
exists.
But Yellowstone is worth the wait. The glorious days of spring will return. Just two days ago, I observed a budding cottonwood and my first Yellow-headed blackbirds fluttering in
the marsh outside of Emigrant, Montana, where I make my first such sighting
each year. And today, before the snow
began to fly, I witnessed my first pair of Sandhill
cranes of 2010, gingerly walking through a pasture in the Paradise Valley
after a long pilgrimage from their wintering grounds in New Mexico. The Osprey
have returned to their nests high above the banks of the Bitterroot, Clark
Fork and Yellowstone Rivers.
No matter how hard the winter-like weather attempts to
simplify our surroundings with monochromatic gray-scale offerings (dark skies
and white landscapes), the return of our winged community members bring vibrant
colors and rich songs back to the Yellowstone wilderness. The snow may continue to fall for another day
or another week, but in the face of this adversity, the fleeting glimpse of a Mountain bluebird on the wing,
accompanied by the melodic call of the Western
meadowlark from atop a large and scraggly Juniper tree gives us all reason
to hope that our days of floating rivers and hiking trails are just around the
bend.
~Michael Leach, Director and Founder
This is how we celebrated Cinco de Mayo in Gardiner, Montana.
