Our Yellowstone travel plans came completely out of the blue. I was wrapping up my last week in Bangalore. It’s not easy to shed 14 years of accumulated baggage, physical and mental. Parul and Abir were in SF, setting up our new life there. Things were pretty mad on both the sides of our family, which was quite litererally on opposite sides of the planet. Yet, when Yellowstone called, we answered.
Besides the random travel stories from friends, neither of us knew much about the place. In fact, we had hardly seen any national parks in the US, so had only a slim idea about what to expect. I felt the first inkling of what we were getting into when almost all friends suggested that we double the time we had originally planned. Can you really spend 5 days in a national park?, I asked them. Yes, they said. We eventually spent 8 days in Yellowstone, Grand Teton and around :)
I am not going to tell you the itinerary, you can figure it out through the the gazillion SEO optimized web articles yourself. I am going to talk about the stories that stayed with us.
The passion of the Rangers
We attended a bunch of Park Ranger led prgrams at Yellowstone. We did a couple of walks, and attended some talks in the auditoriums at the superb visitor centers. Ranger Franklin took us around Mammoth Springs and told us a lot about the underground plumbing that connects the magma underground to the geysers on the surface. A brand new hot spring, merely a trickle, had sprung up right in the middle of a road a few days back. Ranger Russ, who could also speak pretty decent Hindi, took us around Old Faithful area. He told us about how the geysers and hot springs are constantly changing, with hundred of small earthquakes that keep re-organizing the underground waterways. Another ranger, a photographer, gave a us a show of his fantastic & inspiration work around the park over the last few years. Yet, another ranger talked about the history of the park and how it came to be, facing numerous challenges along the way.
While all the talks were super informative, what stood out for me was the passion that these folks brought to their work. Here were these people, spending years in this beautiful yet far away place. Driven by a passion to conserve nature and ensure that it lasts for our kids and their kids and so on.
The scale of nature
Now Yellowstone is basically one large volcano. This is what powers all the weird activity that the park is known for. What blew my mind even more, though, is the scale of the experience. Let me explain. So we cross the town of Jackson and enter Grand Teton area and we are struck by the beautiful peaks and the rolling fields for miles. This was the beginning of a bewilderment about size that continued through our stay. Rivers would follow you as you drove around the park. Lakes that spread out to the horizon. Valleys that roll from your feet to the far away mountains. It’s as if the park was designed to make you feel your minisculeness in the face the largesse of nature. Except, that is always the case but we city bound folks forget that nature exists, and our planet exists and our self-centered universes are but one in a billion universes that everyone around us is constructing. The scale of nature just made me forget what I thought were big problems for me. In front, of this, everything else was small.
Get Prateek Sharma’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Haynes and his photography
In one of the ranger talks we attended, he showed us a bunch of historic photographs of Yellowstone. You typically just gloss over these yellowing pieces of paper. Especially when you get get that beautiful effect at the tap of a button in a bazillion apps on your phone. For some reason, his photographs stuck with me and I dug a little deeper in the photographer who made those pictures, a Mr Frank Jay Haynes.
Haynes became interested in photography as early as 1876. That’s just a few decades after the first commercial camera was introduced in the market, so really early days of photography. Through his entrepreneurial nature, Mr Haynes came about to get closely connected with Yellowstone in the early days of the park. In 1886, with an arctic explorer, Frederic Schwatka, Haynes started a winter tour of Yellowstone. To get some context, the warmest temperatures were -23 degrees C (yeah, that’s the warmest) and the coldest would go as far low as -47 degrees C. Now Mr Scwatka, the explorer, could not take the cold after a couple days and quit. Haynes, like any dedicated photographer, was determined to get the shot. He weathered 29 days in the park, covered 200 miles in skis and snowshoes, and came back with 42 photographs of the Yellowstone in winter, a first for the park.
This is one of those stories of entrepreneurial and artistic courage, that really moved me. Here is a guy, who is into this thing which is fairly recent and not really mainstream (photography), who quite literally stuck his neck out for his passion, even when the so called expert quits on him. In this manner achieves something that was never done before and creates work that lasts long after he is gone.
It was an unforgettable experience. Parul has been saying that since we started with Yellowstone, it will be hard for other national parks in the US to match up now :) Here are some more images from our trip.
All photos on iPhone, except the one by Mr Haynes. Too lazy to process, hence no processing either.
