Lamar Valley and Mammoth Hot Springs

On Wednesday, June 5th, we went up to a very nice breakfast (what, I don't exactly remember) with Nancy's husband, Richard, an Indian-American couple and a Spanish couple from Madrid.  We had been thinking of spending this day doing the northern half of the Grand Loop, via Tower Fall, with most of the time spent in the Canyon area, doing a ranger walk.  But we already knew that the road between Tower-Roosevelt Junction and Canyon Village was torn up and under repair, and Richard said that the best time to see all the colors of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was in the morning, rather than the afternoon.  Instead, he suggested that we drive through the Lamar Valley to Cooke City, Montana, have lunch there and see Mammoth Hot Springs on the way back.

Though Mary Joy didn't consider herself to be much interested in wildlife (the Lamar Valley has been called "the American Serengeti," for its large herds of bison and elk and the wolf packs and grizzly bears that prey on them), we decided to follow Richard's advice.  It turned out to be the most interesting of our three days in Yellowstone.

We drove up the Gardiner River Canyon to Mammoth Hot Springs.  The North Entrance at Gardiner was originally the main entrance to the park, since the Great Northern Railroad had a station there, the nearest railroad approach to Yellowstone.  That is why the park's monumental gateway, the Roosevelt Arch, was built there in 1903.

 The inscription at the top was taken from the 1872 act of Congress that created Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park: "For the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

At Mammoth Hot Springs was Fort Yellowstone, the headquarters of the U.S. Army when it was charged with patrolling the park, before the National Park Service, with its rangers, was created in 1916.  The fort's buildings are now the visitor center and other buildings relating to administration of the park: Mammoth Hot Springs is the headquarters for Yellowstone National Park.

From Mammoth Junction we headed east, out of town, and four miles later came to Undine Falls.

 After a short stop there, we went on, and shortly before Tower-Roosevelt Junction, we turned onto the short side road to the Petrified Tree.  Originally, there were many petrified trees standing on the hillside there, California redwoods caught in a massive volcanic eruption fifty million years ago and slowly turned into stone, before the surrounding volcanic rock was eroded away.  All but one of these trees were chipped away by souvenir hunters.  The remaining one is surrounded by a massive iron gate.

At Tower-Roosevelt Junction, although, as we already knew, the road south to Dunraven Pass was torn up and under repair, we still decided to go the two-and-a-half miles to Tower Fall.  It was stop-and-go, with flagmen and lots of dust, but we eventually came to the large parking lot by a large store.  We parked and headed up a short trail to the overlook, where you can best see a very impressive waterfall: tall and full and surrounded by rocky towers.  It is, unlike the other waterfalls in the park, named "Tower Fall," instead of "Tower Falls."  Why?  No one seems to know.

We returned to the Junction, and there turned east again, off the Grand Loop Road and onto the road toward the Northeast Entrance and Cooke City.  This road goes over a bridge across the Yellowstone River, then up over a ridge and back down into the valley of the Lamar River, a tributary of the Yellowstone.  In the winter, the great elk herds (there are 20,000 to 30,000 elk in the park) come down into the valley from their summer feeding grounds, and they are followed by many of Yellowstone's 300 wolves and 200 grizzly bears.  During the summer, however, the Lamar Valley is left primarily to its year-round inhabitants, the largest population (there are around 3,000 in the park as a whole) of free-ranging American bison left on earth.

They have no fear of people or of cars--many a traffic jam is caused by one or more bison deciding to cross the road.

This time of year, in early June, the large concentrations consist of a dozen or more mothers with their month-old calves, the latter probably weighing more than I do.  Driving along, you see individual bison here and there.  These are the males, who spend most of the year on their own, antisocial.

 In another month or two that would change.  A ranger later told us that her favorite time to watch bison is during the July-August rut.  She said that the Hayden Valley (Yellowstone's other major wildlife-viewing area) is then full of bison running frantically back and forth, with bulls violently challenging one another and trying to gather harems.  The elk rut, as we had discovered in Colorado, is later, September-October, after they've come down to their winter feeding grounds.

Here is how touring the Lamar Valley works: you drive along the road, passing by or through bison herds, until you see a group of people parked on one side of the road, looking at something through their binoculars, or, if they are really serious animal watchers, through a telescope on a tripod.

"Hi," you say, "what do you see?"

"Black bear.  Four of them.  There's a lone one up in that clearing, probably a male, and a mother with two cubs, one black and one cinnamon-colored, over by that patch of trees."

You get out your small, pocket binoculars, and look in the directions indicated.  You see a little black smudge moving across the distant clearing, and near those barely-visible trees you see another tiny smudge, followed by two even tinier dots, one black and one cinnamon.  At that point you wish that instead of bringing the pocket binoculars you had tried harder to cram the big Bushnells into your luggage.

"Wow!" says your wife, who has taken the telescope-owner's proud offer to show what his equipment can do.  You follow her to take a look and, yes, those are really bears.

Further down the road, someone has his telescope focused on an osprey's nest.  Others are watching a coyote den, with pups.  One couple excitedly tells of having, two minutes earlier, seen a pronghorn give birth.  It was a lot of fun.

The road left the Lamar River and headed northeast, up Soda Butte Creek.  Soda Butte is the cone from a defunct hot spring, a big white clump that looks very odd sitting by the side of the road without other geysers, fumaroles, mud pots or hot springs to keep it company.

Twenty-nine miles from Mammoth Hot Springs, having crossed back into Montana, we came to the Northeast Entrance of the park.  Just outside of the park is the village of Silver Gate, where we stopped for lunch at a Lonely Planet recommendation, the Log Cabin Cafe.

 Mary Joy had been looking for trout, and there she found it.  Again, Lonely Planet proved infallible where restaurants are concerned: it was a very nice lunch.

Then, we turned around and headed back.  We stopped where a couple from Idaho was watching mountain goats on Barronette Peak.  Then a larger group of people was looking at something near where Soda Butte Creek flowed into the Lamar.  "Grizzly," said one man.  Indeed, down by the water there was a cinnamon-colored bear, much more visible than the black bears we had seen that morning.  But as it got closer, one woman said "No, it's a black bear.  No hump."  While most grizzly bears are cinnamon-colored and most black bears actually are black, that is not always the case--that morning we had seen a not-black black bear cub.  What is distinctive about the grizzly, besides its size, is its shoulder hump.  This bear, besides seeming smaller than a grizzly should be, had no such hump.

Many years ago, the now long-dead British humor magazine, Punch, did a takeoff on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.  At one point, Hiawatha asks his mentor the exact same question at issue here: how do you tell a grizzly bear from a black bear.  The mentor replies that you take a stick and whack the bear over the nose.  If it runs away and climbs a tree, it's a black bear.  If you run away and climb a tree, it's a grizzly.  I would not recommend trying this method.  If you did it with a black bear, you would, at very least, end up in the hospital.  If you tried it with a grizzly, you wouldn't get far enough to climb a tree (he can run a lot faster than you can, and would assume that since you are running away from him, you are prey).  Both you and the bear would end up dead, the bear not because of anything you did to protect yourself, but because other human beings do not look kindly on bears who kill people, even if by doing so they substantially increase the average IQ of the human race.

The National Park Service expends a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that visitors to Yellowstone and Grand Teton are "Bear Aware."  They provide a good deal of information on how to behave in bear country, so as to avoid (or at least survive) nasty encounters.  If you are hiking where there are known to be bears, you should go in groups of four or more, making lots of noise, carrying cans of bear spray (a kind of pepper spray shown to stop grizzlies in full charge).  Don't run away, don't make eye contact.  If necessary, drop to the ground face-down, with your arms covering your neck.

At breakfast, Richard had told us of a couple who were hiking in the woods, turned a corner in the trail and suddenly found themselves face-to-face with a grizzly cub.  Before they could think of what to do, they both felt sharp nips at their rear ends and were brushed aside as the mother grizzly went to join her cub.  As Richard said, they were very lucky.  Still, many more injuries are caused every year by bison than by bears, and just the week before, a child had been gored to death by an elk.

But we did not see a single grizzly on this trip (except one in our cabin in Gardiner),

nor any wolves, though, on our geyser day, we were caught in a traffic jam at one point, whereupon a coyote crossed the road immediately in front of us, went quickly up the embankment to our right and disappeared over the top.

We stopped and took the short hike up to Trout Lake, a peaceful spot.

As the afternoon was drawing on, we continued westward, bidding a fond farewell to the Lamar Valley.  On the way we pulled off at the Roaring Creek overlook, mentioned favorably in both Janet Chapple's Yellowstone Treasures (a detailed and valuable guidebook to all things Yellowstone) and a National Park Service video on the North Loop.  We went past it the first time, since there is no signage.  There is a broad panorama of the Yellowstone valley, but no really spectacular scenery.

When we got into Mammoth, there were elk sitting in the shade of some of the buildings.  As in Grand Canyon Village in Arizona, elk act as if they own Mammoth Hot Springs.  The same is true of Gardiner.

We parked in the lot near Liberty Cap,

a forty-five-foot-high cone of travertine--calcium carbonate rock deposited from a now-defunct hot spring.  Mammoth Hot Springs, unlike the other thermal areas in Yellowstone, is not built of volcanic rock.  Instead, the springs are hot water forced up through limestone, dissolving out the calcium carbonate, then depositing it when the water reaches the surface and cools.  The result is huge mounds and terraces of white travertine, constantly growing and changing.  Janet Chapple says that the springs put out 1.4 million gallons of water and two tons of new travertine a day.  If you are a Rick Steves fan, you might remember seeing one show where he visits Pammukale in Turkey, where there are similar but larger springs and terraces.

We wandered around the Main Terrace, going up and down the wooden stairs and boardwalks.  My favorite feature was Naiad Spring, a colorful watersource issuing from Mound Terrace.

We had huckleberry ice cream at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel's Terrace Grill, then checked out the Hotel Dining Room.  Mary Joy wanted to go back to Gardiner to change for dinner, so we did that, driving the twenty minutes each way, down and up the canyon.  Mary Joy liked her meal at the Dining Room (I forget what she had), but mine was the worst meal I had on the trip.  The penne pasta had clearly not been drained, so the sauce was mostly water.

We drove back to Gardiner just before it got dark, had some cookies and tea at the main house and went back to our cabin to bed.