The King’s Green Pad

This summer my family and I traveled to Yellowstone National Park for a short family vacation. We had a wonderful time and visited the obligatory sites/sights: Old Faithful, Mammoth Hotsprings, Canyon Falls, Hayden Valley. My guide during our visit was Paul Schullery’s delightful 1997 book Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness. Formerly the Yellowstone park historian, his book helped me navigate the historical evolution of and complexities of human-natural interactions in America’s most famous national park. Accessible and thoughtful, Schullery is a ruefully funny author, and reading his book enriched my own experience of Yellowstone.

Schullery explores many issues in Searching for Yellowstone, including the politics of wildlife “management” and conservation, the establishment and construction of the park, the place of the park in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, among many other things. He is particularly interesting on the human factor in America’s “last wilderness.” Yellowstone is a place of breathtaking natural splendour, but most people encounter these wonders in concert with thousands of other human beings, especially at the famous attractions along the Grand Loop Road. In fact, we were several of over three million people who visited or will visit the park in 2009. When we visited Old Faithful, for example, we did so with a crowd of several thousand people waiting on benches in a semi-circle for Yellowtone’s most famous geyser to erupt. After a few premonitory percolations, it erupted in full splendour; the crowd ooh-ed and ahh-ed, and before it was over half the people were already headed for their cars or RVs in the vast parking lots, hurrying for Mammoth before dusk, most likely, and hoping they wouldn’t get caught in a traffic jam. There was scattered applause from the remnants of the crowd when the show ended.

It’s easy to cynical about how the encounters between the natural world and masses of humans are structured in parks such as Yellowstone; as Schullery admits, there is no question that Yellowstone tourism has been highly and effectively packaged, and in some respects, perhaps, that outcome is tragic. Some critics have thus argued that Yellowstone is a curiously artificial, not a natural, site, the theatrical product of industrial tourism (99). The wilderness is vulgarly consumed; Yellowstone would be a splendid place if not for all the people. But Schullery’s reflections are more nuanced and thoughtful than this critical lament for nature’s splendours lost or ruined. “The trivialization of a spectacular natural area’s real beauty and power through the standardization or ‘packaging’ of the visit is always regrettable,” he writes, “but it is hard to imagine how else public use of Yellowstone might have proceeded” (100). And while the experience of Yellowstone is often framed in advance by guidebooks and the like, even to the point where we are told what we ought to feel, human nature is not merely conformist. “Every visitor participates in the search for Yellowstone,” says Schullery in characteristically generous fashion. “The vehicles of that discovery–whether television travelogues, the received wisdom of other visitors, publications, a road system, a hotel and campground network, a stagecoach, a mule, a pair of hiking boots–are modified over time, but they are at last only vehicles for each person’s search…. We may lament the limitations that culture and commerce place on the Yellowstone experience, but we must never underestimate the resourcefulness of each visitor in finding his or her way to the wonder of the place” (104).

We had these moments of wonder, too, in encounters of the kind that many visitors are blessed with in national parks and yet seemed to be performed for our eyes alone: an opsrey soaring through the canyon; the south end of a distant black bear running north; a bull elk, its velvet-covered antlers glowing in the twilight as it crossed the highway in front of our car, stared regally at us for a moment, and disappeared just as quickly into the forest.

This post was authored by Will VanArragon, Assistant Professor of History at The King’s University College.