More Wonder

(entry for 9/25/24)

In my last blog post, I recounted the beginnings of my family’s trip to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1951. I also talked about how the book Cubby in Wonderland had affected and influenced my attitudes about the trip. And I had ended the post by recounting my mother’s cautionary tale about what would happen to me if I wasn’t careful near the geysers and hot springs.

It wasn’t fair! Cubby’s mom hadn’t tried to scare him like that! And my mother hadn’t tried to scare my sister, who was even younger than I was!

Having accomplished her purpose, however, my mom soon turned to marveling at the wonders herself. Although, for her, the wonders weren’t just the thermal ones. She loved the campground and, in particular, our campsite, which was among gorgeous pine trees, reminiscent of the ones around her mother’s cabin near Denver. She wasn’t at all frightened or worried about the grizzly bear that had awakened my dad and me, sleeping in the home-made trailer. She wandered around the various campsites, making friends with other campers, and keeping track of what states they were from in her little notebook. (So far, in two days, she had landed twenty-six different states, mostly by looking at license plates. In fact, she seemed more interested in license plates than in the people who owned them! By the end of our trip, she had recorded forty-five of the then forty-eight states, plus three Canadian provinces.)

Like everyone else in Yellowstone that year, we fed the black bears. Not the grizzlies, of course, just the black ones. There were warning signs all over the place telling people not to do it, but we all did it anyway. The bears had become so accustomed to being fed that they would line up at popular parking spots and patiently wait their turn for food. At one such spot, I was sitting in the front passenger seat of our DeSoto sedan, with the window down, eating an apple. I was looking to the car’s left, watching other people feeding the waiting bears. Suddenly, I heard a soft snuffling sound right beside me. I turned and tried to look out my own window, or where my window would have been if it had been rolled up. Instead of a window, there was a head in the opening. A big head. About four times the size of mine. It was a mother bear: maybe Cubby’s own mom, for all I knew. She was a dark brown, a common color among so-called ‘black bears.’ (She had a coal-black cub beside her.) She was looking at my apple and licking her lips.

In about four tenths of a second I was out the driver’s door and running for dear life to where the rest of my family was watching the fun. My dad took one look at my face and knew something had happened. He glanced over at our car and started laughing. He didn’t have to ask why I had suddenly appeared. The answer was right there to see. The mother bear still had her head inside our car, probably trying to figure out what had suddenly happened to ‘her’ apple.

My dad said, “You should have seen the size of your eyes when you came running up,” and laughed again.

My mom didn’t laugh, but she also didn’t seem too worried. At least I hadn’t fallen into a hot springs.

After staying another night in our Upper Geyser Basin campsite, we moved on north, to the much smaller Midway Geyser Basin. I liked this one better. The geysers, while not as regular as Old Faithful, were more fanciful looking. Some of their outlets had really weird shapes that I found fascinating, more so than the eruptions themselves. (Many of these had been mentioned in the Cubby books, but some had been omitted. Perhaps the author had run out of room. Or ideas.) 

My favorite item there, not a geyser, was the Grand Prismatic Spring, the third largest hot spring in the world (the top two are both in New Zealand), which Cubby and his mom had also admired. (See stock photo at the top of this post. To give you a sense of its size, those are people along the edge! Morning Glory is tiny in comparison.) We also looked at, and were disappointed by, Excelsior Geyser, which at that time was inactive and considered extinct, though it woke up again, seemingly for good (or at least until the whole park blows up some time in the future) in the 1959 earthquake.

Next , and even farther north, was Lower Geyser Basin, which featured the famous Paint Pots (volcanically heated and therefore boiling mud of various colors). Cubby and his mom had been fascinated by them, in the book, but I found them rather boring. The colors were very muted. The mud just looked like mud, although it did bubble from the heat of the springs underneath it.

The rest of the family was very impressed, though, especially my dad. “Did you see that?” he asked at one point. We said we hadn’t. “That green pot right there spit a glob of its mud over there into that pink pot. It disappeared in a heartbeat.” He marveled about it for the rest of the trip, and in fact for months afterward, after we got back home. He seemed to think he was the only one who had ever seen such a thing, although I found out (much) later that it’s a fairly regular occurrence, not just there, but at other ‘paint pot’ locations in the Park.

Our next stop was the Grand Canon of the Yellowstone. We stopped at the parking area near the Upper Falls (the smaller ones), and my mom hiked by herself to go see the actual falls. Then we climbed back into the car and drove to the much larger Lower Falls, where we all four hiked to the overlook, and then farther still to the Inspiration Point, where we got out again while my dad took dozens of color-slide photographs of the view.

Finally, after visiting the Petrified Tree and Tower Falls, we drove out of the West Entrance into Idaho, having paused briefly for a herd of bison to cross the road. We skipped Mammoth. In fact I never saw those famous hot spring terraces until my second wife, Carol, and I visited them on our honeymoon, almost exactly fifty years later.

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