People Watching People Watching Nature

We arrived at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming amid thick snow flurries and we left Yellowstone, just a few miles north, a week later and about an hour or two into yet another gentle snow storm. For a week we slept wrapped around one another in our small tent, trying desperately to get warm once we’d put out the fire and hoping we didn’t wake up sore with cold the next morning. We spent our days trampling through meadows of sweet sage growing high autumn stalks, crossing over glacial lakes, and climbing up into the snowy mountains. It seemed everywhere we went grew wild. We heard elk call to one another in the evenings and saw a large moose standing quietly at the top of a windy hill. Buffalo staggered across the geysers of Yellowstone and threw their heads from side to side in great herds across the yellow valleys. We awoke one morning to find a whole crowd of people down by the road watching a pack of wolves trot quickly across the open plateau. We saw the full moon rise up and erase the stars and we washed out our pots at water spigots that were frozen by morning.

Though the weather dropped below freezing and the bears were all making their way down into the valleys for winter, the parks themselves were still brimming with people. There was Intense Camper, the woman who already had a circus-size tent and complex array of tarp roofs arranged weeks before we arrived in Grand Teton. For two nights we gritted our teeth as Asshole RVer kept the generator grinding through the still night like a lawn mower and cooked steak and bacon over a barbeque in the heart of bear country. On the second night an elderly man who we came to call The Valiant Old Man knocked down the Asshole RVer’s door and forced him to turn off the soul-grinding generator. We learned quickly to follow the people if you want to find the wildlife. As soon as you spot a turn off with more than one car you’re bound to have at least some buffalo on your hands. If you see a whole group of people with telescopes and specialty license plates, then you’re probably in for some bears or wolves. One such tracker, who we named Lone Wolf, had been coming out to Yellowstone every year for the past ten years and vacationing as a volunteer wolf-tracker. These people— normally wild-haired, middle-aged, Patagonia-clad and exceedingly kind— lived for wolves. But it seemed everybody who we met in the parks was there because they lived for it, they lived for the air, the mountains, the birds, or the quiet. They braved the cold, the crowds, the imminent danger of death by bear attack just to feel alive again. And I’ll tell you one thing, when you wake up with frost on the walls of your tent and the smell of firewood in your hair, it’s difficult not to feel alive.