Yellowstone Summers

Our family rented a cabin in Yellowstone National Park for a few days each summer the years we lived, first in Casper, Wyoming and then Denver. My mom drove us four kids north from Casper along the winding road through Wind River Canyon.

There may have been an official entrance to the park, but for us, Yellowstone started where the road turned steep and ran between mountainsides green with conifers. We always noticed the green. It was like coming to an oasis after the parched plateau surrounding Casper.

Once on every trip, the car would vapor lock—annoying my mother and making it that much longer till we got to Yellowstone. Mother parked the car at the side of the road until it cooled enough to start again. Ranch trucks passed us—hauling truckloads of sheep up to the national forests that bounded the park.

My dad always came later. He worked for Wyo-Ben, a company that mined bentonite–used in drilling oil wells. Their plant was in Cody, a town east of Yellowstone, and a place I remember being closed off one summer during a polio outbreak. My dad sold ‘mud’ to drilling sites all over Wyoming. He’d work the latest oil fields, stop in the Cody office, and come meet us in the park.

The cabins we rented near Lake Yellowstone were so basic they seemed little changed since the days of the early fur trappers—small single pane windows, weathered single-board walls, metal beds with thin mattresses, and a small wood stove. Its one luxury was that it had two rooms: one my parents slept in and the ‘big’ room shared by us four kids.

The cluster of cabins sat under tall pines. Nights were cold at the 8,000 foot elevation. We woke in the morning to sun filtered by the pines, but it was as cold in the cabin as outside. We’d lie in bed hoping somebody else would get up and start a fire. Finally, my dad or my oldest brother would get up, teeth chattering and light it.

The altitude and the cold made for pure air, and the fragrant pines made it smell like you could just sit and breathe it in and that would be  wonder enough. But it was sweeter, because at home in Casper, we breathed the sulfur fumes of Casper’s oil refineries.

By day, we left the cabins to see Yellowstone’s wonders. We stood to watch old Faithful erupt; leaned out the car window to look at bears that stopped lines of cars, saw Morning Glory pool, bought cheap souvenirs in the gift store, and tried to take in the size of Yellowstone Falls—unused to ever seeing that much water.

I don’t think my parents ever knew or guessed that of all the things we did and saw, what I treasure most was sunlight filtered through the pines, the beauty of the hills and meadows, and summer mountain-cold nights that made pulling up the covers cozy. And it was the sense of wild that I as a child and teen could feel. Trees grew where they grew with the patterns nature provided. I felt I belonged there.

I remember so little of those cabins—not eating breakfast there, not coming in with suitcases. I just remember the smell of campfire smoke and those thin wood walls and the feeling that we had come to someplace that suited us; that was the best the world had to offer.