Western Journal, Day 5

Part of a series.

Friday, Septermber 16

We woke up in this wonderful valley, finding it in yet another wardrobe of light. We packed our things and continued south along the highway. The two mountain ranges on either side of us slowly withdrew from each other’s distant company. At one point, a truck’s tire burst, sending a cloud of rubber into the air and the truck swerving across its lane in front of us. The driver skillfully recovered and settled into a slower pace, allowing us to pass. At some point, we entered the territory of Idaho National Laboratories, though there was little to distinguish it from anything else except an access road rolling off toward an industrial park in the distance and aggressive, dire warnings against trespassing.

When the mountains had become nearly forgotten humps on the horizon, we encountered a fork in the highway with a little farming town built in front of it. A little circle of community coaxed an island of green crops out of sea of rough sagebrush. We turned east, bringing ourselves into the direction of Yellowstone and stopped in Rexburg, Idaho for a late breakfast of pancakes. We left town as the local police began the chore of closing down the main road on the strip for reasons we never learned. A parade maybe?

It was my turn to drive and my dad napped in the passenger seat while I took the car across farming plains outside of Rexburg. Our approach to the mountains was met with yet another forest distinguished by its own particular flavor of color palette. Sometime afternoon we reached West Yellowstone. West Yellowstone is a town at the edge of the park founded sometime around the turn of the century. Initially it had another name I’ve since forgotten, was later renamed “Yellowstone,” and after that was given the name “West Yellowstone.”

I hate West Yellowstone.

Let me give you some background. The backers of the establishment of Yosemite National Park, one of the other early national parks, were awed by its landscape and wanted to protect it from undergoing the thoughtless commercial assault that one of our other natural spectacles shared with Canada, Niagara Falls, had seen.

West Yellowstone is a pocket of commercial hell which has collected on the edge of that protected zone. The two main streets are littered with motels, ice cream vendors, novelty photo booths, and the… gift shop. You know what sort of gift shop I mean. It’s the type present at every corner of the earth beside an attraction, plying the same universally consistent inventory of t-shirts, beads, and little glass sculptures. They’re everywhere. As are the fast food offerings and slot parlors that loftily call themselves casinos. There’s even an IMAX theater. The Grizzly Bear and Wolf Discovery Center (a “non-profit park”), whose parking lot we stopped in, boasted of a live grizzly bear and pair of wolf packs somewhere in its acre and a half of fenced off lot. The thought of seeing such animals I hold in the esteem I do enclosed in such a tiny space might have moved me to furious tears had I paid the admission to go in.

What especially troubles me is that Yellowstone National Park is a place marked on the international consciousness. Think about it. You’ve heard of it, even if you don’t exactly know what’s inside. With just a handful of ways of entering the park by road and the peculiarities of where the airports are arranged, many, many of our international visitors are funneled through West God Damn Yellowstone. And this crap is the face we present to the world.

I hate West Yellowstone.

We went into the Yellowstone National Park’s information center in the town and were met by a ranger and park volunteer who set us up with information booklets and maps. Their job is one I’ve worked before and silently in my mind, I appreciated the casual enthusiasm and charisma with which they both engaged the public. I hope that if they saw me in that role, they might feel similar approval. We were happy to find my dad now qualifies for an interagency senior citizen’s pass, which grants him free entry to almost all federally owned outdoor recreation areas, from lands held by the National Parks Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers (they run parks too), National Wildlife Service and on and on. For $10. I try to impress upon him what a thing this is to have, calling it his “golden ticket” (when I’m not calling it his “geezer pass”).

Surprisingly, Yellowstone NP itself offers limited space on organized campgrounds and has fairly stringent rules for camping in its wildlands, unlike National Forests and BLM land. So we opted to head north to a National Forest campsite along the edge of the park.

After setting up, we returned to West Yellowstone for dinner. While walking around, my dad remarked, “This is just like New York.” And I could see it. Bright lights are everywhere and the languages of the world are spoken on the sidewalks, which in Montana is quite a novelty. The Chinese restaurants advertise to their clientele in their native language (as does the indoor machine gun range, much to my amusement). I also picked up on a lot of German being spoken. I thought about this with some puzzlement, then I realized why. What are some preoccupations of German culture? Techno, heavy metal, and the American West. So of course they’re here! I guess I found something positive in this, hoping the park and their other experiences would persuade the foreign visitors that we’re better than this.

We went back to camp, listened to a horror podcast and went to bed.