A Winterkeeper's Reflections On Yellowstone's State Of Ambient Beings
In a stirring presentation of fantastical imagery, Steve Fuller shows why—and how—Yellowstone becomes wonderland when temperatures fall, the snow flies and water turns to ice
NOTE: This is Steven Fuller's 49th as a "winterkeeper" in Yellowstone National Park. Although a number of park locales and features hold names bestowed by 19th-century Easterners who came to the park as "explorers," Fuller relates to Yellowstone literally through a different lens of thinking. He possesses his own lexicon when it comes to describing the icy, wintry realm of America's oldest national park, which turns 150 years old on March 1, 2022. Fuller's own sensual awareness is informed by the surreal, tactile manifestations of extreme cold and wind converging with water warmed by geothermal influences, which freezes solid and thaws, creating visual landscape unlike any other. His language, which accompanies his photographs, often flows with references to classical literature, meteorological and geological terminology, allusions to fine art, and spiced with wry mirth. It's not only wildlife, he says, that projects a feeling of "being" and natural sentience. This winter in Yellowstone also reflects subtle shifts happening in climate, he says, causing him to lament that the frigid park he has known for half a century is fading. Enjoy Fuller's blend of imagery and words translated through his exclusive Mountain Journal dispatches, "A Life in Wonderland." Also read our profile of Fuller, "Twilight of the Yellowstone Winterkeepers," which will give you context by clicking here. —Todd Wilkinson
Text and photos below by Steven Fuller
THE WEEKS BEFORE AFTER THE WINTER SOLSTICE ARE THE DARKEST, COLDEST TIME of the year when Yellowstone’s geyser basins are alchemical crucibles in which the interplay of hot water and cold air are at their most extreme and the changes of water to and fro its’ three states (solid, liquid, and gas) occur simultaneously throughout the basin in a synergy that creates otherworldly crystalline gardens that are a festival of light, intricate, fragile, and ephemeral.
Deep cold recalls Jack London’s story, To Build a Fire, when the chechaquo (newcomer to the Yukon) spits the brown juice of his tobacco chaw and is started when it freezes and audibly pops before it hits the ground. For this to happen the air temperature must be a minimum of -42 degrees F, a temperature we haven’t seen recently. So far this winter we’ve seen a few overnight lows of -20 degrees, not nearly cold enough to manifest the other worldliness of geyser basins at their winter best.
Fox tracks: when she walked across the snow her weight compacted the snow and made it more dense and resistant to wind erosion. The windward side is to the left, the lee to the right.
Similarly wind-sculpted fox tracks suggest an esoteric geoglyph.
Aeolus—The Wind Sculptor of snow and sands creates a curious wall 'round an extinct mud cone.
Wind spoor in the form of a sigmoid curve.
In geyser basins ornamented with snow and frost accretions...and forms fit for quoting Shakespeare.
"Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?"
Polonius: "By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed."
Hamlet: "Methinks it is like a weasel."
Polonius:" It is backed like a weasel."
Hamlet: "Or like a whale?"
Polonius: "Very like a whale."
A pareidolia bounding, its motion frozen.
Ephemeral frost fossils of archetypal beasts from subducted collective unconscious.
Medusa
A sunset MRI of frost accretions.
Odysseus saw one of these on his tortuous way home to Ithaca.
A critter graceful as a wave.
Frosted millipede.
Buzzard or a crane?
Albino mamba in the act of striking.
Small tale: a new sprouted lodgepole that lived and died, acted as an armature on which overnight frost accumulated, in the warmth of the afternoon the frost collapsed, and with sun going down, process will repeat tonight.
Japanese sumi-e ink-wash painting and two lodgepole pine needles.
Coyote spoor with desiccated grass skeleton.
Kill site...perhaps spoor of Archaeoteryx.
Columnar frost—at first glance the curiosity looks like grass made of glass. Columnar frost grows out of warm humid soil where humidity meets seriously sub-freezing air and a horizontal hexagonal crystal is created. The process is repeated crystal by crystal and the column grows from the bottom.
Here columnar frost on the floor of a geyser basis is topped by clumps of frost and snow.
Vivid green Shangri-la moss gardens bloom, nourished by the constant snowmelt of the geothermally-heated ground. In the summer heat they will appear dead and dry as dust.
Ice light holed by a small hot spring rising from the shallows at the edge of the Yellowstone River bottom maintains a small water window into the sky.
Horizon sun pillar at sunset.
It adds interest to the sunset.
A view of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone near my home. Winter is sun pillar season but seldom seen often during this warm winter of 2021 to 2022. I still hold out hope the cold returns, but the sun-pillar season is short lived.
A sun pillar and snow pillows in the canyon.
During a windy December, a wind slab and sastrugi (snow eroded on the windward side and deposited on the lee side) tell the story.
Sunrise on the eastern rim of Yellowstone and its high plateau as seen from Canyon Village.
Yellowstone Lake generally freezes over between Christmas and New Years. Until the open water on the lake to the right recently froze, wind-driven waves created a chain of frazil cones where the waves met the beach.
In the weeks before Yellowstone Lake freezes, the surface of the water becomes super-cooled so multitudes of small floating ice crystals (frazil ice) accumulate in the water on the lee shore. Wind-driven waves splash when they crash on the beach., quickly building up cones of frazil ice.
Often, the beach will be lined with a chain of alternating "fjords" and "headlands." Frazil cones form at the head of the "fjord" where the frazil-laden wave crashes and splashes, depositing its load of ice crystals on a fast-growing cone.
Even after the lake has frozen many hot springs on the floor of the lake keep circular windows open in the overlying ice cover. In the middle distance a row of ice-bound "fossil frazil" cones mark the previous edge of open water.
In parts of Yellowstone Lake hot springs maintain open water throughout the winter. The warm water nourishes the proliferation of nearby "frost flowers."
Captured: a "decisive moment."
Mud pot with floating scum of iron sulfide.
A normally brown mud spring for a short time one winter was tomato-soup red with iron oxide.
A frosted buffalo pie.
Cold makes a geyser eruption even more interesting than usual.
Tale of a whirlpool: this one is part of the post-eruptive draining of a geyser pool extinct now since the spring of 1989. The backcountry geyser has an eruptive phase that was reminiscent of the monotonous "chuuh-chuuh" of a primate engine. When the geyser went quiet it drained back down the pipe from whence it had come. The geyser existed near the bottom of a large timbered hill that was hot burned during the fires of 1988. In the spring, when the winter snow melted and the summer rains came sand and gravel washed down from the burn and smothered the geyser. Subsequently, it re-emerged nearby but in a new incarnation devoid of several of its' predecessor's fascinations.
A geyser that long ago and, was for a winter in perpetual steam eruption building an ice cone that by the end of the winter was big as a house.
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About Steven Fuller
Steven Fuller has been the "winterkeeper" at Canyon Village deep in the heart of Yellowstone National Park for 48 years. Well traveled on several continents, he is also an award-winning nature photographer. Follow him at A Life In Wonderland appearing exclusively at Mountain Journal. His collectible photography is available through Fuller directly. This profile photo taken by Neal Herbert/NPS
