Nightfall in Yellowstone as fleet of snowmobilers try to find their way home. All photos by Steven Fuller
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is a pithy phrase coined by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th-century
German biologist, philosopher, and naturalist artist to mean that the
development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the
intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny).
I have long thought Haeckel’s
word byte offers insight into the evolutionary kinship, both mechanically and
spiritually, of chainsaws and snowmobiles.
The morphology of chainsaws
goes back to the early 19th century with hand-cranked surgical bone
saws and came to fruition early in the 20th with a patent for a
recognizable gasoline-driven chainsaw designed to fell giant redwoods.
Both early chainsaws and
snowmobiles were powered by a two-stroke gasoline engine that drove an endless
loop of toothed saw chain or snowmobile track via a belt driven centrifugal
clutch. Compare the two machines on an autopsy table and the kinship of the two
is obvious. Both are useful tools. Both can be nefarious in the wrong hands. In
either case ancestrally they are close cousins.
And one has come to shape the
winter experience for many in Yellowstone.
Years ago, after a thoughtful
perusal of the belt-driven pulley system under the hood of my snowmobile in
Yellowstone, my English father-in-law, an engineer of the old school, turned
and, somewhat dismissively, declared the snowmobile to be a piece of farm
machinery. Morphologically he had a point.
I have a complicated bi-polar
relationship with snowmobiles; they deliver me into the other world by
necessity and yet they are antithetic to that very serenity.
To sporting devotees/aficionados,
snowmobiles are “sleds”; to those less enthusiastic they are “beals”. To me the
word “sled” evokes the
image of my childhood Flexible Flyer No. 251 Junior (Sled), so if I have to
choose between the two monikers I suppose I am of the “beal” inclined crowd.
In the first several decades
of my experience in Yellowstone, snowmobiles were primitive machines—unreliable,
dogged with fuel line freeze ups and a mélange of mechanical failures. If you depended
on one with your life and were unprepared to deal with the consequences of a
break down in the middle of nowhere on a 40-below night, their failure could
kill you.
"In the first several decades of my experience in Yellowstone, snowmobiles were primitive machines—unreliable, dogged with fuel line freeze ups and a mélange of mechanical failures. If you depended on one with your life and it broke down in the middle of nowhere, their failure could kill you."
It was years before I had a
machine with heated hand grips—a strikingly profound innovation. “Bealer’s
Thumb”, the threat of a frost-bitten throttle thumb, was for years a pain
accompaniment of the snowmobile adventure.
Those early jobs had no
luggage rack and their low sporty windshields were ineffectual in the face of
speed generated wind-chill. They were filthy things, enveloping the rider at
start-up in a dense cloud of stinking blue smoke laden with a potpourri of carcinogens.
To anyone within earshot they were noisy and at a distance their sound could be
mistaken for that of a working chain saw. Pete Townshend got Tinnitus from
playing air guitar in front of giant woofers; deafness, or serial ringing in
the ears, could come from the roaring back of a beal engine.
In the early years of snowmobile development, when machines were notoriously unreliable, manufacturers unveiled all kinds of advertising to make their products look fashionable, as with this ad by Johnson. It's one that Steven Fuller kept, reminding him how far technology has come.
In 45 winters here I have
spent a great deal of time astride a snowmobile. I have never thought of a them
as anything but a useful tool, both in facilitating my work and as a convenient
motorized means of infrequent trips to and fro the distant outer urban fringes
of the park.
This acknowledgement is not
an assertion of my moral superiority to other’s use of snowmobiles. If the National
Park Service had mandated dog sleds or hot air balloons as the designated mode
of winter travel in Yellowstone I would be mushing or drifting overhead.
I sometimes remark, when
asked about my relationship with snowmobiles, that the first 100,000 miles on
them was fun…not literally true, since they were often a source of frustration,
inconvenience, and stranding…but still, there is the pleasure of mastering
them, as there is in riding horses in wild country, or backcountry skiing
finding your way through challenging topography, or driving a 4X4 for weeks in
a roadless region of Africa.
In conversations regarding my
use of snowmobiles I have claimed, a bit of tongue in cheek, to be the
“Baryshnikov of Bealers,” an assertion based on my decades long practice of
extreme “Body English”, that “danser
avec la machine”, required
to maneuver the snowmobile towing a ten-foot long ladder and snow tools amongst
my 100-plus buildings, despite the obstacles and pitfalls, to a place at each
where I could successfully mount the building and winterkeep it’s roof.
In doing my work-a-day
routine there are the daily occupational hazards of tipping the machine into a
tree well, or hitting an unmarked fire plug, or burying the machine in a sugar
hole down to dirt. When this happens at speed there is the challenge of
self-recovery. (As Pa used to say, “You want a helping hand?... look to the end
of your arm”.)
As with infantrymen under
fire, a winterkeeper’s best friend is his shovel. Never leave home without it. With the right
shovel and a thoughtful evaluation of the situation you can get a beal out of a
hell of a hole. There have been a few situations that on first assessment
seemed hopeless. A prolonged predicament inevitable.
When engineering a
self-extraction of a floundered snowmobile I remind myself: don’t take short cuts, do the prep right, do
it patiently, do it once, and you will climb the beast out of that hole. Or you could end up like a Yellowstone version
of Robert Falcon Scott.
There follows a brief history
of my romance with beals which has characteristics common in my life with
horses and women.
My first beal at Canyon, our first winter of
1973-‘74, was a Johnson (see the advert blurb poster). It was worn out when I was given it by the
old Yellowstone Park Company, my first employer here. The previous Canyon winterkeeper, who only
did one winter at Canyon, put many miles on the machine commuting 38 miles to
park headquarters to where he lived and back to Canyon any weekend the weather
permitted.
For him the winterkeeper job
was a hardship posting. It was work he
undertook out of financial necessity. There was no sense of adventure let alone
of romance in the posting. It was a job
for losers or the desperate, not like now, when it is a dream job for the
romantics among us.
In the course of the nearly
90 years’ history of winterkeepers posted at Canyon before me deep winter
isolation was routine. The
winterkeepers were self powered.
Want your mail? Ski twenty
miles over Dunraven Pass to Tower junction once a month and stay the night with
the ranger there, then ski back home to Canyon the next day, weather
permitting.
We arrived at Canyon when
snowmobiles, despite their limitations, were starting to change the challenges
of over-wintering in the interior of Yellowstone.
In the 1960s and 70s there
were about a hundred makers of “snowmobiles.”
Like my first beal. most were primitive, technically naïve, and in the
case of my first one, worn out.
Our first winter my wife
mounted that beal to take out the garbage.
Half-way down the hill the throttle stuck, she fell off, and the beal
gracefully arched down-slope motoring straight for the Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone, a few hundred yards below.
"Our first winter my wife mounted that beal to take out the garbage. Half-way down the hill the throttle stuck, she fell off, and the beal gracefully arched down-slope motoring straight for the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a few hundred yards below."
Fortuitously the beal came to
rest at the base of a lodgepole pine tree alarmingly close to the canyon
rim. I recovered the machine, and a few
days later, Jerry Mernin, the Lake ranger, reading the spoor, dropped by to
ask, “What the heck happened?”
Later that winter, I was
driving the same machine to work, when its’ rust spotted chromed bicycle handle
bars broke at the welded T-joint and I was left holding the handle bars with no
connection to the machine as I went blazing down the road.
At the end
of a work day, the Johnson wouldn’t start, so I abandoned it and skied the mile
back home. Later that spring a grizzly bear pleasured itself by tearing foam
chunks out of the vinyl-covered seat. This was the first of three more grizz
snowmobile seat vandalisms in spring.
After the death of the
Johnson, each winter there followed a string of “one season stands” with
company provided cheap dysfunctional snowmobiles: a Massey-Fergeson—they should have stayed
with tractors; a John Deere, ditto; a
Kawasaki: underbuilt, with no cargo rack options what-so-ever and it reliably
ran out of gas when the gauge claimed the tank was ¼ full and many more of the
dirty dozens of machines I had difficult relationships with.
Over the years, in fits and
starts, snowmobile technology improved until today the company provides me with
the finest utility snowmobile ever made. And, of course, as my snowmobile
prospects improved, so too did the prospects for visitors wanting to make runs
into the park, mostly from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful. Thus began, an
opportunity, an industry, a popular activity, a problem, a conflict, a
controversy and a reconciliation.
For decades, routinely, I
expected, was always prepared and rarely disappointed, to deal with break
downs. I integrated an always on-board
bivy kit so as to be able to survive, in relative comfort, were I stranded overnight.
In the course of those years
I walked the roads between Canyon and park headquarters at night on several
occasions. This was true especially when I was ferrying my family back and
forth to school 34 miles north for the week.
One of our first winters at
Canyon we were asked to host a National Geographic photographer and his wife
while he photographed Yellowstone for a book project. We had a delightful week together, both in
the field and around the dinner table.
Come time for them to leave, the tail end of the winter season, they
were headed for West Yellowstone where he was to photograph the end of the
Winter Snowmobile Jamboree.
That year I did not have a
snowmobile. The clutch on the pathetic
machine the company had given me seized-up early in the season. Unable to fix it myself I took the one-lunger
engine with attached clutch in my arms on my skis down to the road and put it
on a snow coach headed for the maintenance service center 40 miles to the north
at park headquarters in Mammoth. I never saw it again.
So throughout that winter I
skied the mile to work where I moved from building to building with a ten-foot
ladder, a shovel, and my six-foot snow saw on my shoulders in order to cut the snow
cornices off the many buildings for which I was responsible.
But, late that winter, I was
keen to see the National Geographic photographer at work, so I rode as a
passenger on his beal 40 miles out to West Yellowstone.
The day they left West to
return to Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. I bought a box of grocery treats for the
family back at Canyon. We had had no re-supply in the whole course of the
winter, so I took advantage. I caught the last snowcoach leaving West bound for
Mammoth with the expectation that the driver would drop me at Canyon on his way
north.
When we arrived at Norris,
half way to park headquarters and 14 miles from Canyon, the driver stopped and
said, “Get out.”
“You gotta be kidding?” I suggested.
In those days I had no clout
and he had a higher priority. I suspected:
a hot date with his bartender down in Gardiner.
Back then, I never left home
without my skis (seven-foot-long wooden Laplanders, and my kit, which always
included a skein of mil spec parachute cord). So as the snow coach accelerated
out of sight headed north and the sun faded into twilight I broke up a wooden
road side snow pole and with the parachute cordage fashioned a crude sled out
of my skis, then made a harness out of the cord.
As the night-time cold
deepened and the light faded I squatted in the snow and ate a little bit out of
the box of groceries. Then I hooked-up
and trudged east, over the top of Blanding Pass, accounting the 14 miles to my
front door step by step. About midnight a crescent moon was setting, the sky
was animated by scudding Halloween-looking clouds.
When I arrived at my front
door about 2:30 am I was startled to see six sets of skis and poles set
vertically outside in the snow. Inside
my wife was waiting in the kitchen for me.
There were six sleeping bags in front of the living room heater.
Angela, my wife, told me the
ski party had showed up that evening after being lost in the Hayden Valley for
three days. They had been living on GORP
(“the horror!”) and they said that earlier that night they had encountered a
grizzly bear and one of their party in panic had fallen into Alum Creek. They
had arrived at our door in poor condition.
While listening to the story
I devoured a litre of strong milky sugared tea and a pile of buttered marmite
toast before slipping into the luxury of our bed. Had I had a beal this
adventure would likely have been forgotten.
Another time, five miles from
home, the sun was setting and the temperature was plummeting when the dread big
red warning light on the snowmobile dashboard lit up, “Engine is overheating,
stop now!” A coolant leak.
First I tried melting a
bushel of dry powder snow on the heat of the engine. Results: a thimble of liquid water. Options? I didn’t want to walk home with my
box of groceries (again). Beers! I had a
six pack! So, after reviewing the
options, reluctantly I poured the beers into the radiator. I re-started the engine, the red light stayed
off, so I motored home. In retrospect I
thought I should have taken my time, drunk the beers, then added them to the
radiator recycled.
In the course of the couple
of decades of my early winters at Canyon the numbers of visitors, the majority
on dirty noisy two-stroke snowmobiles, either rented or privately owned, ramped
up.
Just as I was entranced by
the glories of winter in Yellowstone others near and far heard about this
“winter wonderland”, what was becoming known as a “quintessential American outdoor experience,” and they came in rapidly increasing numbers.
By the 90’s the sight and
scent of blue haze at the West Entrance gate house in the morning and at Old
Faithful at mid-day was routine when a thousand, or on three-day week-ends,
1400 snowmobiles passed through the west gate to lunch at Old Faithful.
The Park Service authorities
were increasingly concerned, then alarmed, about the conditions and the
diminished quality of the experience that was becoming routine here in winter. Rangers
manning the entrance station at West Yellowstone on some days had to wear gas
masks so as not to succumb to the fumes.
Some among the snowmobile
sub-culture deliberately flaunted park regulations, leaving a double snowmobile
track on either side of a sign warning that “Off road travel was prohibited and
punishable” by a substantial fine, or by peeing on other regulatory
notices.
Outlaw snowmobilers
increasingly made illegal gang incursions deep into the backcountry of the
park.
In the face of the dogged
political and legal resistance by special interests, particularly by the
gateway communities and their larger allies who had no greater vision than
preserving the “money cow” rather than the unique qualities of the park, the Park
Service, much to their credit, evolved a management plan formulated so as to
reclaim for conventional visitors the aesthetic values of a winter trip into
the park undiminished by noise, pollution, and congestion.
For now, the plan is largely
successful.
The plan, however, came at a cost to
some, especially those with a dream of winter wonderland and a tight budgets. Currently
(2018) four nights at Old Faithful Snowlodge double occupancy including meals
and transportation to and from the west entrance, but not including taxes or
utility fee, cost $2,239 per person.
Higher end, for example, National
Geographic Expeditions five days (Bozeman into the park and back out) $5,195
per person double occupancy, airfare to Bozeman not included. The package 2019 will add $900 to the cost. You
can go to Africa on that.
A basic snowcoach day trip
from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful costs $135 per person.
Guided day-trip snowmobile
tours from West to Old Faithful cost $265 for a snowmobile with double riders.
Only guided snowmobile tours were permitted and they have to be made on BAT
(Best Available Technology)—clean, quiet snowmobiles.
The clientele at Old Faithful
Snow Lodge has changed since the regulations were first starting to be
instituted. Now those at dinner in the Snow Lodge any evening are a mono-culture,
nearly all appear to be Baby Boomer couples (except for the guides, who look
like me).
Most have come in on a
week-long high-end package tour. Local
or regional people with families are very rare.
Independent snowmobiles are excluded, except for those that may have won
a spot in the complex lottery system for independent winter snowmobile access
instituted this year.
With the new regulations a
winter visit to Yellowstone is much quieter, the air is much cleaner, there is
less yellow snow, the visitor experience is much improved and I suspect the
wildlife is a little less stressed.
But, it is costly to visit Wonderland
in winter. Ma and Pa Kettle and kids
will find no affordable access, let alone food and shelter here in winter, to
this American people’s park. This was not always the case. During its peak in the late
20th-century snowmobiling was a working class and often family endeavor. But demographics have changed. Now much of
the snowmobile industry’s market is targeted on “highmarkers”—young men,
relatively affluent, often from the regional boomtowns fed by fossil fuel
production, who ride machines specifically designed for the acceleration
required to climb as high as possible, ideally up a 30 to 45 percent grade,
toward the summit of a mountain face outside the park.
As the slope gets steeper the
machine threatens to stall so the rider must execute a 180 degrees turn and
descend before he bogs or rolls the machine.
After a few beers with his
bros another rider attempts to high mark beyond that of the first rider. These guys play in the avalanche kill zone,
part of the thrill of the sport. This is
the kind of Darwinian thing guys do, always have, and always will. "Highmarking accounts for more than 63
percent of the avalanche fatalities involving snowmobilers in North America,”
according to stats. Fortunately, for the sake of Yellowstone, off-trail bealing is banned in the park.
So the conquest of the nivean
frontier advances until the highest reaches of our mountains are conquered in
the pursuit of amusement, trophy hunting, and self-aggrandizement. And So It
Goes, another of the fast diminishing cache of sacred places world wide are
being trashed and checked off the collective bucket list. I am thankful that highmarking is prohibited in
the park.
"Now much of the snowmobile industry’s market is targeted on “highmarkers”—young men, relatively affluent, often from the regional boomtowns fed by fossil fuel production, who ride machines specifically designed for the acceleration required to climb as high as possible, ideally up a 30 to 45 percent grade, toward the summit of a mountain face outside the park."
The ideology of the current
American political regime sees our commons as nothing more than a monetizable
commodity to be gifted to corporate and private greed. Nothing is sacred, all is available for a
price—people, communities, and the natural world.
The opportunity for
“highmarkers” to trophy the upper rim of the Yellowstone caldera overlooking
the iconic Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is not so far fetched.
Our public lands, even our
sacrosanct national parks and monuments, not to mention our less protected
public lands, are being opened to all manner of unprecedented
deprivations.
The incredible has become the
“new normal” in this post “American Century,” and the panoply of the incredible
continues to skyrocket as we live through metastasizing desperate times that
recapitulate those our ancestors lived through, but which we naively thought we
would not repeat yet again.
The despoilers, emboldened by
our collective paralysis, like deer in the face of apocalypse, will likely have
their way and our descendants will be left to live for the rest of the 21st
century and long beyond mining the benefice of our luxuriously-endowed landfills.
Maybe, one of my distant descendants
will even uncover one of my snowmobiles in a junk yard landfill, fossilized in
rust and polymer degradation and make an icon, an effigy, an idol of it…in
memoriam to that long ago time when we strode the earth as human gods.
Click here to read all of Steven Fuller's journal entries for "A Life In Wonderland" and this Mountain Journal profile of Fuller, "Twilight of the Winterkeepers"
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
