Re-Bisoning the West by Kurt Repanshek

Author:Kurt Repanshek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yellowstone’s Stigma

Chipmunks in New York’s Central Park get more consideration and protection than the bison in Yellowstone. The fact that Interior uses the bison as its official symbol adds the insult of misleading advertising to the injury of mass mayhem.

—Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 2006

There are more than four hundred units of the National Park System in the United States, each with its own fan base. Yellowstone arguably stands above all others, and not simply because it was the first national park established by Congress. The park’s collection of geothermal wonders, topped by the Old Faithful and Steamboat geysers, is second to none. But Yellowstone also is renowned for its reputation as North America’s Serengeti, home to a rich and diverse wild kingdom that is believed to include all the mammalian species that wandered the landscape centuries ago. Stand before the thundering geysers, or a thundering herd of bison or a howling pack of wolves, and you won’t go home disappointed. Having the good fortune to live within a half-day’s drive of the park, I have been astounded again and again, year after year after year for more than three decades, by visits to the park. One trip, by canoe deep into the South Arm of Yellowstone Lake, brought me face to face with a paw print, bigger than a saucier pan, in the wet sand of the beach. Here was the home of Ursus arctos horribilis, aka grizzly bear. Practically overrunning the bear’s imprint was a series of wolf tracks, Canis lupus in lope. And then there were dainty tracks possibly left by sandhill cranes. Following an evening cracked open at times by lightning bolts from thunderstorms passing to the north, the audio show resumed the next morning, as in the predawn murkiness a rich, melodious howl first broke the silence and then hung in the air. Perhaps it was the wolf’s presence that silenced the elk and the cranes that had been so vocal the day before.

The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 directed its namesake agency to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” It’s only deep in the backcountry of a park, whether Yellowstone or Yosemite or Glacier or Great Smoky Mountains or Everglades, that you gain a good and sound appreciation of “the scenery and the natural … objects and the wild life therein.” These backcountry locales have been preserved by the National Park System, and for that we’re all fortunate. Unfortunately, what the Organic Act didn’t take into consideration is the simple fact that some wildlife migrates. And that wildlife ignores park boundaries. Each year, pronghorn antelope from Grand Teton National Park and the Jackson Hole Valley in northwestern Wyoming make an annual migration of about two hundred miles to winter range south of Pinedale in Wyoming’s Green River Basin.

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