Reflections on Yellowstone National Park

My work at Old Faithful Inn in 1982.....

The world has changed a great deal since I worked for a summer in Yellowstone National Park in 1982. I here share what it was like working there then, and reflect on the many ways the Park and our nation have since changed.

I was a backpacking addict, and hiked a lot in the New England Appalachians though High School. For the summer following my first year of college, my mother suggested I apply for a job in the National Park system. I had worked the previous summer in Maine, and got some cooking experience, so I applied to work as a cook.

My first choice was Glacier National Park, but I got my second pick: the much larger Yellowstone. I was hired to work as an Assistant Cook at the Old Faithful Inn! I was paid $3.65/hour for four ten-hour days on a five-cook line serving about 650-750 people nightly. I learned a great deal about cooking, and enjoyed three-day weekends to backpack around the Park.

The Old Faithful Inn is an historic treasure (literally: it is a National Historic Landmark). Built in 1903 and 1904, the lodgepole pine timbers were dragged out during winter to construct the 76 ½ foot tall structure, one of the largest timber-framed structures in the world. The Inn features knotty, twisted pine boughs as balustrades and cross-members, original furniture and fixtures, a massive fireplace, and a custom-designed clock.

(Old Faithful Inn, with Old Faithful erupting in foreground. Old Faithful Geyser (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov))

Park employees received government housing for a dollar a month. I lived in a small cabin with no running water. There were dozens of these cabins in a sort of rustic suburban settlement with shared showers. The cabins were a short walk from the Inn, and often I spent time late at night (we got off work after midnight) watching the Old Faithful geyser erupt (184 feet!), a personal show.

Elk and bison roamed freely around the Park, and even at times around our cabins. In addition to hiking the backwoods on days off, we park employees would hang out at Madison Hot Pots (now closed), swim and cliff-dive (now forbidden) at the Firehole River Canyon, or drive south to the bars in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 

A distinct attraction in Jackson Hole was the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, where patrons sit on horse saddles to drink at the bar, which is named after the silver dollars embedded in the bar top. 

(Million Dollar Cowboy Bar's Photo Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming.)

After about three months working at Old Faithful, I quit and lived in the Yellowstone wilderness for about a month. I boiled rice to eat with the trout I caught, bushwacking along the northwestern corner of the Park, occasionally hiking into West Yellowstone, Montana to eat a burger and get some groceries. I took a job as a pizza cook in West Yellowstone at The Gusher (which is still there!), and several months later I hitch-hiked back east from Montana to Connecticut.

In 2005, 23 years later, I returned to Yellowstone with my wife and children, as part of a cross-country trailer trip. This might have been a reflection on how much we change, but what really struck me was how much the places I have mentioned had changed. 

West Yellowstone, Montana exploded in development, unrecognizable. Located at the west entrance to Yellowstone, I suppose it was unavoidable. But I lived there in a condemned motel for $200/month (with a roommate so it was only $100/month!). The town is rebuilt, with many businesses, restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. It remains one of the coldest towns in the nation, at an elevation of 6,663 feet.

Jackson Hole was even more dramatically transformed. It went from dessert Western ghost town to condominiums, high-end dining, and specialty gift stores. A lovely, polished community nestled between massive buttes: but a completely different atmosphere and culture than two decades earlier.

Old Faithful Inn was just the same as I left it, and the reliable geyser that faithfully erupts about every 1-2 hours still belched spectacularly, but the area surrounding it was completely transformed. All of the cabins we employees lived in were gone, like a vanished Hooverville. The parking area and amenities had swollen to accommodate the steady increase in visitors. 

But also, much of the Park’s landscape was utterly transformed by the great fires of 1988. The area around the Firehole Cavern which had once been dense with tall evergreens was essentially barren. It looked like a moonscape or nuclear explosion site in contrast to the verdant oasis it replaced.

The survival of the Old Faithful Inn was nearly miraculous: a comprehensive roof sprinkler system had been installed just the year before, and only constant firefighting and a last-minute wind shift saved the structure from incineration:

Firefighters worked furiously to protect the inn. They draped hoses over the exterior and drenched the building, hoping to make the wooden structure as fireproof as possible. Helicopters flew overhead, dousing approaching flames.

It has now been almost another twenty years since that last Yellowstone Visit. I fear the area has become yet more burdened, and more changed. But this is a perspective we humans all gain in this modern age of growth, technological advancement, and a mobile population. I have watched far too many areas of wilderness succumb to development, and far too many vestiges of a past world go unsaved.

I often feel much like the Old Faithful Inn, somehow managing to avoid the ravages of fire and change; aging nonetheless. Our society retains fewer and fewer public reminders of history and artistic vision, and appears hellbent on tearing down and destroying what few faint echoes of the past remain. Either there is contemporary “development,” or the counter-pressure of “rewilding.” 

It is as if balance itself is no longer valued, and all that remains is extremes.