I finally made it to Yellowstone this week. What a magnificent display of what the planet has to offer. The views on the drive in exceeded my expectations and while there is more traffic than anyone should have to endure, I was greeted by this small group of Buffalo as I entered the fray on my first full day.
Yellowstone is huge. On the second day, I decided to drive to Old Faithful, which is fifty miles from the Northwest Entrance. I never made it. Traffic was awful, and the tourists were worse. I come from the Texas Hill Country and stopping for a single deer on the side of the road so I can snap a quick pictures is not only beyond me, it was super annoying as the summer tourist stops for every fucking thing they see…right in the middle of the road. So it was on day two that I left camp at five a.m. for another shot at Old Faithful.
Aside from the wildlife that must serve as a distraction in this haven, there are rolling hills and meadows…and geysers. Sulfuric scented steam is a central attraction for the Yellowstone tourist. As I drove by these roadside parking lots filled with excited tourists, never finding myself parking that I started noticing things about these hot springs, bubble pots and geysers. Not only do they smell of sulfur, but the corrosive effects on the land and limestone are apparent.
I stopped by the Park Visitor Center and asked a ranger about what I was seeing and smelling. He said the pH of the vapor becomes normalized as the steam rises from deep beneath the ground. In addition to sulfuric acid, he also mentioned boric acid. All I really needed to hear was the word acid which matched up with the caustic nature of what I was seeing that also gave way to me wondering how much we breathe in while touring the park. I asked if there were air particulate studies done by the park and he volunteered that there probably was, but it was pretty easy to tell this wasn’t an area he either knew about, or was free to talk about.
Me being me, fast forward less than an hour to me in a parking lot where I could get cell signal to confirm my thoughts. The air quality is poor here and the signage, if any, around the streams where vapor runoff occurs simply says to be careful…it’s hot.
Beware – this can be a rabbit hole, Alice.
If you’ve never read “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey you should. Ed was an essayist back in the fifties and sixties who did two stints as a National Parks Service Ranger at Arches National Park. Both his take on tourists and the government are prophetic in nature. This particular book was published in the nineteen sixties. Even then he cites the government as a money laundering machine for the wealthy and goes as far to say that the government lines the pockets of the wealthy in the name of accessibility. He adds that maybe the wilderness isn’t meant for those those didn’t manage to take care of their bodies during their lifetime and may be best left to those of us who deserve the payoff of a waterfall view after a long hard hike.
I can’t shake this mental image as I see parents, their children, and a boat-load of infirm fat white folks touring around the geyser pools on wooden sidewalks breathing in the air like they are here for the taking.
Natural selection I say.
I finally made it to the vast parking lot of Old Faithful, where there is yet another visitor’s center, a hotel and many other buildings so the pasty whites can have a heaping helping of poor air quality to add to poor food quality offered in our grocery carts and poor information consumption as well.
The plan to kill us off continues.
I was sickened by what I saw and drove the fifty miles back to the exit and have no plans of returning.