Two Days in Cody/Yellowstone

We arrived in Cody shortly after noon on Sunday. Our friends Randy and Bev were both tied up for the afternoon - Randy preaching in Montana and Bev with the Plains Indians Annual Pow-wow on the grounds of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center where she works as the conservator. We wandered in and out of the wonderful Center and the Pow-wow, exceeding our annual quota of frybread consumption, before spending the evening with Bev and Randy.

Monday began with breakfast at the Irma Hotel in Cody. This place is meaningful to us because we have a collection of letters written on the hotel stationery in 1919 from John's grandfather to his grandmother, who grew up here. In the letters, he's telling of his great love for her and begging her to return with him to the East. We're not quite sure why he was here--pure adventure perhaps--but we know he stayed at the Irma. She graduated from Cody H.S. in 1915. In August, 1904, she traveled with her sisters, father, and several others (including some "Eastern visitors") to Yellowstone and we have a detailed description of the journey written by Bertha, her eldest sister. Their "caravan consisted of the mess wagon, a covered wagon in which the tents, tarps, bedding and grub was carried, a three seated Park rig, and four saddle horses." Describing the area along the Shoshone River, she wrote" Its shores are lined with attractive verdure in the form of cottonwood, quaking aspen, and willow. Everywhere up and down and over the mountains are forests, forests, forests till it seems that there is wood enough to last the world for years."

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. The pine bark beetle is devastating the forest so now there are great swaths of dead trees. You can still see evidence of the great fire of 1988, and with all the dead trees, one can barely imagine what the next fire will be like. We saw one area as we drove into Cody a few days ago, where they have clearcut part of a mountain where the infestation is especially bad.

We didn't go to Old Faithful as we wanted to travel through the Lamar Valley in hopes of seeing wolves. Bertha, however, did see Old Faithful and she described its "uniform periodicity of action" (65 minutes in her time; 80 minutes now). They returned to see it at night "by searchlight. There is no way to describe the grandeur and beauty of this sight. When the searchlight if played on this beautiful spray, it is first one color than another until it dies down out of sight." We try to imagine what it was like for them traveling through the park in 1904. Remarkably, we saw many of the same things she saw, only we took one day to do it.

Bertha didn't talk much about the wildlife but I'm sure there was plenty to see. This may have been because she was so used to seeing bison, elk, wolves, pronghorns

and coyotes (all of which we saw on our tour) in and around Cody. As for us, our jaws dropped many times not just on the partial tour of Yellowstone that Randy conducted for us (he and Bev know just about every corner of the park) but on the loop drive (in the east entrance, out the northeast entrance) to and from the park. Our first buffalo was a thrill to see; by numbers 308-370 we were a bit less excited. One thrill was watching several wolves move through a patch of sagebrush; another was the elk that crossed the road in front of us. A delightful day, followed by a lovely evening with Randy and Bev, enjoying the incredible view from their porch as we ate. Now, we're moving on to Cheyenne.