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150 Years of Yellowstone, 50 Years of Friendships

 

In 1972, Yellowstone National Park celebrated 100 years as the first national park in the world. For a group of Old Faithful Inn employees arriving from around the country, it would be the beginning of a bond that would go well beyond Yellowstone’s centennial summer.

 

“We were all fresh out of high school, away from home for the first time and looking for adventure,” remembers Christy Wood, who was 19 in the summer of ‘72. “Many had never seen mountains before or spent time 

Christy Wood with buddy Brian Raines in her first season at Yellowstone National Park.

outdoors, but over the span of four summers we came of age together.” Romances bloomed – some resulting in marriages – as they explored the park. They learned to hike, climb and fly-fish. After dark there were bonfires and regular fish fry suppers. They danced through the night at cowboy bars and soaked in the hot springs, grabbing a diner breakfast at dawn before catching a few hours of sleep ahead of their shifts. 

 

“We were carefree, with no responsibility other than to do our jobs as waitresses, bellmen and tour guides,” Wood said.


Fifty years after that summer, a core group of Old Faithful Inn employees plan to return to the park as Yellowstone marks 150 years since President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law in 1872 – and to toast five decades of friendships that formed in a 3,500-square-mile wilderness spanning Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.


Like Wood, many arrived already knowing the magic of Yellowstone through stories of parents and siblings who had also worked in the park. Some had dim memories of visiting as children. Others had little inkling of what Yellowstone held for them.


“I remember sprawling out on my mother’s living room floor in St. Petersburg, looking at a map of all the national parks in the country,” recalled Sally Thompson, who would later be responsible for curating a newsletter that would spark the first reunions in the ‘80s. In 1969, Thompson was still a freshman at a junior college in a Florida suburb when she and a friend decided to go West. 

 

Cycling on a path near Castle Geyser in 1976. Photo by Rosalie LaRue. Courtesy of the Xanterra archives.

They wrote to several national parks. Yellowstone was the first one to write back. “We just took off,” she said. They took a plane to Chicago, a train to Livingston and a bus to Gardiner and checked themselves into employee housing – then they were off on a tour of their summer home. “I didn’t know what a geyser was,” Thompson laughed. “I remember driving through the geyser basins and seeing the steam – I thought something was on fire. I just had no idea.”

Celebrating another season in Yellowstone National Park with a staff party. Photo courtesy of Christy Wood.


Friendships blossomed in this wild, new landscape. “We grew up together,” she said, describing how they would hitchhike everywhere, and she soon became adept at sleeping under the stars, even though she had never camped before coming to Yellowstone. “It was the first time for many

 

 of us that we were actually on our own. We didn’t have brothers and sisters to live up to. Nobody knew our parents. It was just liberating.”

Even after life as a seasonal employee came to an end, and careers, marriages and children pulled everyone back to different parts of the country again, those friendships continued. “In the early ‘80s, a friend came to visit and we just thought ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to fi

 

nd our former co-workers?’” Thompson remembers. “And we had something on our side: a directory called ‘The Inn Crowd.’ It was just a booklet that had our names and the addresses of our parents. So not even 15 years later, I started this chain letter asking if people wanted to be in touch.” 

 

Thompson began compiling the responses and pasting them into a newsletter. At the time, she worked at a law office and they let her use the photocopier after hours.

 

 

“I’d have to retype everyone’s information on a typewriter, copy them, fold them, staple them together and mail them off. And I kept hearing from more and more people. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

 

Inevitably, this led to the question: “Is anyone interested in having a gathering?” In 1987, their first reunion brought about 30 people back to Yellowstone. By 1990 there were nearly 90 making the pilgrimage, as the former employees started bringing their children to experience the park. These continued every three years – now every two years – most often organized for the full moon in August.

The former YNP employees gather for their first reunion in the 90s. Photo courtesy of Shauna Olds.

 

“If someone had told us when we were 18 or 19 years old that in 30 years we would be coming back with our children, and that our children would know each other, we would have thought they were out of their mind,” Thompson laughed.


For Michael Olds – who drove east from Washington in 1970 to drop a girlfriend off for the summer at Yellowstone and ended up turning around on a whim, staying to pick up work – the park changed the course of his life. The reunions have been a chance to honor this fateful U-turn.

 

“I remember that I was so stunned when I first drove through there. I just thought, ‘This is my backyard for the next three months. This all belongs to me.’ I knew after I made that drive, it was over. I was coming back.” 

 

Olds would go on to spend seven summers in the park. It was a love for the area that outlived the relationship that first lured him there. In the summer of 1977, he met his future wife, Shauna, at an employee volleyball tournament. 

 

“My friends said, ‘Oh, boy, dude, this isn’t a summer romance. You aren’t just going to go hiking and then write a couple of letters when the summer’s over. This is different. We can see it.’ Of course, they were right.”


Shauna, an Idaho native, was on her ninth summer, the last five as a full-time employee. When she and Michael left in the fall, they left together, and were married the following June. Through the years, the couple’s three children would also become a part of the reunions, developing their own connections with the other kids. Now grandchildren are regular returnees.

 

“It started out as renewing friendships,” Shauna explained. But eventually, as they began to lose old friends, the reunions became more frequent, and the relationships shifted into something deeper. A decade ago, they began having a memorial at their regular campfires to remember those who had passed, tossing a pinecone into the fire and saying a few words. When Covid shut down the world in 2020, a few of them began having regular Zoom chats to have a connection outside the home – even just to play cards for an hour. 


“Now it’s not rehashing memories so much – you just pick up where you were the last time you talked,” she said. The memories and stories of the craziness of their Yellowstone summers have dwindled off. “Now it’s more, ‘How’s your health? How are the grandkids?’ And now that we are in our early 70s, it’s ‘So where are you going to be buried?’”

 

The answer is easy for Shauna and Michael. The couple have already made arrangements with the park to have their ashes scattered near Old Faithful. “Both our families are buried in different parts of the country,” Shauna noted. “This way our kids can go to Yellowstone whenever they want and remember us together.”


The natural phenomenon of Yellowstone is still captivating to reunion returnees like Al Chambard, who arrived in 1969 at age 18 from a suburb of Minneapolis, never having seen the mountains. 

 

As a bellman for eight years at the Old Faithful Inn, he estimates that he watched Old Faithful erupt about 2,000 times. He plans to see it once again this August when he returns to Yellowstone for the park’s sesquicentennial. 


“To this day, Old Faithful does not get old,” Chambard said. He could be describing his friendships that began during college summers and endured for 50 years. “I never took it for granted. I’m still in wonder of it now.”

 

 

* Story and photos originally published in the 2022 Summer issue of American West Magazine

 

 

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Regrets

Many years ago Dick Geary told me that I’d always have a horse when I wanted to take an afternoon off and go for a ride.


Dick and I never met in person. We communicated through weekly check-in emails and our columns. Both of us were bound to Montana – Dick was born into a Helmville ranching family; I had married a fly-fishing guide – but we each had a place in the world we held on to and wrote about frequently; a place that had shaped us as youth. For me, it was New Zealand. For Dick, it was Belize. We each had a boot in a land that still gripped us, and maybe that was why we connected here, through our writing, both of us a little bit restless and lonesome.


I missed being on a horse. I almost felt like it was pointless being in Montana if I wasn’t riding my own, or someone else’s, I emailed him one Sunday evening, when I was sifting through my inbox, trying to prepare for the coming week.


Well, he wrote back, there’s one here for you when you have time.


When I looked at my calendar, time was something I didn’t have a lot of.


A month later, Dick was haying. Pretty soon the first snow had fallen. And it just went on like that, a ride in Helmville with Dick, talking about Belize and New Zealand, ranching and writing, always pushed back to another month, then another season. I got pregnant. I left the newspaper. I was consumed by motherhood, then a winter move to New Zealand with an infant. Covid arrived just as we returned in March 2020 and my world became even more still, more insular. I couldn’t read the news anymore. I waited out another pregnancy until our second daughter arrived. It was in the first few weeks of Eliza’s birth that I was up in the early hours of the morning, that I thought of Dick. Maybe it was the relief of feeling like I was just starting to piece parts of myself back together again, or maybe it was the false spring warmth of March, but I was ready for that ride.


It had been years by then, since an email had gone out between us. I couldn’t remember the last time I had read his column. Maybe that alone made me hesitate before writing to the paper and asking for his contact info. Instead, I wrote his name in a search engine. It confirmed my hesitation. Dick had passed away, more than a year before.


I’ve spent a lot of time in the rocking chair by our front lounge window, rocking both our girls, at all hours, from infancy and into toddlerdom. It’s the best place to watch the first light in the sky at the start of the day, and to watch the sun disappear over the hills. I can’t help but think big thoughts when I’m there, one of my two life miracles on my chest, a cheek squashed into my skin, the rise and fall of their breath matching mine.


I don’t think I walk around with a lot of regrets. But if you were to ask me if there was anything I do regret in my life, without hesitation, I would say not taking Dick up on his offer of a horse to ride on a summer afternoon would be it.


It’s not a regret that hangs heavy over me. It’s more of a reminder that life is short and the months, summers, seasons, years, go by so fast. One day I’ll long for the years of rocking a baby at 4 a.m.


Next time I’m asked, I’m going to clear the calendar.



I’m going for that ride.

Comment Montana, Uncategorized

Summer, the beginning

  All of the sudden, summer is here.
  This will be my eighth one in Montana, and just saying that makes me feel both old and grateful.
It seems like another lifetime when I was driving from California in early June, arriving in Big Sky just before the sun was up, everything I owned packed into the used Saturn I had just bought for $1499, hoping it would just get me through the first season in my new home. I got out of the car, and stood there in the driveway, listening to the roar of the creek, deafening with spring runoff, and then birds everywhere in the first light. I had just arrived back in the exact place where I had spent the winter, but that place had been transformed. The snow, the quiet, the hushed darkness that I had cross-country skied through during the previous five months was gone. In its place was a land that was full of light, color, noise – not just birds and water, but wind in the leaves, in the waist-high green grasses; of cattle being moved; of horses released to the fields in the evening. It filled me with energy I didn’t know I was missing. I had only been gone from Montana for two months but it was another landscape I was returning to.
  I grew up in a temperate California climate where winters were almost irrelevant. I spent a decade in New Zealand, where summers were short and stormy months, potentially brilliant, with equal potential for disappointment. To me, Montana summers have everywhere else beat. Maybe it’s the brevity. Maybe it is the long winters that build up the anticipation. Maybe it is the suddenness of its arrival. It is long in coming. But every year it delivers.
  It is soft and warm. Gentle at first, then just when the heat you’ve been longing for gets a little too much to take, there are these storms that roll through, reminding you to just stop and bask in warmth while warmth is here. One storm arrived just as I was leaving work last week and a few of us stopped what we were doing and took a moment to watch its approach from the doorway. Even the summer in Montana has different moods, shades and smells – seasons within a season. For people who struggle with restlessness, this is a made-to-order landscape, changing every few hours. There isn’t enough time to get tired of it.
  Last summer felt stolen to me, first by a pandemic and then by morning sickness. I had enough energy after work in the evenings to do a faceplant into the couch and eat grape popsicles and chew on ice, until even the smell of water – even frozen – made me nauseous.
  This June, I feel like a corralled horse, anxiously pacing, watching the rest of the herd thunder past me for the hills. I am not the same woman who rolled into town in a beat-up Saturn eight years ago, arriving in this house I had rented from an online posting, unseen, and upon stepping into the lounge room, hearing my own footsteps echo on the wooden floors, thought, ‘how am I going to fill up all this space?’
  I laugh at that now, as I rock Eliza, now 4 months, with Jessie dragging her whale-themed potty around the house like a big teddy bear. This space has been filled.
  There is an Australian journalist I follow on social media, who gave birth a month before I did, and captures motherhood in a way that always has me nodding.
  “The phrase, ‘you can have it all, just not at once,’ keeps skittering around in my brain,” she wrote in a post I read at 3 a.m., as Eliza snoozed on my chest. “It’s not my turn for sleep-ins and long leisurely yoga classes and writing when the muse pokes her tousled head through the door. It is my turn to squint with one eye at the watch when I hear a yell from next door, and be delighted at wide new eyes looking at the world and wipe poo from between shoulder blades and wonder how the bloody hell it got there.”
  That Saturn that got me here is long gone. My arms are so full, especially during the summer  when I lose my husband to the guiding season.
  This last week I’ve watched from my couch, trapped by blankies and baby arms, my neighbor loading up to go ride her horse. Her kids are grown; she is a grandmother now. She swings her saddle into the bed of the truck and my shoulder muscles move vicariously through hers.
  Someday, it will be my turn to throw a saddle in the back of a truck on a bright summer morning. 
  For now, I am here, arms full, heart full, jiggling a baby rocker with my big toe as I write this, corralled. It’s my turn to be right here.

Comment Montana, Uncategorized

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

I was two years into living in the Holland Street house we’re in now, when I first read “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” by Richard Hugo.

It was eerie that I had already come to love a place that I would have been pulled to from afar with this poem alone, with its distilled lines about complete bleakness, following a walk Hugo took around town here in 1966, on “streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives.” There’s a jail that turned 70 that year, Hugo describes, with only one prisoner, always in, not knowing what he’s done.

“The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte …”

My whole life I’ve had a thing about dying communities. It’s not the fascination for ghost towns, with dedicated volunteers who revive these places once a year with apple-bobbing and gold panning demonstrations. It’s the towns that are just barely hanging on still; not quite dead enough to be romantic. It’s the towns that had boom-time glory years, with people packed into streets, looking up at the camera, from under hats and parasols; streets now bare,where the loveliest time of the day is at dusk, when the gas station sign is the only light that holds off the dark, and there’s just the faintest heartbeat of survival. The kind of towns where you wonder if might be wiser to keep driving, and hope that there’s another gas station up ahead.

My hometown came back from the grave because it has rolling winter-less hills with coastal fog hanging over the oak trees in the mornings, soil good for wine-making, and it’s only two hours north of L.A. Here, it’s more complicated. There is beauty everywhere in this part of Montana, and yet the towns still decay, because it is hard to price this beauty up unless you can ski it, mine it, or you have the fortitude to build on it.

This last week I looked up a book by Seattle writer Frances McCue about Hugo’s life, which she titled with one of the final lines from the Pburg poem, lifted for the cover – “The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs.” Pburg was just one of many towns that Hugo spent time in and wrote poems about. McCue describes how this was including a trio of poems penned by Hugo, Jim Welch and J.D. Reed after getting drunk in a bar in Dixon after a day of fly-fishing in 1970, and sending each of their competing verses to the New Yorker. They were published in October of that same year under the title “The Only Bar in Dixon” and got themselves into trouble with Welch’s line “You can have the redheaded bartender for a word…”

The redheaded bartender – also the owner of the bar – turned out to be a bit of a writer herself and fired back with a letter to the Missoulian that she herself was in the process of co-penning a poem with the mayor of Dixon and titling it “An Ode to Five-Bourbon Hugo.”

Hugo was more sensible when he wrote about a redhead in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” She’s the final shred of hope that all may not be lost in this town after all in 1966, with her red hair that “lights the wall” despite bigger cities “of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside.”

Earlier this Spring, it seemed like most of Pburg was packed into the old Fire Hall to watch the premiere of Saving The Burg, which had video footage of Hugo walking around, towered by the empty buildings of Granite, with lines from his famous poem reverberating. The late Peggie Pahrman – to whom the documentary was dedicated – was in a clip, recalling how the town would have been bulldozed but there was no money to do it. It was moving, as we all crammed in, shoulder to shoulder in a sold-out event, to see what had been done to bring Philipsburg back and up and away from being a town, as Hugo describes in the first lines, as a place you’d only end up when your life breaks down.

Against the odds – and as the film’s subtitle points out, with a lot of love, sweat and beers – Hugo’s prophecy that all was not lost came true. It is a gray today. A shade specific to this time of year in a small mountain town. You go to the store to buy lettuce everyone at the check-out is trading stories of how the weather compared at this time last year, or even the decade before. It’s a spring afternoon with winds churning up dust that we turn our heads away from and scowl. There is snow still in the hills around us. But in bigger cities at lower elevations there are buds of green starting to erupt with white flowers on the streets and we know that we aren’t far behind, that June is pushing through and that soon the smell of lilacs will be everywhere.

The car that got us here still runs.

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