Lots of people are visiting Yellowstone
10:22 PM PDT, July 1, 2009
There may be a serious recession, but visitation to Yellowstone was up about 17% this May over May of 2008. Reports of unexpectedly large crowds in June have surfaced, too. Of course, gas cost about a dollar more per gallon last year than this, and that could contribute to whether or not people are willing to drive to the park.
For whatever reason, the large number of visitors is great for sales of Yellowstone Treasures. Many more third edition copies have been sold in the months of February through June than in those months of any other year, ever since the guidebook first appeared in 2002. And I owe a big "Thank you" to Justin "Paul Weimer," whose super review just appeared on the book's Amazon page. Such comments make all the work worth doing! BTW, if anyone reading this should happen to come to Old Faithful Inn on Saturday or Sunday, July 25 or 26, I'll be happy to sign your book, since I'll be sitting in the lobby those days between 11:00 and 6:00. I'm celebrating 70 years since I first spent a summer in Yellowstone! On a tight travel budget?
9:00 PM PDT, June 3, 2009
I just learned about something that could make a difference in your travel plans this summer.
Entry fees at 147 national parks and monuments will be waived for three weekends this summer. The weekends are June 20-21, July 18-19, and August 15-16. Since the usual fee for entering Yellowstone is $25 per carload, good for a week in both YNP and Grand Teton National Park, this could make a difference in your budget if you're only staying those two days. Wolf pack has left Mammoth
9:02 PM PDT, May 30, 2009
For anyone following the activities of the four wolves who denned very near Mammoth Village this spring (see my posts of May 1 and 17), the word is now that they have left the area and the traffic is no longer controlled along the Mammoth to Tower road. Rangers believe there were no pups; certainly none were ever seen. The pack made its way a week or more ago past Norris Junction, where they killed an elk cow at Nymph Lake. They then traveled on to the Canyon area.
This is a disappointment for visitors to Mammoth hoping to see wolves with pups, but there are always some wolves to be seen early and late in the day in the Lamar Valley. A Smoking Gun
11:43 AM PDT, May 21, 2009
I am extremely saddened by what Congress has just thoughtlessly done in passing the amendment (to the credit card bill), putting all visitors to our national parks at risk.
The long-standing regulation concerning firearms in Yellowstone Park has been that they must be unloaded and placed somewhere that is not easily accessible, such as in a car trunk. Regulating guns in the park goes back a long way. Yellowstone was designated a national park in 1872. As early as 1875, people were concerned about hunters possibly decimating all the big game in a very short time, since there were no regulations against hunting or carrying firearms in those years. As a result of this concern for the animals, from about 1889 on all firearms were sealed at the entrances, or the guns were held for their owners until they left the park. Just before the Bush administration left office, they overturned this policy for all national parks. Quoting from a statement about the Bush ruling: “Visitors will be able to carry a loaded gun into a park or wildlife refuge—but only if the person has a permit for a concealed weapon and if the state where the park or refuge is located also allows concealed firearms.” Now Congress has overturned this historic policy. Poaching is not a major concern in Yellowstone these days—perhaps at least partially due to the sensible ruling against loaded guns. However, with the shameful history of gun-related crime throughout our country, this ruling will add to the already heavy burden on law-enforcement rangers. It will also lessen the sense of tranquility and safety for visitors to our national parks. A Little More News of the Mammoth Wolves
10:06 AM PDT, May 17, 2009
I’ve learned a few more facts about the Canyon wolf pack that moved its den last month to about one-half mile from Mammoth Village.
The pack’s three males and one female wolf had denned on the Norris to Canyon road last year, but park officials sealed off that den this year with a piece of plywood, because it was located in a place they considered dangerously close to where human traffic passes. So the wolves established a new den, this one not only close to traffic but close to human habitation. When the wolves killed elk there, they were hazed from the area with bean bags and cracker shells. A grizzly bear was also hazed from the same area on May 14. The wolf den area is still protected through a closure, and visitors are advised not to approach these wolves for photographs or any other reason. These wolves have been seen as far from their den as the Boiling River bathing area about two miles north of Mammoth Hot Springs. No pups have appeared near the den as yet. Wolves den near Mammoth Village
7:18 AM PDT, May 1, 2009
Creating a “puzzlement” for park authorities, the so-called Canyon Pack has chosen a den site not more than a mile from populous Mammoth Village, with its own elementary school and housing for many park employees. The site is reported to be between the village and the high Gardiner River bridge and visible to all who pass on the four-season road, as well as within the range of scopes from the Africa Lake pull-out above the village.
In one sense, the wolves have chosen well, since Mammoth is home to a sizeable permanent population of elk. In another, they could not den in a worse place, due to the human use of the area and the Mammoth-Tower road’s essential nature to northern Yellowstone and its gateway communities. As “Paul” wrote on a Yellowstone chat page: “Close encounters of the first order loom on the horizon, and the fine balance between the use of the Park by 'the people' and protection of the wolves will prove to be, in the words of Yul Brenner in the King & I, 'a puzzlement.' " Wolf enthusiasts are hoping the pack might move any pups born at this den to a less vulnerable spot—and yet—they would love to have them so visible for a while. I will continue to report on the dilemma as denning season progresses. Yellowstone Treasures as an e-book
7:57 AM PDT, April 19, 2009
I'm thinking of making this guidebook available as an e-book. Is that a good idea? Would enough people buy it in that form to make it worthwhile? I'd love to see comments about this.
Since a book with so many four-color pages requires heavy paper and so is not very convenient to carry around, we've already made the text for the ten easily accessed hydrothermal areas into a small booklet. We sell that booklet, called "Visiting Geyserland," only on our Web site: http://www.yellowstonetreasures.com and at the various visitor centers in Yellowstone (for $5.95). If you already own an e-book reader—and I'm hoping to get a Kindle 2 myself—a portable version of the whole book would be very handy to have while visiting the park. What do you think? Yellowstone season opening
8:48 AM PDT, April 12, 2009
Five more days before some roads—and a few facilities—will be open in Yellowstone! Geyser gazers will no longer have to resort to trading pictures from past visits and daring each other to identify mystery videos of rare geysers.
For the whole schedule showing when snow plowing of the roads is expected to be completed, you can visit: http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/hours.htm. For lodging, camping, and dining facilities, see: http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/open_closeda tes. htm#CP_JUMP_127493. For planning a visit, it's also useful to know when segments of the park roads will be under construction. There are always some improvements being worked on as part of a twenty-year federal road program. This summer you can expect construction on these park roads: the East Entrance road and US Highway 212 between Cooke City and the Northeast Entrance will have half-hour delays on weekdays, and on Aug. 17 the road from Norris to Madison will close for the rest of the season. In case you haven't heard—follow-up to March 13 blog
7:05 AM PDT, April 4, 2009
Lawsuits against Ken Salazar and the Department of the Interior are again being filed objecting to the ruling that delists Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves in Montana and Idaho. The National Resources Defense Council and 12 other organizations filed their suit on April 1, and Earthjustice has another suit in the works.
Meanwhile, loaded guns have been allowed in national parks since early January (I discussed this ruling in my 12/7/08 blog). The combination of these two recent rulings seems to me like asking for trouble. One of 58 delightful walks in Yellowstone
8:08 AM PDT, March 30, 2009
I just read a review of the book edited by Park Historian Lee Whittlesey about Truman Everts's ordeal in the park. He was lost for 37 days and had an adventure not recommended for anyone.
I was reminded of a delightful hike you can take in Yellowstone just across the Gardiner River valley from the mountain now named for Mr. Everts. It's called the Beaver Ponds Loop Trail, and I'll quote here the description of it in Yellowstone Treasures. "You can start the Beaver Ponds Loop Trail at the same point as the Old Gardiner Road [this is a one-way dirt road that starts behind the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel]. A slightly steeper way to begin the loop is at Clematis Creek (it’s named for a flowering vine and pronounced KLEM-a-tus or klem-A-tus). Clematis Creek is located between Liberty Cap and the U.S. Commissioner's stone house. "Although billed by the park service and several hiking books as a 5-mile (8 km) trail, to complete a loop from any point in Mammoth to Beaver Ponds requires a walk of at least 6 miles (9.5 km). The long-range views, birds, wildflowers, and the ponds themselves are delightfully worth the effort, as are the contrasts that you pass between the high desert and the moist forest microclimates. Beaver (Castor canadensis) are most active from dusk to dawn, so you’re unlikely to see them in daytime, but you can see a dam they’ve built between the ponds. Incidentally, in 1996 a parkwide aerial survey found about 50 active beaver lodges in the entire park." This is just one of the 58 Recommended Short Walks I list in a chart in the back of the book. You can't do them all in one summer!
|
Bio
Born and raised in Billings, Montana, I was the second daughter of musician parents: my mother gave piano lessons for most of her life, and my father taught piano, organ, and voice until the World War II years, when he became a teller and later an officer in a bank.
My association with Yellowstone goes back to very early childhood, when both parents worked in Old Faithful Inn in 1939 and my father worked further summers as transportation agent. I trace my love of Yellowstone Park to memories of wonderful times with my sister Joan: waiting for geysers to erupt, visiting with rangers, attending slide shows and sing-alongs in the amphitheater, playing hide-and-seek in the inn, and watching as my father assigned passengers to the big yellow tour buses. After college at Stanford, U. of Washington, and U. of Southern California, I married Bill Chapple, who was also from Billings. He took all his degrees at Caltech in geology, later becoming a professor of structural geology at Brown University. While raising three daughters, I worked as a professional performer and teacher of cello and spent over forty years in Rhode Island. In 1981 I lost Bill to a very rare form of cancer. In the next few years I sold my house, lived about a year and a half in a graduate dorm at Indiana University, and received my Master of Music degree in cello performance. Then in 1984 I married Bruno Giletti, a geology department colleague of Bill and a good family friend for over twenty years. This increased the count of daughters to five--and now the count of grandchildren has risen to six. In 1995 I began work on the guidebook that became Yellowstone Treasures in 2002, and by 2000 I had retired from teaching cello and from the musical groups I played with. That's also the year I formed my own publishing company, Granite Peak Publications. Since all our daughters had long since left New England, Bruno and I decided to enjoy our later years in a year-round pleasant climate, and we both favored the San Francisco Bay Area for that and for its beauty and cultural attractions. So 2004 found us buying a condo in the area, choosing to be near friends Bruno had known since high school. We kept up a bi-coastal existence until late October of 2005, when we condensed our life from nine rooms in Pawtucket to five-and-a-half in Menlo Park.
Scaled by popularity
Topics
Books
Entertainment
Film
Food & Cooking
Home and Family
Insider
Music
Technology
Video Games
|
|
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
