Yellowstone & The Grand Tetons: Leslie Knope Would’ve Been Into It.
Isn’t it funny how, when we’re at a famous site or landmark or location, we all pull out our phones, eager to capture what’s in front of us—even though it’s been photographed so many times before? How we try to keep our hands from shaking while extending them out, over other people’s heads, desperate to pause what we’re seeing, the legend of whatever site or landmark or location it is standing in front of us, how we save it or share it or send it to our loved ones, look where I am! Look what I see!
I’m thinking about this a lot at Yellowstone, overlooking a terrifyingly steep waterfall deep in the park, sandwiched between my parents and about forty other tourists milling about the concrete platform with selfie sticks and professional cameras and iPhones and even polaroid cameras. There’s probably a far better picture of this waterfall in the gift shop for sale at an admittedly steep price. There are definitely tons of perfect shots online, all a Google search away. And yet, here we all are, huddling over the edge of the fence, each of our lens pointed at the same thing.
But it’s impossible to fully capture the brilliance of it all—the way the water falls over the side of the rocks and darts in a white sheet of sheer force down to the water below, exploding in an swallowing splash and spitting down the river until it finally slows and calms in the shade of the valleys. A video can’t capture it all: the start, the climax, the slow finish. A picture most certainly can’t begin to tell this water’s story. It’s overwhelming and beautiful and scary all at once, and there’s no way any of our pictures can say all of that.
We’re in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone—perhaps a less creative name than what could’ve been, but it’s a canyon, and it’s grand, so it fits. We’ve been driving through the park all day, stopping at random to see steaming geysers and rivers and even herds of bison stand lazily in the barren fields. I think about how cars look so out of place here, metal and smoke against a backdrop of beige grass.
Regardless, it’s incredible that national parks exist—expanses of land, saved for their beauty! There’s little-to-no internet access here, and aside from those aforementioned cars and a few general stores and gas stations and lodges throughout the massive park, it’s the most natural place I’ve seen in a long time. No commercialization, no connection to the outside world, just the land, the animals, and the occasional sign warning people to carry bear spray.
I’ll admit it: I’m a little terrified of the prospect of bears. My mom found a book in one of the general stores all about ways in which visitors of the park have died. She tells me about one guy who hiked off the trail (against all advice) and eventually got mauled by a bear. What a wonderful thing to share with your daughter—the daughter that loves entertaining irrational fears and rational fears alike, a long list that now includes bears!
While in Yellowstone, we stay at a lodge with a main lobby and dining area in a grand wooden building. Guests stay in the tiny cabins behind this building. It costs $5 an hour to get on the WiFi. I swallow my self-hatred and type my credit card number into my computer. I guess the beauty of nature isn’t quite enough to keep me entertained.
Mom, Dad, and I agree that the food served at our Yellowstone lodge is the worst yet—cafeteria style, kind of cold, semi-terrible choices. We also agree that we feel like we’re at camp, eating off of plates on trays in a giant dining room, surrounded by muffled chatter and an air of excitement.
Our next day is spent in the Grand Tetons. We do a hike near Jenny Lake up to Inspiration Point. It’s beautiful, aside from the signs reminding us to keep bear spray at hand, which we do not have. Even more thrilling is the discovery of a dock at the end of the hike, where we are invited to get on a boat back to the parking lot from which we started. This is how all hikes should go: tough incline, stunning view, boat that luxuriously floats you back to the starting point.
We chugged water bottles and shared a bag of barbecue chips on our way over to Jackson, where we went up in cable cars over the mountains and ate a homemade waffle smothered in butter and maple syrup 10,000 feet up. And when we happened upon a mountain bike course where riders performed stunts on steep ramps and wheelies, we decided to settle in at a nearby restaurant patio with local IPAs and watch, mesmerized by wheels in the air and the helmeted people controlling them.
Our next lodge overlooks the stunning outline of the Grand Tetons, a stunning expanse of the Rocky Mountains. We have wine and a cheese plate while watching the sunset of the rigidity of them in the distance, and it’s beautiful, and here we all were, whipping our phones out to capture the beauty once again. Mine are all terrible.
But maybe the point of taking all of these pictures isn’t because they’re going to be the best. There’s no way—not with National Geographic photographers (among many others) capturing the uncaptureable better than the rest of us. Maybe we’re just trying to take a piece of it for ourselves, bottling up a feeling rather than a sight, an experience rather than something we’ll simply frame.
We leave the national parks early on Saturday morning, heading to the quaint town of Bozeman, Montana. I watch as my cell service slowly comes back, as the winding roads in the park slowly transform into the straight one that makes up I-90. I won’t lie—I love the world we’ve created, the one with easy communication and restaurants that serve beautifully plated food on aesthetically pleasing plates and air conditioning and a delightful lack of bears, but I suddenly feel an appreciation for the opposite of all that, for hills that host nothing but trees, for geysers that bubble and hiss and steam, for waterfalls that utterly terrify me, even for signs that remind me how delicate I am, that a bear could kill me if I’m not careful. Okay, maybe I don’t miss that part, but I took a picture of the sign anyway.