National Parks Traveler

Calm Yellowstone Lake waters are a paddler's best friend/Kurt Repanshek

Essay | The Other Yellowstone

By Kurt Repanshek

We turned our backs and paddled away from the Yellowstone most people know. Away from the steaming landscape of Old Faithful and Steamboat geysers, of Grand Prismatic Spring and Mammoth Hot Springs, and of the Lamar and Hayden valleys with their bison, and occasionally bear, jams. Left behind was the Yellowstone of conga lines of visitors navigating the Upper and Midway geyser basin boardwalks, the reservation-only dining rooms, the bus tours disgorging their occupants.

We left it all behind, launching our kayaks from the beach at Grant Village and heading into a Yellowstone that requires you to be self-sufficient but also allows you to revel in nature in the raw. No parking lots, no dining rooms, no hot showers or soft beds, no picturesque lodges.

We slowly headed east, into the rising sun, tracing the Yellowstone Lake shoreline. Passing Breeze Point – which mercifully wasn’t breezy – we veered right, steadily stroking our way south, passing Wolf Point and Snipe Point, and crossing Eagle Bay.

The Dixie Fire and other blazes to the west had left a gauzy veil over the Absaroka Range that draws a towering (peaks rise towards 11,000 feet) and jagged line along the national park’s eastern border, but the subtler aspects of exploring Yellowstone by kayak didn’t disappoint.

This was a five-day excursion that allowed us to recharge even while paddling for three or four hours at a time, to distance ourselves from phones and texts and emails and traffic and crowds, to immerse into nature.

Where, I wondered, was the rest of the elk?/Kurt Repanshek

There were bald eagles and their fledglings, some launching from snags and gliding above us, others watching our progress. While we didn’t see any elk on the hoof, they left their tracks, and I spied an elk jaw several feet underwater, its molars intact. No wolves howled near us on this trip, and though no grizzlies shared their meadows with us, one did leave its mark in the form of 8-inch-long tracks striding along the beach fronting one of our camps.

This was a natural park experience, similar, no doubt, to that which prompted John Muir to regale the mountains, to note as he perched at the lip of Yosemite Falls that, "The tremendous grandeur of the fall in form and sound and motion, acting at close range, smothered the sense of fear..."

Yellowstone Lake can evoke fear when winds whip its waters into 5-foot or taller waves, and the skies spit graupel onto your head and shoulders. The appearance of grizzlies near your camp will give you pause, as well. But that is the real Yellowstone, not the one diminished by concrete and asphalt and buildings, of boardwalks that guide your steps and fencing that tries to keep you from danger.

In the backcountry, whether the setting can be both fierce or tranquil, you find an experience many others haven't.

As we came ashore each afternoon, we pitched our tents in forests carpeted by pine needles and sprawling mats of wild strawberry patches that left us disappointed because we had missed the harvest. The surrounding lodgepole forest, much of which had burned during the historic 1988 wildfires and other blazes that followed, was growing thick and green and piney again with newer generations of trees that had just about replaced those consumed by the flames.

There was the young mule deer doe that inspected us and our camp one morning as we lingered over breakfast, quizzically eyeing our tents and us from a short distance. Later, as we paddled deeper into the heart of the park, a lone white pelican wheeled high overhead, possibly for the sheer joy of being able to do so, or maybe searching for a fish that came too near the lake's surface. The only other human paddler we saw during our stay was a lone canoeist with an easy blade stroke slowly making an early morning sojourn back towards Grant Village, hoping to avoid the white caps that afternoon winds might bring to the lake.

There was a raft of goldeyes, 30 or 40 strong, matching us stroke for stroke as we headed back towards Wolf Point for our last night on the lake, and more than a few skittish common merganzers showed themselves throughout the trip.

This is the other side of Yellowstone, where Canada geese – not cars, trucks, and busses – honk through the early morning and into the evening, where elk ramp up for their fall bugling symphony with a guttural barking not as sweet to the ear.

Kayaks are a great craft to take you deep into Yellowstone's lake country/Kurt Repanshek

Escaping into the backcountry of Yellowstone – or Great Smoky, Glacier, North Cascades, Sequoia, or any other national park, for that matter – allows you time to reflect on the purpose of the National Park System, and to be amazed by what it has to offer. Spend time surrounded by the abundant solitude and you'll likely begin to question the long lines of visitors that are encountered more and more often in the front country of parks these days and leave you wondering which experience – that of the front country or that awaiting you in the backcountry – is more rewarding and memorable.

At the same time, the mixed use of backcountry areas that are on the edge of official wilderness just might make you wonder what some seek out when they enter a national park.

I was surprised on our last night on the lake when a boat motored up to the campsite’s dock (there are a couple docks on Yellowstone Lake where boaters can overnight) and a man jumped out with a small chainsaw, walked past a pile of firewood, and sliced up a downed tree for his campfire. Not much later his two dogs leapt from the boat, despite park regulations barring dogs from leaving boats to go ashore. Fortunately, a small band of deer had passed through camp a short while earlier, before the dogs appeared.

Yellowstone Lake, with a watery footprint of 132 square miles and a hot-water-venting and quaking bed, is the largest freshwater lake above 7,000 feet in elevation in North America. It offers adventurers an unmatched opportunity to experience nature as the earliest explorers to the surrounding landscape did, and to measure their ability to be self-sufficient. The lake also is a commissary for 16 species of birds and mammals, ranging from eagles and pelicans to grizzly bears and river otters that rely greatly on its cutthroat trout for sustenance.

Are throbbing power boats cruising the lake a good fit in the world's oldest national park, one where preservation is supposed to trump enjoyment? Should Yellowstone Lake be restricted to muscle- and wind-powered craft, and more rangers placed out on patrol to guard against chainsaws and dogs on the loose? We never did see a ranger during our five days, a sign no doubt of the Park Service that is supplied by Congress, not the one the parks need.

Yellowstone is a global icon of the national parks movement and sits at the heart of the roughly 22-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Its 2.2 million acres are part described by the National Park Service as “one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth.” The park is home to the largest wild bison herd in the United States, and possibly the largest in North America. Wolves have thrived since a recovery effort was launched in the park in the mid-1990s, and there also are moose, antelope, bighorn sheep, coyotes, trumpeter swans, osprey, and black bears in this landscape. And, of course, grizzlies.

Across the country, wilderness, and its inhabitants, slowly are vanishing. How we explore national parks determines whether we can preserve both.

If you venture into the watery side of Yellowstone, be it the big lake or Shoshone Lake, you will surely emerge back into the other side of the park with a deeper appreciation for nature, the rewards it offers, and the intrinsic value of the parks.