Skiing in Yellowstone

Here on our ridge in the Bangtail mountains, the January thaw is continuing. Birds are flying everywhere, icicles are dripping, and the snowpack is disappearing.

Since there is not enough snow to ski and we needed a ski fix, we decided to go somewhere higher and colder. We drove an hour south of Livingston to Yellowstone Park, then continued through the park on the only road that is kept plowed in the winter: the road to Cooke City. In Mammoth, the elk were grazing as always, the terraces and hot pools were steaming, and while there were plenty of people around, it was much quieter than in the summer.

Along the road east of Mammoth we saw a magnificent bull elk with a large rack of antlers, a small herd of Bighorn rams on a rocky cliff above the road, and a really scrungy looking coyote running along the road. I didn't get any pictures, because I was driving. We were stopped by a family of bison that was dawdling on the pavement. A little farther on, two juvenile bison and one full grown one burst out of the snow bank in front of us, galloped across the road and trotted on across the field on the other side. A typical drive in the park.

We parked at the trailhead for the Lamar River Valley and strapped on the skis. The sun was shining, but the air was cold enough to have created a layer of surface hoar on the snow. Surface hoar forms when water vapor in the air sublimates into solid form without condensing into liquid droplets first. It makes large, flat, feathery-looking crystals that in this case lay about an inch thick on the surface of the snow. Those large flat surfaces reflect the sun brilliantly, so that it looked like we were skiing through a sea of diamonds. The hoarfrost had also built up feathery crystals on every blade of tall grass that was still sticking up through the knee-deep snow.

We skied for a few hours up the valley, then turned around and skied back. We stayed on a high bench above the river instead of following the trail, so we had beautiful views of the valley.
We got in a few turns on the way back, but because of the extreme avalanche hazard we did not go up any of the steep slopes where we could have been in telemark heaven. We just skied along the bench and up a few gentle hills, looking at the scenery, delighting in the light show from the the hoarfrost crystals, identifying animal tracks in the snow (ermine, elk, coyote, but alas, no wolf prints), and basking in the sun.

There were bison everywhere digging their faces through the snow to get to the grass underneath. (Why do you think they have all that fuzzy wool around their faces?)

We skied right by a pair of elk antlers sticking out of the snow. We had a debate about what they were doing there. Elk lose their antlers in the winter, but I think it is still pretty early for that, and when you find antlers that an elk has shed, you usually find only one at a time, lying flat on the ground, not a pair of them sticking up like sculpture. I thought that there was probably an elk skull buried in the snow, and maybe even a whole skeleton. We did find a bunch of animal hair that a coyote had been digging around a little further on. It might have been elk hair. Tom thought that someone had found the antlers elsewhere and propped them up like that for the aesthetic effect. Anyway, you aren't allowed to take anything out of the park, so we left them where they are for the next skiers to puzzle over.

At the end of the day, we crossed a footbridge over the river and headed back to the car for the drive home. On the way home, we saw a small herd of pronghorn antelope near Mammoth. If I have to drive for a couple of hours to ski, I have to say that skiing in the magical landscapes of Yellowstone Park makes it worth the trip.