Tracking in Yellowstone

I am sitting under Sylvia Plath’s gnarled old fig tree, which buckles under blossoms of fat, bronze figs. I watch all my lives unravel into little golden sunsets – a wildlife biologist, a photographer, a writer, an artist - until there is nothing but one endless knotted clump brimming with swollen, sickly-sweet brown fruit, which suddenly drops and smashes on the ground and has its seeded flesh torn to pieces by a manic, seething torrent of squirrels.

As much as one should be grateful for having these formative experiences in addition to gaining perspectives that only the ones privileged enough to travel can gain, you can let yourself miss a life un-lived that continues close to love ones, feel so overwhelmed with the possibility of uprooting oneself again that it makes you ill, feel bone-aching sadness as you forcefully close the chapter that you have spent so many years writing. I try to piece together the next six months, three years, five years, and I feel smothered with the babble of unlived lives like a flood suffocating the land with silt and debris.

The life I have now hums with the thumps and crickles that sputter inside my ear. Tinnitus comes and goes, but mostly it’s there, the hiss of a receding wave that rolls over the pebbles of traffic, conversation, birdsong, music, silence. It’ll be there forever, probably.  Sometimes it is a low hum, other times it is a pendulous skittering of static. I’m trying to make friends with it, use it as a way to measure how much I’ve healed since the early days and remind myself how much more I could have lost if I never had the surgery in the first place.

But onto a more fun topic. By the end of summer, the wildlife work up north was starting to wind down, so I organised to go on a mammal tracking residency in Yellowstone National Park from October to November – cold enough for snow, but not so late into winter. My mentor was a carnivore biologist who has been tracking American mammals since he was 14 years old - his first job was finding elk kills in rural Wyoming. He’s worked closely with other wolf biologists on the wolf re-introduction program in Yellowstone since the mid-90s, helped run the second-longest running atmospheric carbon dioxide monitoring station in the world, and has written tracking guides since the 1980’s. He’s 75 now, and has lived in a little town called Gardiner, Montana, on the Yellowstone Park boundary for 30 years, running classes and workshops at the education centre I stayed at for the month.

Getting answers to logistical questions prior to the residency were hit and miss. He had a tendency of responding to my meticulous bullet points of questions by forwarding the original email and brutally interrupting sentences with scant replies in Comic Sans MS. When I asked for the second time whether I needed snow chains or not, he responded (quite a few days later) ‘bring a bathing suit for the hot springs and old river boots for the river’. I began to really question if this residency was actually a good idea to pursue. Eventually I convinced myself that this was a promising trait of an old school, less technologically-inclined tracker. He’s 75, has lived in the Arctic for 20 winters, and watched wolves rip elk calves to pieces countless times. Our version of pressing matters just doesn’t correlate with his. A couple days before my scheduled leaving date I had another wobble to my partner– ‘Am I insane for doing this?’ to which he replied, yes.

I took three days to drive to Gardiner. The Montana landscape soon became synonymous with sweeping mountain ranges, an abundance of road-killed raccoons, and Trump signs. Jim shows up at the centre at 9am every day in an old 4WD that rattles like tools trying to escape a large biscuit tin. We spend the day checking his favourite tracking spots and taking footprint and stride measurements.

By the end of the first week there was a foot of snow, and temperatures were down to -11 Celsius, causing many mammals in the park to come down from the higher elevations and forage in the warmer valley bottoms. Hundreds of pronghorn grazed alongside horses and cattle in the fields. They were a lot smaller than I expected. They’re the size of sheep and have very endearing inquisitive, concerned expressions. Elk, still with their calves, were all over town. They’d frequently descend on the driveway and surround my parked car, grazing on fallen leaves all afternoon. I was in a small town so there was never an expectation to be anywhere on time, but whenever I needed to do a last-minute milk run for my cup of tea it was quite inconvenient.

In terms of making art, I wasn’t really in the headspace. The residency took up most of my time, as it included lectures, homework, an independent research project, plus time spent helping Jim with his own mammal project. But I did manage to create some pieces I’ve connected with. Below is a cyanotype of the inside of a wolf skull Jim had archived in his museum. And another one of Sagebrush that has slowly grown on me.

My favourite - I think - is this one; a sonogram of a raven calling in the park. I turned the corner and the raven was there, perched on a fire-killed mature Douglas-fir that overlooked a black bear den.

I’m keen to hear your thoughts!

I also produced a short book on the research project I undertook. I measured the footprints and stride lengths of seven ungulate species found throughout the Rockies (mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, moose, pronghorn, and bison). Aswell as data analysis, it includes some notes on species ecology and the anatomy of the cloven-hooved mammal. If you’re interested in an introduction into ungulate tracking in North America, copies are available here on Amazon for $15:

https://www.amazon.ca/Cloven-hooved-Mammals-Rockies-Tracking-Guide/dp/B0BPGMFPNM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3D8HM3F0NZ1HS&keywords=tracking+guide+cloven-hooved+mammals&qid=1674095424&sprefix=tracking+guide+cloven-hooved+mammals%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1