Happy trails

Four black lumps stood out in the fading daylight, silhouetted on a ridge. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” someone joked, “if that was a bunch of wolves after a bison?” “Well, yeah, that’s what it is,” replied the guy riding shotgun in the snow van, binoculars plastered to his face. It was just past sunset in Yellowstone National Park and we were heading back to our yurt camp after an intense day of skiing, hiking and animal watching.

I had thought the focus of the week would be wilderness skiing – you know, empty meadows, picturesquely frozen waterfalls, deafening silence. Who expected Disney meets National Geographic?

On a ridge north of Mud Volcano, three wolves had cornered a bison and were circling him, trying to wear him down. The bison’s tail was raised – a sign of alarm.

The wolves moved in and the bison wheeled, lunging toward them. They skittered back, then forward again and so it went, well into darkness.

The next morning, back at the ridge, the wolves were still there but sitting in snowless scrub while the bison calmly grazed 50 yards away. The bison slowly made his way off the ridge to the road while the wolves, inexplicably, did nothing.

Then, as the sun came up, the wolves started howling – a mournful, low-pitched wail that seemed to bounce across the valley until it surrounded us. Even the owner of the park’s yurt camp, who’s worked here 30 years, had never seen anything like that.

I had been to Yellowstone Park in winter half a dozen times, yet somehow missed the fact there’s been a yurt camp operating out of Canyon Village since 1983.

Of the 115,000 winter visitors to Yellowstone each year, maybe 10 percent cross-country ski, and most of them just shuffle around geysers for an hour or so. The other extreme is a few hardy souls who do serious backcountry ski camping.

Yellowstone Expeditions’ yurt camp is a compromise for folks who want to ski backcountry but don’t want to sleep in a tent. It’s camping, but in comfort – sleeping in heated canvas huts with access to hot showers.

The skiing ranges from three-mile jaunts to backcountry geysers for the novices to all-day treks to interior canyons and hot swimming holes for the serious skiers.

You travel to trailheads in vans fitted with skis and treads (like large snowmobiles). It’s on these trips that you get to see the best animals – and the animals are everywhere, since they come down from the mountains during winter for the warmth and exposed grass around geysers.

All this is led by Arden Bailey, a sweet, somewhat eccentric soul of boundless energy who has worked in the park since the 1970s. Bailey is everywhere – driving vans, leading skiers, even sponging off the dinner table.

Each morning we grabbed coffee at 6:45 a.m. and headed out for a dawn run, hoping for blood-red sunrises over the steaming Yellowstone River and perhaps a critter sighting.

The first day, there weren’t any good colors in the sky, but at Alum Creek, a small meadow between rolling hills, we spotted two bison near an isolated clump of trees across the river. In the dawn fog, it was all black and white and shades of charcoal, softened by the haze into sparse silhouettes.

Then the radio in our van crackled with a message from the other camp van: “Sun pillars on the canyon rim!”

This happens maybe three or four times a winter. Frozen mist from the canyon waterfall creates crystals that catch sunlight.

We took off at as much of a clip as a snow van can manage – all of maybe 20 mph. But we hardly went a mile before we screeched to a stop.

The sun had caught a bend of the river, turning the water a liquid platinum and sending tendrils of steam through the pine tree branches. In the middle of this rose a vertical rainbow streak some 30 feet high.

A mile beyond, we found our sun pillar. It was a glowing column of ice crystals spinning madly like a tornado just off the rim of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

From where we stood, the sparkling crystals appeared to set a dead snag on fire. And a few steps to the left, the pillar lit a small tree, like something biblical – our very own burning bush.

Every day brought some new surprise. One morning we set out for Yellowstone Lake but didn’t get far. First it was swans silhouetted against a rising sun, then coyotes loping across a meadow and then the bison – on the road, in the valley, on the ridges.

And especially at Mud Volcano, where dozens wandered around the fumaroles, posing fetchingly among the frost-covered trees, strolling down the boardwalks and eventually stomping through the parking lot.

Mud Volcano is one of those spots that sets Yellowstone apart, especially in the winter. Vapor from the hot springs had coated every twig, branch and pool with hoarfrost an inch thick. In the middle of the mud flats, needle frost had grown like blades of grass – thousands of thin shards erupting from the mud, each laced with crystalline webs of ice.

Yeah, we did ski. Eventually. The way our schedule worked out, we would go out at dawn and spend a few hours watching critters, come back for a late breakfast, then ski till late afternoon with a break to eat a sandwich.

But that was just us. Each group, said Bailey, finds its own routine and flexibility is what makes this operation unique.

We dragged our camera gear to the canyon one night and experimented with time exposures. The canyon by full moon is truly awesome – all monochrome blacks and whites, but with an ethereal glow on the frozen waterfalls.

Hey, how many people can say they’ve seen the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone by moonlight – in winter?

Our group was fairly typical for one of these weeks: people in their 50s and 60s, in decent shape, the kind of folks who have three bikes in the garage along with a few sets of skis and a membership at the local gym. There was an engineer, a retired teacher, accountants, a jewelry designer and a pipe fitter.

And while most were experienced cross-country skiers, a few were not. So each day, the faster group would head out for something ambitious – say, a seven-mile round trip to hot springs – while the rest of us went to closer waterfalls and overlooks.

After a day or so, we became family, bad jokes and all. Bailey, it turns out, has an inexhaustible supply of really bad, squeaky-clean jokes.

“What did the mother buffalo say to the baby when he left home? Bye, Son.”

And: “We used to cook eggs in the hot springs for guests, but we can’t anymore. The park rangers don’t allow poaching.”

Then there were the Buford-isms, courtesy of Bailey’s old friend and guide, Bruce (Buford) Miller:

“You have to grow old; you don’t have to mature.”

“Marriage continues to be the number one cause of divorce.”

And, considering I’m size-challenged, my personal favorite: “All things being equal, fat people use more soap.”

OK, skiing. Honest, we really did some.

We went through forests filled with animal tracks in the snow – dainty coyote prints, large wolf prints, triple-pronged rabbit tracks, weird little offset pine marten holes and huge trenches left by bison.

We lunched by geysers far from park signboards and boardwalks. We visited frozen waterfalls and skied across bridges.

But our best trek was around the edge of Yellowstone Lake. The hoarfrost was astounding. The entire surface of the lake was covered with crystal feathers, each nearly an inch long. A blanket of delicate sparkles stretched clear across the frozen lake.

We cut through some trees and came out on a point where we could see the Absoroka Mountains rolling in blue and white waves on the horizon.

As a final touch, we had company on the way back – a coyote who trotted along the frozen lake shore, his thick fur gold in the sun. He stopped, looked directly at us, then raised his nose to the sky and howled not once but half a dozen times.

It never did snow that week, but we got faint northern lights one night. And our last morning, a red fox wandered into camp, sniffed around and posed charmingly by the camp propane tank before wandering off.