We drove the Mammoth - Tower road yesterday, and did some snowshoeing out on the Blacktail Plateau.  Even got out and took some pictures off the Gardner River bridge just east of Mammoth (picture below), something we’ve always said we wanted to do but have never played tourist long enough to stop and actually do. 

The Gardner river looked beautiful in the snow, and undoubtedly deserves more angling respect than it receives, oft living in the shadow of its greater river relatives in the western and northeast corners of the Park.  The guys at Park’s Fly Shop in Gardiner are the masters of this fine fishery and can tell you everything you need to know about this gem.  They run a nice shop and offer sound advice. 

We were pleasantly surprised to see the number of bison that we did yesterday, and even more so their condition.  Our local media (and some national media) is flooded with information suggesting the bison of Yellowstone are bedragled, hazed endlessly, starving, and battered.  We observed several mid sized herds (including the herd grazing along the Gardner in the picture above), and found the animals to appear surprisingly robust.  My family (Mark) ran an equestrian facility in northwest Montana for years, and we’re acutely familiar with the stresses that winter places on large animals - while the bison we observed weren’t as hearty as in July after months on spring grass, they did not appear to be critically stressed.  We also observed very closely bison rooting through the snow on the Blacktail Plateau, and clearly they were reaching the dessicated grasses beneath the snow.   It’s winter, the Park has snowcover closer to average, and it’s tough on all the wildlife in the Park.   One might very reasonably proffer however that this is how the ecosystem was designed to work - winters come and go, and bison, like all the wildlife in the Park, soldier on. 

There are groups that appear to be trying to make the bison a “sentinel animal” for the Park.  The bison is a wonderful, majestic creature, unique in structure and form, and with an astounding history (having just reread Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage detailing the adventures of Lewis and Clark I too would loved to have seen the massive herds on the plains).    The bison is indeed a critical feature of the Park’s dynamic and complex ecosystem, and despite what you might have heard this winter in the media, bison will continue to be a key feature of the Park for decades to come.  

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