Yellowstone & Grand Teton Photo Expedition

When I think about Yellowstone being the first national park, part of me is just like, well, yeah, of course. Why wouldn't you protect this place? It's just so unique. It's hard to even fathom the amount of open space that we have here. It takes a day to drive across Yellowstone. Its forests, It's big open grasslands. Geysers bubbling hot water shooting off. Tons and tons of animals that make use of that habitat. My favorite thing in the world is just sit there and take it all in for a day and and watch the bison roam by. Just swept up in the majesty of this animal and the adrenaline rush of being on the landscape with that animal and knowing that they're so much larger than you and that they're just part of something that's so much bigger than any of us. They play such an important role in Yellowstone. And so we get this intense competition, massive herds, noisy herds roaming across the land, the males bellowing, the dropping of hooves and the strain of the animals, every muscle in their body tensed, eyes bulging out, and you can see the blood vessels in their eyes, fur flying, and, yeah, it's it's wild. You know, that's really what makes you feel like you're on the American Serengeti. I think it's the closest thing to the experience of what it would have been like to be with these giant herds. People always assume that, like, oh, you must have been born and raised in nature, like raised by wolves or something to like have developed this line of work. But I grew up in a city. I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, right smack in the middle of downtown. Had this vision that I would be a veterinarian and so would my husband. And then we would breed golden Retrievers. And then I went camping for the first time at age twelve, and that experience of camping at the edge of a lake in the pouring rain, listening to the call of loons and wolves howling for the first time, and I saw my first moose on that trip, but also the aesthetics and the feeling of being out in a wilderness area that just flicked that switch and just everything changed for me. Goodbye veterinarian and whatever I do I want to work outside. Continuing to chase that feeling of expansiveness in particular that connection with wildlife. And what's so cool about working at Nat Hab is that I feel like I'm now a roaming park naturalist. So I'm not working for the park service, but here I am getting to play that same role as the interpretive park ranger, just transplanted into a landscape that I've fallen in love with. There are just so many different species on this landscape. Of course, bison come to mind. Bison were nearly exterminated from this landscape. Yellowstone served as a refuge. There were about twenty three bison left in this remote region of Yellowstone that served as a refuge for them called the Pelican Valley. So this is the one place in the world where American bison, this particular species, has existed in this state since prehistoric times. European colonists come in and discover what feels like an unlimited supply of bison, right, as far as the eye can see. You could just hear the thundering of their hooves, the booming of an ocean or distant thunder rolling. We're impressed by the sound of maybe a thousand bison that we can see within our view in the Lamar Valley, but just imagine a whole landscape full of them. They almost went the way of the passenger pigeon and so many others that, yeah, we just completely removed that also used to range in the millions. That's when people come in. There's this push to save this population. There is this history of, you know, twenty five years of really intensive ranching of bison in Yellowstone. So it was the wild bison stock and then some additional bison were brought in from Montana and Texas to help increase the genetic diversity of the Yellowstone bison population. The buffalo would be extinct today if it had not been for our government and a few public spirited men like Mr. Clark. Bison management is one of the most complex issues surrounding Yellow stone. There is such a tension between the communities outside of this national park and here. Because say if bison range as far as the Paradise Valley north of Gardner, they're going to be coming into contact with cattle and there's risk of spreading a disease called brucellosis. It's a bacterial disease that about half of the bison in the Yellowstone population carry. It gets a little bit tricky when you consider that cattle actually introduced brucellosis to bison. We created the problem and bison are wrapped up in the mix of it. And it's just a question of how many bison can we tolerate on the landscape? And it totally depends who you ask. I think that we benefit from diversity on the landscape. Their pattern of grazing increases the productivity. There's more nutrients, there's more protein being produced on this landscape. It's something like one hundred and fifty percent when the bison are grazing it relative to just letting the grass grow. There's part of me that says yes, let all the animals be where they would naturally be. I also appreciate having food on my table and the other uses that take place on the landscape. Bison are a success story, right? We went from twenty three, now we have over five thousand bison. There's a message of hope there. If we can figure out how to manage our relationship with bison and all the tensions around it, yeah, there are lessons that we can take out elsewhere. All of those questions around land management and tolerance and our position relative to other species and how we can share the planet with other animals, And we maybe owe it to these animals and to these landscapes to think about how we can restore that relationship and be more in sync with the species that are native to here and to try to find those creative solutions. Yellowstone is total magic, Especially as a wildlife guide in this role that I feel like I have the best job in the world because I'm just doing exactly what I wanna be doing. I'm in the position of getting to take twelve people in to share in that experience. And so when you have people who appreciate it as much as you do and get to connect, there's something so, so rewarding, especially in getting to initiate people into something that you love to do. There's also a sense of peace, a sense of belonging. And whatever emotional experience is happening, that kind of, like, tug, feeling present, feeling alive in your senses, feeling like you're a part of this place. You can capture that feeling, it's easier to access that feeling here. And I always wanna encourage people to take that home as well.