White Is the New Yellow
21 May 2008
Gardiner, MT—
Apparently, a visit to Yellowstone National Park in late May is best experienced atop a tauntaun. Maybe everyone in the world knew that, and you all assumed Wayne and I did, too. “Surely they’ve packed hats and gloves and snow boots for their May road trip,” everyone would have said to themselves, had it been obscure enough a detail to even register above their subconscious. We appreciate the benefit of the doubt you didn’t even know you gave us, everyone. But you know what they say about assumptions, right?
Try to imagine our surprise when we expected a carefree day of strolling around in t-shirts and were instead greeted with battalions of rain, snow, and wind intersecting violently at temperatures just above freezing.
We couldn’t have asked for worse weather, but we were still able to enjoy some of what the park had to offer, mostly from inside the car. There were abundant deer, bears, moose, buffalo, and coyote. There were countless creeks, lakes, rivers, geysers, and boiling springs bubbling furiously and reeking of sulfur. We drove through the forty-square-mile crater of a colossal, dormant volcano that is expected to quite suddenly bring about the end of all life on this continent within the next thousand years. And, bless its heart, the sky above it all just kept piling on the snow, because no one told it that summer is coming.