Yellowstoning

Yes, it's amazing

Here’s Old Faithful, a few minutes before erupting, under the stars. I see why they made this a national park.

I’ve been to Montana three times, and Yellowstone National Park twice, the second time just this last week. I surprisingly don’t think I’ve written about any of those trips before, mostly because I went there before I started writing, and never got to thinking about what I’d say about it. But it’s interesting.

The West is very different from the East. They call it “Big Sky Country” for a reason; you almost feel like you’re in a floating world, like in an old simulator video game. You’d think, say, the flatness of Delaware would feel the same, but it doesn’t.

There’s a lot of vernacular architecture, or at least a lot of pastiche/homage architecture. Everything looks “Old West,” such that you wonder whether they’re doing that self-consciously, or whether our everyday architecture looks “Eastern.”

I remember thinking it was interesting that a lot of the houses in Bozeman, where I’ve flown in and stayed, were pretty small, older homes, but a lot of them had some kind of expensive recreational vehicle or equipment parked outside. It’s a different trade-off from a city, where you have a small apartment but the life of the city right outside your door. In fact it’s almost the opposite: a small living space in exchange for access to a great deal of country and natural recreation opportunities.

Montana, along with Idaho and probably other places, saw a huge exurban boom during the pandemic, with people fanning out from California (and elsewhere) all the way to these places. It strikes me that the people moving in probably are pretty different from most of the people who’ve been there awhile, and I wonder how that all goes down.

I’ll probably write a little more about some of that, but today I want to share some photos from our trip! We spent a week in Montana and Wyoming driving around Yellowstone and Grand Teton. The best part, honestly, was probably having spotty internet access, and being forced to see what’s in front of you. It’s like waking up. You don’t realize how much devices mediate your reality until you just have to put them down. It is very worth it to put them down, except to take photos:

The first time I went out west and spent a couple of days in Yellowstone was 2012, and I didn’t have a smartphone then. The absence of a cell signal didn’t matter to me, because nothing I did all day was mediated through the internet. This time, I noticed it a lot.

I can only imagine—which is to say, I can’t imagine—what this landscape would have looked like to someone who was not only seeing it for the first time, but who barely knew it existed.

Most visitors today know what they’re going to see, even if a photograph can’t capture really being there. But someone from a crowded, industrial-era city who managed to make it out here? It must have been even more incredible than it is now.