Goodbye to a long Winter

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Leslie

The snows are melting and although Sunlight creek is still not in the spring run-off phase, you can feel the weather breaking.

Last night it snowed lightly, but today its raining. It’s a slow warm-up, but it’s coming. My old neighbor who grew up in this valley tells me this was a normal winter in terms of snowfall, but I suspect its still not as cold as when he was growing up. His wife says that -25 degrees was regular then. Not now.

Several years ago I helped an elderly woman stage her landscape in order to sell her home. Her husband had been a great friend of mine and fellow beekeeper. Once he died Dorothy packed up the family home and moved to Idaho where her kids were. That was the year I bought my cabin in Wyoming and along with so many other strange coincidences, it turned out her father had been the Chief Engineer in Yellowstone from the spring of 1925 through the spring of 1930. The last two years he was the Assistant Superintendent at Mammoth under Horace Albright His name was Merrill Daum and the family had interviewed him and transcribed his memoirs. Dorothy graciously gave me a copy of the section from his time in the Park. Here are a few of his stories of snow in those days:

There were no concessionaires living in the park in the wintertime. They closed up everything. We had to go down to Gardiner and Livingston to do our shopping. We had cars and oh yes, the road was open. We only had light snow in that country. We could keep the road from the park open up to Mammoth with our own equipment, but from there on it was generally open. They had a train running in there every so often, so many days a week, so we had train service at Gardiner. So much of that country was rough and hot that the snow was not very thick on it.

I don’t know much about Middle Geyser basin. It wasn’t a good place to stop and just put a road through to yell at Old Faithful. That’s where we turned off from and went cross country to the Lake and Canyon or kept on going out to West Yellowstone or to Old Faithful. We had ten cabins about every ten miles on the ranger patrol station because they would patrol all along that area, especially the southern part of the Park because there might be poachers come in to kill the game. They’d go around in the winter time on skis. That’s a long trip around that part. Down towards the southern entrance there might be ten, twelve feet of snow. I’ll never forget looking at one of the bridges; there was a stream going under and all that snow on top of the bridge. One winter the bridge just broke.

The wintertime was mainly spent getting ready for the next year. Then we had to get ready to remove the snow in the spring. We started at Cody,Wyoming at the entrance. About thirty miles from Cody up to the entrance. We got as far as the Park with snow 12 to 15 to 20 feet deep. We’d blast it out with TNT which Uncle Sam gave us. That would start it thawing and then we’d take a big power shovel and shovel the stuff so we had a two-way highway through there to the east entrance of the park. From there on we’d use our own equipment. The deep snow was right there at the entrance. That was the high point. We’d generally try to get the Park open by the 1st of June. By the 6th of June we were officially open, I believe. But you couldn’t make some of the interior trips that early. It would be long in July before you could get away from the snow.

Here is a photo tribute to my 2010-2011 winter in Wyoming. After this long and snowy winter, I think I am officially a Wyomingite!