Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park. The tug of America’s happy childhood

By Janis Turk

If America’s childhood could be found by GPS or held a physical location on a map, its latitude and longitude would intersect in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone is a stand-alone state in the country of memory. Sprawling across a slim southern edge of Montana and cutting a broad-swath through northern Wyoming, it proudly straddles the Great Divide like a cowboy on a saddle, while Idaho, to the west, rides alongside—its brave Ke-mo sah-bee.

There is a magic about Yellowstone that comes from the mist of hot bubbling springs and steam-sprouting geysers.

In the hills and valleys throughout the park, ghostly sulfur mist rises from soft rock outcroppings and thin, crusty salt surfaces.

Boiling brooks below gurgle in the ground. The geysers hiss, whistle, give, and moan before erupting. Their scent of the sulfur is stiff and oddly familiar—a faint tinge of timelessness lingers at its edge.

In early autumn, small heart-shaped aspen leaves are still a bright apple green in the high mountains, though a few groves are already making a bold yellow stand. In those bright spots, a bank of glistening gold doubloons, like money growing on trees, dangles delicately from white branches, trembling and skittery in the now-cool wind.

A Thousand Burning Bushes

A little lower, in the valleys of this Big Sky country closer to the Grand Teton mountains and Jackson Hole, the aspens have already changed colors. There they look like a thousand burning bushes—blazing but not consumed.

After driving down from Bozeman, Montana, pass through Yellowstone’s Western Gate in late September, and park rangers in Smokey-the-Bear-style hats and khaki uniforms greet you with a map.

As you enter the park, miraculously, time seems to fold back on itself; the green hues fade from the Aspen trees, and gold emerges as you’ll enter a world of log cabins, western lodges, cowhide furniture, bear rugs, wagon-wheel lamps, divinity candy and souvenir shops, wheat-colored plains where bison roam, and yippie-ky-o-kay-ay old west cowboy songs and a stream of old western serial memories.

And suddenly, there it is spread before you—your childhood.

Memories gust up from the ground like geysers. Towering pines, ancient oaks, root-linked aspen groves, Yellowstone is a many-splendored-thing, home to bear, elk, buckhorn sheep, bison, mountain goats, whitetail deer, and myriad birds.

Even if you’ve never been to America’s first national park, and such memories are not quite your own—merely leftover snapshots from some 1960s or 70s road trip in a camper with your folks to some state park, or from an old black and white “Gunsmoke” or “Big Valley” episode—they’re your memories all the same because indeed they America’s memories.

America’s childhood happened here.

This is the land of Sacajawea, Lewis, and Clark, fur trappers, gold rush guys, “Lonesome Dove” cowboys, Butch Cassidy bandits, wild west gunslingers, Gold Rush miners, saloon keepers, settlers, railroad builders—seekers all—and the history that comes alive here is bound to stir the soul just as if you’d lived it all yourself.

Arrive at Yellowstone’s mammoth-sized Lincoln-Log-like Old Faithful Inn, and I promise some part of you will feel like you’ve been there before—as if your very body holds the memory of this place it deep in the travel-worn creases and folds of your mind’s map.

A flood of nostalgia, not only for your own impossible youth but for our young nation’s hard-won childhood washes over you. The blood-and-tear-weary plight of her native peoples and the lonely hard winter lives of pioneers all seem to send smoke signals up from every stone chimney in the lodge.

Norman Maclean says it well in A River Runs Through It: “… Life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember.”

The Ellis Island of the West

From that life-becomes-literature feeling and that pleasant déjà vu of sinew-level-sensory memory emerges hope, especially when you realize what a marvel it is that it’s all still here. Not only the ancient spaces, the bubbling springs, and soft plains and the buffalo but the buildings of Yellowstone, too.

Structures built in the teens, 20s, and 30s still welcome guests. Travelers are sleeping tonight in the very cabins where your grandparents might have honeymooned.

All along the walls of the multi-level log lodges and restaurants of Yellowstone hang black and white turn-of-the-century photographs of women in long skirts and men in Howdy-Doody-style cowboy clothes, standing in these same spots, leaning against these same log walls, watching the same reliable geysers.

Like an Ellis Island of the West, Yellowstone has seen wanderers from every corner of the earth pass through since long before it had boundaries, fences, gates or even a name.

In early 1872, Congress set aside 1,221,773 acres of public land straddling the future states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho as America’s first national park, and on March 1 President Grant signed the Yellowstone Act of 1872.

This designated the region as a public “pleasuring-ground,” to be preserved “from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within.” And in the past 142 years since, generations of travelers have come here; and, God willing, future generations will continue this ancient pilgrimage to this park after long we’re gone.

Old Faithful

There is nothing as reliable as Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone.

Even now, while I go about my day, and tonight as I drift off sleep, Old Faithful will erupt on schedule. Think of that next time you wake in the night: Somewhere, a geyser blows.

And like Old Faithful, the Wild West I imagined and the Yellowstone I remembered continues, just as it did over a hundred years ago, remaining largely unchanged, unchallenged, and unspoiled by the modern world and my time-diluted adult memory.

In the same way that Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are connected by Yellowstone—like clonal colonies of aspens with a shared ancestry in its roots—so are we Americans all connected to one another, to this land, and to our shared story.

“This land is your land; this land is my land,” as Woody Guthrie sings, so it’s only natural that our collective memory would be stronger than any one individuals’.

Before leaving the park, I stop at a gift shop and buy a junior park ranger hat and a buffalo-shaped bank for my kids—a kind of kitschy insurance policy that my Wild West memories will live on in my children and maybe they’ll begin to remember America’s childhood, as well.

Perhaps one day, like Old Faithful, nostalgia will spring up in them when they, too, come back here—again—for the very first time.

Where to Stay and Map Out Memories near Yellowstone

Mountain Sky Guest Ranch, Montana set in Montana’s aptly named Paradise Valley, Mountain Sky Guest Ranch continues to top the list of the nation’s best upscale guest ranch resorts. www.mtnsky.com

Rainbow Ranch Lodge Resort, Montana This small luxury Montana Lodge along the highway leading to Yellowstone combines the rugged adventure of the Wild West with the service expected of a world-class resort.

Be sure to dine at its restaurant, known for fine ranch-to-table cuisine from executive chef Jake Irwin. www.rainbowranchbigsky.com

Spring Creek Ranch, Wyoming, At the base of the Grand Tetons in Jackson Hole, just south of Yellowstone National Park, atop a 700-foot rise above the valley floor on a 1000-acre wildlife sanctuary sprawls the stunning Spring Creek Ranch.

Travelers will love this serene resort with luxury lodging, including rooms in an inn with big wood-burning fireplaces; 3-bedroom townhomes; and 4- bedroom Mountain Villas. Only 5 miles from the town of Jackson, this enchanting western resort is sure to lasso your heart. www.springcreekranch.com

Yellowstone National Park Lodging. For rustic cabins to luxury suites in Yellowstone, visit this website.