Monday we headed out to Trout Lake, and stopped off at the petrified tree to visit a moose who’s often seen in that area.

At Trout Lake, a Barrow’s Goldeneye couple were swimming around under the moon.

We took a stroll over the hill and found another moose, this one completely unexpected.

Tonight, I ran into a Yellowstone friend who’s been away for a couple months and we did some quick catching up before needing to go our separate ways. She was excited about doing some hiking together as this will be her first summer in this part of the park and she’s never done some of the trails I’ve done the most.

I had to tell her maybe . . . I’m still waiting to hear when the testing date will be for the Duluth job, and then I’ll need to find out how long they expect the hiring process to take and how much staying there a month or two would cost me. I know I’d be paying a lot more than the weekly rate I get there in November.  Rather than just moving back to Duluth, I’m now thinking more along the lines of going back for as long as the process takes and then returning here if I don’t get the job. Seeing moose and bears on a frequent basis is a hard thing to leave no matter how much I dislike other aspects of being here.

I went along for a ride/hike last night. We stopped by the petrified tree looking for a moose but instead we saw a black bear with a cinnamon cub.

We went on to Slough Creek hoping to hike some of the trail there but the dirt road leading to the campground and trailhead was still chained off so we just walked the road to the campground. A sign announced that a bear had been seen near the campground the day before. We looked around but didn’t see a bear. I did find a track at campsite 5 and we enjoyed watching the creek behave more like a river. There was a lot of whitewater in places, the result of temperatures in the 60s and 70s over the past ten days.

Heading home, we stopped at the site of the earlier bear sighting and got a great reward. As we parked and looked into the dusky area, a black bear came racing up a trail with a second one in hot pursuit. Let me repeat –”You can not outrun a bear.” The way we were all positioned it appeared as if they were charging right at us. “Hmm, humans. Let’s eat ‘em.” I actually said, “Maybe you should close your window.”  Satisfied that the first bear had gotten the message, the pursuer turned around and headed back while the first one continued on past us at a leisurely walk.

 

A couple elk were on the stairs of the post office yesterday, but just after I noticed and just before I took a photo, a bus parked and blocked my view.

I got the annual spooky first solo hike in bear country out of the way late Friday afternoon. I didn’t see any bears, but there were a few flowers blooming including shooting stars. Looking downhill through some trees, I saw some movement which I originally thought were the wings of a large bird, but they turned out to be the ears of mule deer.

The main wildlife encounter happened at the house right at the trailhead. To the left of the house where the trail is, a single bison was grazing. On the right of the house and much closer, were half a dozen elk. I didn’t want to turn around and start the hike from the other end so I started on the bison route since it would leave more distance between me and the wildlife. When the head raised and the eyes stared, I thought, “Let’s try the elk.” I pressed against the house (the judge’s house–trespassing as a federal crime) with the closest elk no farther away than the corner of the room where you’re reading this. She, chewing and seeming more curious than aggressive, took two steps toward me and I tried a method I had heard worked. I extended my arm a third of the distance between us and said “Stop” as a mixture of plea and order. She didn’t come an inch closer and my hike was underway.

I would have been cursing myself had I been watching from the other side of the street, but I gave myself some leniency based on motive. I wasn’t trying to get closer to the animals; I was trying to stay as far away from them as I could. The temperature has already been too high and the crowd too big, and I’ve already seen someone climbing over a railing and walking across one of the terraces.

The Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans took place nine blocks from the hotel where I stayed a couple years ago, and I got within six blocks. Nothing compared to the thousands of times I walked by the sites of the Boston Marathon bombings. Here, a man despicable by all accounts I’ve heard including from someone who knows him, found a way to kill another wolf.

My application has been sent to Duluth. Thinking about it, I know that if I’m serious about trying to get this job, it makes much more sense to quit and move back before the test, since it is a multistage process of testing and interviewing. Repeated trips back and forth really isn’t an option. So I’m waiting to learn how much advance notice I’ll get of the test date, and thinking about what I’m going to do. Four years ago, I lost almost everything after lengthy unemployment in Duluth, but I’m having raging fantasies about cooking and having a room of my own again.

I got back to Yellowstone last Thursday, after a ride in which our company driver played a lot of obscenity filled music and then provided a lot of inaccurate information about the park to the new folks such as stating that we had long and short tailed ferrets in the park. I hadn’t been excited about returning, but it did feel good when I saw Gardiner and the few miles up the hill.

I hadn’t seen the ground squirrels before I left, but there were a few around when I carried my stuff back to the dorm after checking in. That night, my roommate and I headed out to Lamar Valley where we saw the distant moose below, and a fox in the road missing a tail who we imagined claiming that he was a lynx rather than a fox who’d had his ass chewed off. We also got a report that a couple black bears had just crossed the road but we didn’t see them.

What felt like the best news I’ve gotten in quite a while came in my email today–Duluth is hiring a couple people for the library. I went through the process when I lived there years ago but those jobs wound up not being filled because of the budget, a situation I don’t think is a problem now. I’ll fill out the application online, and likely will be invited to Duluth to take a written test I did well on last time. I will go to take it even if I have to quit to do so.

No more work til May. I’ll be heading up the road to Bozeman tomorrow for a week of relaxation and restaurants.

We’ve still been getting snow and it was down in the single digits last night, but the killdeer and bluebirds are back and I saw my first red dog (baby bison) last night. There was a moment which would have made a perfect photo, but by the time I was ready, there was just a blur hiding behind mom.

We wandered around McMinn Bench and Rescue Creek in a ferocious wind. That area is Ungulate City–bighorns, pronghorns, mule deer, elk, bison.

I’ve taken a lot of photos of this pool over the past few years. Here’s one from January.

Here’s how it looked a few days ago.

I’ll miss that pretty little spot.

I’m ill as a canine, sleeping through most of today which was the third sick day I’ve taken in the past week, so it’s just as well I’m not on the train to New Orleans. I was surprised how little disappointment I felt over canceling the trip, which I suspect means I knew I really wasn’t up to it. My research helped me find some good music new to me. I’ll work a couple more weeks here, then take a week break in Bozeman where I’ll go try the Cajun restaurant for the first time. This means I’ll be working the same job for almost eleven months with just one week off. Hardly seems like the seasonal life at all.

If you remember this post from five months ago, it probably comes as no surprise that the federal government has shut down Rimrock Trailways. It doesn’t surprise me that they’d be considered unsafe, but I wish they could have waited about a month to do it and I would have taken my chances. At least I wasn’t actually on one of the buses at the time the order came down–passengers who were only got as far as the next stop before being stranded.

I needed to take this company’s buses to Whitefish, 400 miles from here, to meet my trains to and from New Orleans. (It’s also the company which has gotten me between here and Minnesota in the past.) So it’s very unlikely that I’m going–I’m not one for last minute uncertainty and I don’t have a lot of time as leeway for things to change. A friend already offered to help get me to the train if he can and I pay for gas, but even if that worked out, it would still leave me with the issue of how to get back a couple weeks later when he wouldn’t be around. Instead, I’ll probably either be working straight through if I can get one of my contracts adjusted, or living in Bozeman or Gardiner for a month.

Between hotels and trains, I’ve already spent over $3000 on this trip so I’ll have to see how much of that I can get back. I was willing to blow a lot of money on this trip because from the time I began planning it, I was thinking of it as the last big vacation of my life. It looks like it will probably have to wait a year, if the bus company or a replacement is running. If there’s no bus service, any future trip would have to start from somewhere else because that would certainly end my Yellowstone career. Quite a few of this summer’s Yellowstone employees would have been getting to the area on those idled buses over the next month or two, so it will be interesting to see what happens.