MAKING
MEMORIES
We asked residents living in the states surrounding Yellowstone National Park to share some of their favorite memories of the park, along with favorite places to visit, hidden gems that may be a bit off the main roads and some of their favorite photographs. Here’s a selection of what they so generously offered.
I
n 1971, I readied my Harley sprint bike for the long trip from Kansas to Yellowstone, where I had taken a summer job working at the service station in Mammoth. My parents got nervous and loaned me a car for the summer. It would come in handy. One week after I started work, Hamilton Stores employees arrived, including a tall blonde with a soft North Texas accent. Two days later, I asked her to go with me on an evening trip to the brink of the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. At the time, I did not know that it was one of the most romantic date destinations on the face of the planet. Before the summer was through, we had made our plans. The next May, with a fellow Yellowstone employee as best man, we married and headed back to the park to work during its centennial celebration. We worked three seasons there, and then returned to the “real world,” with careers and a growing family. We have returned to Yellowstone on a nearly annual basis over the course of our lives. For many years, when he saw us come into the general
Then
store in Mammoth, longtime manager Ted Lowe would run through the aisles, grabbing presents for our four small children. After he died, it was a decade before we could enter that store without tears. In 1988, we were teaching in a tiny Montana school, near the park’s northern border. We watched as the fires raged and hoped for the best. In 2019, having retired from teaching, we returned to Yellowstone to work a full, magical season. This year, we will return to Mammoth to celebrate our 50th anniversary. We will hold hands again as we walk behind the service station. We will stand in a parking lot and “see” the photo shop that is no longer there, and in our collective memory, we will see and hear our friends who worked with us long ago. We will travel to the brink of the Lower Falls and Artist’s Point. In the spring night, as a gibbous moon rises above the canyon wall, we will renew our commitment to each other. Yellowstone boasts amazing natural landscapes, but it also harbors an immense tapestry of landscapes formed by countless human lives — lives forever altered by the park’s
32 • YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK • 150TH ANNIVERSARY
Now power and beauty. John Forsyth Laramie, Wyoming
