So as part of this grand adventure, I stopped at Yellowstone Ntn'l park...I mean, when you are hitchhiking across the country, why not? I'd never been there before, and I have to say....oh MY GOD! If that is what unspoiled wilderness looks like, I'm more pissed then ever that we fucked this place up...
I read somewhere that the bison once stretched from from Oregon to Minnesota and down to Texas; if that is true, well then, again, WHAT THE FUCK? Why did we trade bison for boring old cows...oh yeah, because the Natives lived on bison and to kill them would be to essentually kill the Natives. And I guess it is a lot easier to fence in docile cows then to fence wild bison. So yeah...what was I saying? Oh yeah, Yellowstone was like THE MOST AMAZING place I've ever been. Watching elk grazing, standing about ten feet from a 1,000 pound bison rolling on it's back the way dogs do to itch, sitting next to the largest undamed river in the US and yelling "so this is what a wild river is suppost to look like!?" All of that is so amazing, it will bring you to tears. I was choked up most of the time I was there. When watching the bison, most of the people standing there had similar reactions. Our conversation went something like this:
"I think I'm just gonna move here and retire..."
"What does bison taste like?"
"Oh, it's great...better then beef...leaner..."
"How did the Natives drag one of those back I wonder?"
"Oh I guess they'd butcher it right out in the field before bringing it back..."
"You guys are probably vegitarians right? Am I affending anyone?"
"Nope..."
This brief conversation just proved to me, once again, that deep down in our hearts, we are gatherer/hunters. (Notice that I put gatherer first, because actually, in those sorts of societies, those who gatherer procured 80% of the food.)
Anyway, lots more thoughts, but I'm gonna save them for now...
Love ya,
Carrot
You know of all the talks I have ever heard about yellowstone and how cool it is, I do not htink anyone had ever mentioned the bison. I am glad you are doing well.
~T
A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. ~Benjamin Franklin
Really no one mentioned the bison? How sad. One of my favorite stories about my Yellowstone adventure involves the bison trying to walk into the gift shop....
OK, that's pretty much the whole story. :-P
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Actually its just as sad that I have never been there and had to google to see if it was a diffrent place then the grand canyon. I have a small bubble like an ostritch has a whole.
[-(
A bison? In a gift shop? thats , um thats...
:))
~T
A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. ~Benjamin Franklin
We had a couple bison walking along the boardwalks on the roadside exhibits.
~C
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Actually, Yellowstone is one of the most densley developed and closely managed areas in this state and it sees by far the most humans of anywhere else in the State. Yellowstone is a neat place but it is not really that much different then visiting that zoological park near San Diego,
If you want to see some real wild country, take a walk through Shoshoni National Forest just a little to the East. Don't forget your bear gun though because the grizzleys own the place.
Just about any of the ranchland and all of the National Forests in the State sees a lot less human impact then Yellowstone. If you get 25 miles from the Interstate and you'll find huge blocks of land that seldom see either a human or a motor vehicle.
We folks here in Wyoming like it empty like this. I suppose that is why I am so opposed to illegal immigration and favor sharply limiting legal immigration.
Maybe someday the environmentalists will figure it out. It is pretty simple but for some reason outfits like the Sierra Club have been totally unable to make the connection:
More people = More environmental degradation.
In the last 25 years the American people have made huge strides towards living greener. But every effort we have made in that direction has been undone by immigration. We have smaller footprints but there are almost 100 million more of us then there were then so we make a bigger mess.
San Diego's artificial habitat along sparse hills compared to the Yellowstone Rocky Mountain scene? Are you kidding me?
(CARROT) "And I guess it is a lot easier to fence in docile cows then to fence wild bison"
By the way, I've heard bison --with their terrible eyesight and whatnot-- are fairly easy to obstruct with fences. Great blog man. The Yellowstone was one area in Montana that I wanted to get to this summer but couldn't. I had a friend that fished in West Yellowstone for two weeks though and damn, anglers come back with mighty stories.
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Yeah .... it was an exaggeration. But not all that far from the truth. I was not talking about the terrain but rather the human impact.
And much of the same can be said for Glacier National Park in Montana. A beautiful place but teaming with people and heavily managed for their enjoyment.
If you want to really see wilderness in Montana, the place to go is the Bob Marshall Wilderness which is South of Glacier National Park and is known by the locals as "The Bob". Again, like the Shoshoni National Forest in Wyoming, it is a place where a person can actually be eaten by the wildlife.
So Green Underbelly, do you know how to differentiate black bear scat from grizzly bear scat? The grizzly bear scat smells like pepper spray and has little bear bells in it.
Regards,
Jack
Yeah I dig the Bob. I've dipped into the Danaher area a few times, but that's in the southern sector. Most of my wilderness treks are in the Selway-Bitterrroot and Scapegoat Wildernesses. How many times have you made into pristinity this summer? Thanks for the joke. All too funny.
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I have a mountain cabin on private land surrounded by the Big Horn National Forest. About half of our border is with the forest is against the Clould Peak Wilderness Area. I hike in there almost every weekend during the summer. It is awesome. The Bighorns don't see a lot of traffic even in the areas where you can take motor vehicles. I almost never see anybody in the Wilderness. We have a lot of lions in the Bighorns but no grizzlys so there is not much chance of being eaten.
One thing about owning a cabin though is that you are kind of tied to it. They require a lot of work and maintenance and they cost enough where you feel the need to use it a lot. The good part of that is that you get to know the area around it really well. The not so good part is that you don't explore as many new areas. I have only been camping once this year and that was in the Blackhills of WY/SD which is another National Park that sees tooooooo many people. I used to camp a lot more.
(Notice that I put gatherer first, because actually, in those sorts of societies, those who gatherer procured 80% of the food.)
I know that this is a true statement for most hunter gatherer societies.
But it was not true for the Plains Indians. This country in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas is high, cold non-productive desert. There is not much food that grows here naturally to gather.
Yeah ....I know ....many parts of a pine tree are edible. You can also dig up cattail tubers. Bu beyond that and a limited supply of very seasonal berries, about the only thing that grows here is grass and humans are not very good at digesting it.
The Plains indians were meat eaters and their culture was centered around hunting buffalo.
One of the many tragedies of the reservation system has been the change in diet from high protein to high carbohydrates. The reservations in Wyoming and Montana
are rife with diabetes. Apparently the indians have not yet adapted to our diet and because they are poor they are eating a lot of the worst of what moderinity has to offer: lots of white flour and white sugar.
Yeah, the folks in this part of the world certainly relied on meat....
I don't think it is just Native folks who are suffering because of our high carb/low protein diets...I myself just switched to a more meat/'based diet, and not only have I lost weight and been feeling 100 times more energetic, but a chronic numbness in my hands and feet went away...damn civilization with its cheap carbs!
Anyway, yeah the bison where the highlight of my trip!
Love ya,
Carrot
What an anthropologist! You should, dare I say, teach a course if you haven't already taken that path. You must continue to produce, because More and Better often occupy the same nest. Get off yer ATV and charge into another profession. Damnit work for a large corporation that does not offer pensions or living wages like the rest of us. Get off yer high horse, smell the coffee. You're only what, 55?
Fuck Social Security. Lets maintain jobs until Jesus visits our dying bead, because if we didn't have 'capitol, capitol, capitol' we wouldn't have time to worry about ecosystems or collapse or heaven forbid, psychedelic rock).
Best, GU
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Actually my Mom is an anthropologist. She earned her PHD at Harvard when I was a kid so I grew up steeped in the subject and am still interested. I even helped with some of her field work. My brothers, sisters and had fun doing grave stone rubbings (thin paper taped over the head stone and then rubbed with artist charcoal) in lots of the older cemetaries around Boston. It was interesting how the styles of head stone carvings radiated out from Boston at about 10 miles per decade. Carvings of "death angels" that were being done in Boston in 1640 would start to show up on headstones in little towns 50 miles from Boston in 1690. Happier carvings of more benevolent looking angels that showed up in Boston in 1650 would show up in the same little towns 50 miles away in about 1700. The same "10 miles per decade" rules could also be demonstrated with architecture and other matters of style. Mom is now Professor Emiritus at Vanderbilt University. You might find some of her books worth reading: Virginia Abernethy . The books having to do with population and the environment are mainly hers and she is cited in many others.
My brother has gone the teaching route. He tired of being an engineer and got his PHD in mine and environmental engineering. GUB, I'm sure you will be pleased to know that about 150 kids per year at the local junior college will be properly educated in the science of digging a massively huge hole in the ground while mitigating harm to the environment. He also teaches several other science courses including climatology and takes particular pleasure in undoing the fear based gobblygook that has been substituted for knowlege in the area of global warming.
I'll turn 50 in about 2 months. I work at keeping my businesses running but not too hard. I've done pretty well in my career so Social Security will hopefully just be icing on my cake. I absolutely hope that it remains solvent because I plan to use the $1900 or so that I get per month to fund travel and other elective fun activities and projects. Traveling to Australia to satisfy my amateur anthropologist interest in Aboriginee cave art for example will be all the sweeter when I consider that you will be working hard at some crappy job as my tax slave to pay for it. Elect Obama and raise Social Security taxes! Tax the young hard so us oldsters can smell the coffee and enjoy our golf!
This sounds breathtaking! Bison are beautiful, just like all the beautifully crafted animals.
Near my house there used to be 150 plus acres of horse farm land. They offered the guy a large sum of money and he sold it. Now there are a billion stores. It makes me sad because it was beautiful to see that, now all it is, is traffic and more pollution. I love humans. lol.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I am voting for Lewis Black.
DrifterDani~
I have had the pleasure of seeing bison over the summer, which was a big, exciting experience and I can't even imagine how amazing it would be to have 40 million bison roaming around. Yellowstone is a great park, too, but sometimes I like to go to some of the more remote and little-known parks in order to get away from the crowds a bit.
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Just got back from a week at wild rice camp, and I have to say, the gatherer/hunter lifestyle is harder/more fun/more rewarding then can be imagined when you are sitting in the suburbs on a computer.
Um, I'm probably gonna write a series of about six blogs about this experience, so look for it!
And, by the way, that figure that gatherer/hunters worked 3-4 hours a day, well, now, I say "Bullshit!" Once you factor in all the time it takes just to prepare food, start fires, etc, well, you've got yourself a regular 8-12 hour day, but I'm sure as people get more and more used to the lifestyle, things take less and less time.
And, if you can't stand constant little annoyances, like poison ivy, mosqitoes, biting black flies, getting damp when it rains, using birch bark for toliet paper, bleeding all over yourself when you menstrate, etc, well then, that lifestyle isn't for you...I found that all of these things become more and more tolerable as time goes on, and you learn little things you can do to deal with all of these little annoyances...
Love ya,
Carrot
I cannot deal with all those little annoyances, so I will just have to live vicariously through your blogs. ;-)
I did, however, manage to obtain quite a bit of wild rice while in Duluth last weekend. From a store though. I bought some honey as well. The guy who owns the store has a bee farm. :-) The two actually go pretty well together as a kind of oatmeal thing, in case you're looking for wild rice recipe ideas.
I also love making soup with it. :-)
I'm glad you had fun. I'll look forward to reading about your experiences! :-)
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Isn't wild rice the tastiest! I've been eating it as a cereal in rice camp all week long, with maple sugar (my friends also do a big maple sugar harvest every year at a place called Sugarbush,) and wild blackberries, and man, is that the best breakfast ever!
Yeah, those little annoyances are hard at first, but as I said, by the end of the week, I hardly noticed when four or five mosquitoes where all ganging up on me at once and a poison ivy rash was running wild on my right leg and the seat of all my pants was stained with period blood...all of those things just cease to matter...you get used to it.
Overpowering the annoyances was the beauty....the beauty of the place, the beauty of the connectedness to the people I was working with, the beauty of wild swans, geese, ducks, and something that hunted mice around our camp in the middle of the night (I got to hear pouncing and the squeaking of mice it got as it killed them...that was awesome!) Who cares if you've got a little poison ivy on your tongue if you can experience that everyday?
Love ya,
Carrot