One of National Parks magazine's editors visits Yellowstone National Park to understand how global warming is affecting the landscape.
It took all morning for the rain to pass. When it did, the Montana sky brightened into a baby blue, saturating the space between mountaintops. You could fit ten Washington, D.C., skies into the one I was standing under.
I had spent the morning inside the lodge of our home base--a ranch in Emigrant, Montana--with a group of reporters and scientists, devouring PowerPoint presentations, fussing with tape recorders, and scribbling quotes into spiral notebooks. Dramatic changes were happening nearby in Yellowstone National Park, where entire forests of whitebark pine are under attack by a beetle that has no business being there. The invasion could send shock waves throughout the entire ecosystem, affecting Yellowstone grizzly bears, which devour the tree's calorie-rich seeds before fasting all winter. The grizzly bear is fresh off the endangered species list, and a number of wildlife biologists believe this additional threat raises the stakes.
It was the last day of a media workshop sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for just that reason, and five of us were scheduled to fly over Yellowstone in a six-seater Cessna plane. When we reached the airstrip--no longer than many of the driveways snaking through Paradise Valley—we piled into the plane like giddy third-graders.
The cabin was tiny and cluttered, offering half the leg room of a commercial jet. We placed soft, puffy headsets over our ears, adjusted the microphones at our lips, and passed around a camera to capture the moment. The plane rolled down the runway, faster and faster, until suddenly, all of Yellowstone stretched endlessly below us. We pressed our cameras against tiny windowpanes, noting the park's most famous features: Yellowstone Lake, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Mammoth Hot Springs, an oversized salt lick beside a pasture of lodges and parking lots.
A half-hour in, the view took a dramatic turn when the life we'd seen flourishing below transitioned to death on the park's highest peaks. Mount Washburn, at 10,000-plus feet, was painted red with dying trees that faded into pockets of rotting, barren snags. I kept taking pictures despite the urge to just gawk. The pilot's somber voice came through our earphones, helping us piece together the morning's lessons with the dramatic visual proof that global warming is affecting our most precious places. It's the warm winters and early springs that allow the pine beetle to wipe out entire mountaintops.
We turned back to the airport, landing so light and flawlessly it lifted our spirits. We applauded the pilot heartily, climbed out grinning, and posed next to the plane for a few more photos to send home with bragging rights.
The next day, I joined one of the ranch hands for a hike up the mountain that towered over my cabin. We stepped around sagebrush and chunks of petrified wood, which had been formed in a volcanic eruption millions of years ago. I stopped often to catch my breath on wind-swept plateaus, marveling at countless acres of land with hardly a home or a road in sight. Finally we reached the top, marked by a tree thousands of years old. I ran my hand over crusty bark and a knobby lower limb poised at a horizontal angle that made me yearn to toss a tarp over it and call it home.
A week later, I was back at work in D.C., when an e-mail came through from my friend on the ranch. “I think that tree is a white bark pine!” he wrote. To be sure, he planned to hike back with one of the local experts who had attended the NRDC workshop. I closed my eyes and imagined the tree and all its details, recalling a branch with the old scars of burrowing mountain pine beetles. They had failed to bring the tree down, thank goodness. It would have been a shame not to meet such an old soul. I hope to return someday to find that tree still standing--perhaps with a grizzly bear under its canopy, happy and fat, munching on seeds.
