By Annie O’Neill EDITORIAL INTERN
Jim Holstein has spent more than three decades leading visitors through Yellowstone National Park, and he’s learned to measure how much the park has changed simply by watching the seasons pass.
“I grew up in the area, and there weren’t any big fires in my childhood,” said Holstein, who owns Yellowstone Tour Guides. “Now it is every year.”
Holstein is among a small circle of veteran guides who have watched Yellowstone change over careers spanning decades, through wolf reintroduction, worsening wildfire seasons, a tourism boom and a park he says is being loved, and crowded, harder than ever.
Holstein worked his first season in Yellowstone in 1987, then for the Custer Gallatin National Forest’s Gardiner Ranger District, where he was involved in fighting the historic fires of 1988. He returned to Yellowstone in 1991, guiding in the summer before going year-round shortly after.
“In the past we were one of 35 original companies,” Holstein said of Yellowstone Tour Guides. That changed once the park opened up guiding permits to anyone willing to pay a $300 fee. Today there are roughly 350 permitted outfits, he said. “We used to know every guide from every company,” he said. “So many new faces, everyday we see a new company.”
The rapid growth, in his view, has thinned out the experience and quality of guided trips across the industry.
A job with a backpack
Randy Hall’s path to guiding wound through a series of jobs before he ever set foot on Lone Mountain Ranch where he works today. He came home from a stint in the U.S. Coast Guard and took a catering job he never took to.
“I literally one day came home and just had to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with myself,” Hall said. “What do you want to do?”
The answer, he decided, was simple: find work where he’d wear a backpack every day. That search led him to Yellowstone.
He landed at Old Faithful Inn, managing the dining room during the winter season, back when only about 20 staff wintered at the inn. The crew worked mornings into early afternoon and filled the rest of their time with what Hall calls their own Winter Olympics: a marathon ski race that required stopping every couple of miles for a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, drag races, pulling a girlfriend seated on a chair across the snow, and a race up and over a steep ridge. The games got popular enough that the Billings Gazette sent someone out to cover them, to which, Hall said, drew the attention of the park’s rangers, who started showing up to compete.
“They’re in really good shape in their work,” he said of the rangers’ participation. “It was a little bit of a kick in our butt.”
From Old Faithful Inn, Hall moved into wildland firefighting, which he still says was his favorite job he’s ever had, largely for the camaraderie. “You had to have each other’s backs,” he said. He spent a few years on fire crews, went through fire science school, and worked some seasons as a blacksmith, making hinges and window hardware.
He eventually found his way to Lone Mountain Ranch, where his mentor, Chris Nelson, taught him to guide and worked alongside him building trail bridges. By Hall’s own conservative estimate, he’s been guiding for 15 to 18 years since.
The work has kept him close to the land in ways that go beyond guiding; he tracks bird, elk and bear movement through Lone Mountain Ranch property, keeping tabs on the wildlife and landscape over the year.
Both guides recall wolf reintroduction in the 1990s as the single biggest shift they’ve witnessed in their careers, a move that polarized the public and changed the landscape. Holstein recalled attending public meetings led by wolf biologist Doug Smith when reintroduction began. After, he’s seen elk populations drop and bear sightings increase. Hall once observed the full aftermath of a wolf kill: ravens claiming first bites, wolves eating roughly 40% before a grizzly chased them off, the wolves retreating as the bear settled in.
“I just got to sit and watch it,” he said. “Watch the circle.”
When communicating polarizing topics such as these, Holstein said the guiding community has adopted a deliberate approach.
“We’ve always taught our guides to talk about any controversial issue like that and let people decide for themselves,” Holstein said.
Hall traces much of how he understands the park to Indigenous creation stories and Lakota tradition, including classes on Lakota spirituality and animals, trips to the Standing Rock Reservation and a buffalo ceremony in Lamar Valley that recounted the white buffalo, a sight tied to a severe winter. As Lakota stories tell, sightings of a white buffalo grow more frequent as the earth’s fate grows more dire.
For Hall, that part of the story feels newly relevant: as he watches the park’s climate shift in ways he calls “completely unpredictable,” he believes that the white buffalo will reappear when times grow hardest. He’s seen one once in the wild, in Minnesota.
Curiosity, knowledge, respect, preserve
In addition to wildlife, visitation pressure is evident in the park for these two guides. Snowmobile use has shifted substantially since the early days, and both men plan routes and timing around crowds in ways that weren’t necessary decades ago. The growth of Big Sky itself has compounded the congestion; “Traffic has been atrocious,” Holstein said. It hasn’t hurt his business directly, but picking up clients in Big Sky now eats up far more time than it used to.
Social media, Holstein said, has changed visitor behavior as well. He explained that while it’s not necessarily making people less respectful of wildlife and park rules, it does amplify incidents that once would have gone unnoticed. Hall sees something broader: a growing disconnect from nature itself. Of the roughly 5 million people who pass through the park each year, he estimated only a small fraction, “maybe 200 out of any given crowd,” are genuinely there to learn something about the environment.
“Sometimes when you go into the park, all you want to do is get to the other side safely,” he said.
Still, both guides describe moments that speak louder than the growing crowds. Just before his interview with EBS, Holstein recalled a mountain lion sighting, his 12th in his career, and a rare wolverine encounter.
Hall pointed to a group that included a man from New York City who watched an antelope sprint 60 miles per hour across a field–he lit up with genuine awe.
“You kind of live off their background, and the way they see things,” Hall said. “It re-energizes you.”
To keep the job fresh and channel that awe himself, Hall is emphatic that a guide should never fall back on a memorized script.
“A lot of guides get stuck on, ‘This is what I say when I’m in this truck,'” he said. “I hate that. I want a conversation.”
He said he can lead two tours on back-to-back days and refuse to repeat himself, in part because reciting the same material starts to feel dishonest to him. He’s less patient, he said, with newer guides who read straight from guidebooks, page by page, with guests in tow.
He described a progression he tries to walk every guest through: learning leads to curiosity, curiosity expands knowledge, expanded knowledge builds respect, and respect leads people to want to preserve what they’ve seen.
“That was the steps of being a guide,” he said. And he’s committed to passing them on.
For Holstein, his awe for the park he’s called his office for 35 years comes from its sheer depth. Yellowstone’s geology, microbiology, wildlife and weather add up to a subject he’s still learning, aided by access to researchers and closed thermal basins that guides can no longer get today.
For two guides who have spent careers taking visitors through a landscape they’ve watched change year over year, it’s the unpredictability, and the chance it still holds to teach something new, that keeps them coming back.
“You never know what you are going to see around the next corner in Yellowstone,” Holstein said. “Whether subtle or sudden, the wildfire is always different; encounters are always different. And the people watching are spectacular.”
