With
the arrival of the solstice, we’re now officially entering winter. But consider
just a few of the many paradoxes and ironies swirling around Yellowstone
“winterkeeper” Steven Fuller.
Nearly
half a century ago, when Fuller arrived in Yellowstone, the notion of human-caused
climate change was, at best, a scientific abstraction. Now it’s regarded as not
only the greatest threat to sublimely frigid winters he’s known and documented,
but also stands to leave parts of Yellowstone that he relates to intimately as
unrecognizable a century hence.
Today,
legions of young people might daydream of having Fuller’s job in the middle of
America’s first national park, but back in 1973 when he was hired as the only
applicant, his position was regarded as a notorious hardship post where others
had gone crazy—like being sent to a gulag on the movie set for “The Shining.”
As
record numbers of visitors stream past Fuller’s rustic home on a highway below
it in summer, his backyard, if based on the recovery of grizzly bears and
restoration of wolves to the park, is actually wilder than when he first moved
in.
The
first time I encountered Fuller was in the summer of 1982. I was a college student
who had come West to work in Yellowstone, like thousands of American young
people used to do. My job was cooking meals for tourists in the dining room and
cafeteria at Canyon Village, located near the north rim of the Grand Canyon of
the Yellowstone.
Fuller
was there taking photographs at the request of his wife, Angela, who oversaw
the operations for park concessionaire TW Services, which over the years
morphed into today’s Amfac. In an instant, hundreds of us smiled, our visages
frozen in time, and then I seldom caught a glimpse of Fuller again, until four
years later.
In
1986, I moved West permanently from a job with the City News Bureau of Chicago,
where I wrote stories as a violent crime reporter. I had taken a job with the
then-Jackson Hole News and during one of my first free weekends in the autumn,
I drove north through the Tetons and spent a couple nights with the Fullers at
their rustic home.
The
two-bedroom structure rests a quarter-mile above the breathtaking river chasm
and adjacent to a rise in topography where the famous Canyon Hotel, designed by
architect Robert Reamer, stood until the 1950s when fire destroyed it. (Yes,
that old edifice would have been a perfect fit for “The Shining.”)
Steve
and I hit it off immediately. Little did we know that only a short distance
away that same weekend, wildlife photographer William Tesinsky had been fatally
mauled and partially consumed by a grizzly bear. Although covering homicides in
the Windy City had, at times, been a hair-raising experience, this was a
visceral reminder of what natural wildness meant.
Two
years later, as I was covering the historic Yellowstone forest fires of 1988,
Fuller’s residence came close to burning to the ground. It has been just one of
many potential perils for Fuller: he was thrown from a horse when a startled
grizzly rose from its daybed in Hayden Valley; another time he was nearly
crushed when four-ton ice sheets tumbled off roofs; he’s stranded snowmobiles
and had to walk a dozen miles home at 40 degrees below zero.
Fuller
is a living legend, the longest-serving winterkeeper in Yellowstone’s history.
Winterkeepers originally were tasked with shoveling the heavy snows off structure
rooftops in the park interior to prevent them from collapsing. Modernity,
however, is steadily rendering those jobs obsolete, with advances in snow-machine
technology making a place like Canyon seem less remote.
“Wilderness?” Fuller
says. “There are still wild places in the world, not so many left in the Lower
48 … enclaves where you can die in
a wild natural way, but few of them are out of cell range, certainly not out of
SAT phone range, so you don’t have that feeling of autonomous utter
self-dependence where the only helping hand lies at the end of your arm. You screw
up, you die, or at least suffer the consequences.”
During
the mid-1970s, National Geographic published an essay with photographs by
Fuller. It was one of the reasons I became enticed by summer employment there.
Reading the story today seems like an ancient time.
Amassed
over his tenure is an extraordinary portfolio of images he’s personally taken
and each carries with it stories. Over the last few years, Fuller has penned a
column, “A Life In Wonderland” for the non-profit news outlet Mountain Journal
(mountainjournal.org), which I founded. He shares observations and insights
about the interior of Yellowstone that put into perspective the notion of the
national park as a realm set apart.
“His
situation has allowed him to spend an immense amount of contemplative time in a
wild landscape in order to develop his way of seeing,” Doug Peacock, the
noted author, Green Beret medic in Vietnam, environmental activist, and friend
of the winterkeeper told me more than 20 years ago in a story I wrote for The Christian Science
Monitor.
“Fuller’s great value to us is his way of being the shaman who goes out
into … the other world.”
As
former park historian Lee Whittlesey noted, there is unlikely to ever be
another like Steve Fuller in Yellowstone, nor a Yellowstone as Fuller has
intrepidly witnessed.
Todd Wilkinson
is the founder of Bozeman-based Mountain Journal and is a
correspondent for National Geographic. He’s also the author of the
book Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek about famous
Jackson Hole grizzly bear 399.
Crosscut is excited to partner with Montana Outdoor Science School (MOSS) to offer a day of storytelling, human history, and reading the landscape through Lightning Creek’s
Event Details
Crosscut is excited to partner with Montana Outdoor Science School (MOSS) to offer a day of storytelling, human history, and reading the landscape through Lightning Creek’s unique geology. You’ll learn about the deep time history of this picturesque region.
Where: The Wilson Hotel
What: Food, games, music, spirit wear for sale – fun for all ages!
Schedule: 6pm parade starts at The Wilson
6:30pm pep rally @ Len Hill Park
Event Details
Where: The Wilson Hotel
What: Food, games, music, spirit wear for sale – fun for all ages!