Following our Grand Teton recon and bear encounter on Tuesday, we drove up to Grant Village, where we stayed the night. The next morning, we weren't set to meet with the amphibian monitoring crews until 11am, so we had time to swing into the giant Old Faithful parking lot and see what time it was expected to erupt.
Luis and I drove through Yellowstone last October on our way to visit family in Spokane, Washington. Unfortunately, we arrived at Old Faithful just after an eruption and had to leave in order to get out of the park before roads closed for the incoming winter weather, rather than wait for the next one. Last week, as we walked up to the visitor center, we saw a sign that declared the next predicted eruption would occur at 8:56 am. We looked at our phones - 8:30.
The timing was ideal. Not only did we not need to wait more than half an hour, the crowd was undoubtedly smaller than it would be at a later point in the day. There were still a lot of people, but it was by no means crowded. In fact, it was calm enough that a bison had absolutely no issue parking himself next to the boardwalk and taking a nap. Some poor park ranger got stuck with the unfortunate job of telling people not to go any further along the boardwalk, which he had to yell from the sidewalk further away, but the bison didn't really seem to notice.
As we waited, Luis left to find a good photo spot and I tried to focus on being present in the moment. Old Faithful is one of the main attractions of Yellowstone and I knew the eruption wouldn't last long, so I didn't want to be stressing about the next things on my fieldwork to-do list when it didn't erupt. The air smelled slightly sulfuric, people were chatting around me, the air was chilly. Plumes of steam rose gently from the surrounding landscape. Everyone was checking their watches. "Four more minutes!" "8:54!" "Any time now!"
It started off slowly - a spurt of water. Another. Then the sound of falling water grew stronger, and the steam began to billow out, higher and thicker, pushed toward us by the wind. Somewhere, behind the steam, water was reaching an impressive height, the sound of its impact on the stone below getting louder, but the morning was so chilly that the boiling-hot water coming out of the geyser was obscured behind a cloud of its own steam. I tried shifting down the boardwalk, as the wind was blowing toward my original vantage point, in hopes of getting to an angle with less steam, but the eruption died down relatively quickly, and I only caught a glimpse of the water, leaping vertically behind a cloud of steam.
While the height the water reached was undoubtedly impressive, I ultimately found the experience kind of underwhelming. Perhaps it was because the cold increased the amount of steam, and we might have otherwise been treated to a better view of the erupting water. Or, perhaps, in this modern information age, I'm not as easily impressed. I say that because I've been reading Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone by George Black. In Empire of Shadows, Black describes the experiences of several different people involved in the history of Yellowstone meeting Jim Bridger, one of the old "mountain men" who knew the area well from his days trapping beaver and other furbearer. These explorers, settlers, and others often took Bridger's stories describing Yellowstone, including its geysers, with a grain of salt, as they sounded so outlandish. But at least two different men commented in their writings that the geysers described by Bridger closely resembled those of Iceland, which the uneducated Bridger was unlikely to ever have heard of, so his stories were likely true, if embellished. Perhaps, in the information age we live in, such things are less impressive, because we have heard of them, or similar things before. Or perhaps because we've seen even more impressive phenomena rendered with the magic of CGI. I could blame this, but I choose to believe for now that I just caught Old Faithful on a bad day - the low temperatures produced steam and obscured its impresssive-ness from view. I think I prefer to believe that story.
After our Old Faithful detour, we drove to Gibbon Meadows, where we met up with the amphibian crews. We had met them once before, while attending a more general NPS safety training with them in Bozeman, Montana, a few weeks ago, so we were already familiar with everyone's names. We parked at some pullouts, struggled into our waders, and set off into the wet meadows.
As I mentioned in my last post, tadpole development has been a bit delayed this year due to some weird, cold spring weather. So, when we caught some of the first tadpoles in the meadows, the immediate reaction of the experienced people in the group was "oh, these are tiny." They tried to point out the diagnostic features I mentioned in my last post, but all of the tads were so small that even though we saw each of the three anuran (frog and toad) species, our leaders were quick to say "we know you don't feel like you can ID them yet, these are so small they're almost impossible to tell apart." We were able to find a couple tadpoles of each species, but eventually we moved on to visit another area of the park.
Our next stop was to visit a location in the park known for having the fifth amphibian species. The four that can be found throughout both Yellowstone and Grand Teton are: the western toad, the western tiger salamander, the Columbia spotted frog, and the boreal chorus frog. BUT! In one speial spot in Yellowstone, in the Lower Geyser Basin east of Fairy Creek, there is one breeding population of Plains Spadefoots!!
Spadefoots, or spadefoot toads, as they are also known, are one of my favorite types of anurans. I remember learning about them in my herpetology class and to this day I think they are one of the cutest, funniest amphibians. Spadefoots belong to the family Scaphiopodidae and are characterized by keratinous protrusions on their feet, which they use to dig. However, they do not dig in a way that we would automatically recognize as digging, Instead, they wiggle themselves around and use their back feet to essentially bury themselves! Videos of this are seriously one of my favorite things - they make me smile more than funny cat videos.
If you jump to about 1:05 of this video, you'll see a spadefoot doing its little dance to bury itself! Link
The Plains spadefoot, which is the one found in Yellowstone, shouldn't really be there. The winters are just too cold for it. But, in the geothermal area that is the Lower Geyser Basin, there is one population that is able to survive. It doesn't look like much. The site we went too was only a few inches of standing water in flooded grass, but you could tell the air temperature near the water was slightly warmer. We didn't see any adults, but we did net a couple of tadpoles, which are much rounder in shape than any of the other amphibians in the park. They've also found some cool leucistic (all white) tadpoles at that site before, though we didn't see any this time.
I think a normal person would have been much more underwhelmed by seeing only two spadefoot tadpoles than by Old Faithful's display, but being the nerd that I am, I was utterly delighted. One of the fun things about field biology is meeting people who are willing to take you not just to see the ordinary cool things (wolves, bison) but the unusual, quirky things that the average person doesn't know about.
On our way out and back from that spadefoot site, we also passed a big herd of bison who did not care that a trail went right through where they had camped out. They had so many bison babies. Their calves are red and furry and I find the temptation to hug them to be almost overwhelming (though I would obviously never even try - that sounds like a good way to die at the hooves of a bison cow). They're also one of the few examples I can think of where the baby animal seems more elegant than the adult. Bison are not not elegant exactly, but their calves just seem so delicate in comparison, and the ones we saw didn't have any of the awkwardness of the recently born.
All in all? I think spadefoots + bison calves beat Old Faithful for me, though I'm glad we got to see it. I'd like to visit it again in slightly warmer weather to see if we get a better view with less steam, but I also know there will be more people when it's warmer. C'est la vie!
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