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Observations for 06 July


A morning of watching Fan & Mortar do nothing much persuaded me that I might as well head home. Plus I followed my rule of never letting Grand suck me in when heading out.

It was nice of Grand and Rift to keep Grand's eruptions synchronized so that at least two of the three eruptions per day took place during dark, or semi-dark conditions. This despite it being the time of year where it's dark for only about 7 hours.

But I was wondering about one thing. On my first night trip out to Grand I encountered a coyote in front of the Lodge. This morning it appears that it had found all the stuff one of the cabin guests had left outside, and scattered some of it about. Which got me to wondering. Years ago, every evening I'd hear over the radio scanner that one of the Protective Rangers was about to do a "food security" sweep of the Lodge cabins. And it wasn't unusual for them to make contact with someone just about every night. I've seen a lot of coolers and grills and other such stuff out in the open in the Lodge area. When did they stop the sweeps, and who gets sued when a food-related wildlife incident occurs? (The woman at the front desk when I checked out also said that the Rangers had finally collected the carcass sitting on the plastic bag behind my cabin. It'd been pretty well picked clean, so there wasn't any smell.)

One advantage to having the bison herd in along the Madison River is that people in the outbound lane have already seen bison, and aren't as likely to cause the two mile long backup that they had of all the people arriving in the Park.