Snowmobile Safari

by Melvin Leavitt

Editorial Assistant

To Old Faithful by Snowmobile

A young man stood in the dim morning light, snow dusting his shoulders. He held a formidable snowball in his hand and shrank against the wall like a TV detective.

“You’ve got five minutes,” he bawled, “and then I’m coming in after you!”

Before the deadline, girls started spilling into the cold, breathing white columns as they crunched to breakfast with the young men waiting outside for them.

The Laurels and priests from Pocatello, Idaho, had arrived in West Yellowstone, Montana, to find themselves in a Christmas-card city that lay under seven feet of snow. Snowmobiles outnumbered cars on the city streets, and even tall people had to look up to see the tops of drifts. The young people were in town to make a 50-mile, round-trip snowmobile journey to Old Faithful.

They gathered around a line of snow-covered snowmobiles and, like medieval warriors, started helping each other suit up in their thermal armor—goggles, helmets, fur caps, stocking caps, and ear muffs; fur coats, leather coats, and ski-tagged parkas; ski masks, scarves, and knitted mufflers; quilted jump suits, ski pants, levis, and bib overalls; mittens, ski gloves, dress gloves, and snowmobiling gauntlets; hiking boots, snowmobiling boots, moon boots, and waffle stompers; and a flurry of other odds and ends in a rainbow of colors. When they were finally ready to face the potentially sub-zero weather, they looked like the first wave of a Martian invasion. And in a brief moment of silence as they admired the science fiction effect, a female voice wailed, “My earring’s stuck in my muffler!”

It was not the kind of morning they had dreamed about. Instead of a burning blue sky and sparkling drifts there was the gray pall of a snowstorm; and the shiver down their backs wasn’t excitement, it was wet snow. But the group brought its own sunshine, and their happy laughter made it clear that weather could not spoil the trip. When they gathered in the snow for prayer and thanked the Lord for the beautiful day, it was obvious that they really meant it.

Their guide explained safety rules and gave a few instructions on the operation of the machines. Then with the twanging of taut pull-cords, the engines roared to life, and the adventure began.

They skimmed along the road that carries caravans of tourist cars in the summer, but now it was under many feet of packed snow. Flying through the thick of the storm, they all soon became white statues, and from a distance their headlights looked like a string of pale torches winding through the mountains of some other century.

The veil of snow gave the world an aspect not only of timelessness but of placelessness; all sharp edges were blurred, and the landscape had the unreal quality of a Monet painting. Forests of dark trees became horizontal sweeps of vertical shadows, and mountain peaks dim vacancies of an uncertain distance.

The road ran along the Firehole River where swans floated and complacent elk fed along the shore as if all alone in the world. Upstream the river narrowed into a deep gorge, and snowmobilers wound along the side of it, slicing through a universe of clean white powder and feeling like explorers on some other world.

They stopped by a waterfall that plummeted from precipice to precipice and sent white spray up into the white snow. It was more like a vision than a view, and the young men and women were one moment boisterous with the exuberance of it and the next moment silent with an overwhelming sense of awe.

Miles of snow and scenery later, there were buffalo. They materialized out of the great, shaggy-gray shadows, too beautiful to be true. Later there were more of them in a broad, open meadow, and beyond the immense white of the meadow, the dark line of another forest, like a landscape from Dr. Zhivago.

They left the river and turned their runners down narrow, powdery lanes between tall evergreens, past boiling mud pots and geysers steaming in the snow—on to Old Faithful.

There was time then for lunch and some much-needed rest in the visitors’ center at Old Faithful. “Why are we so tired if we’ve been sitting down?” asked one young man as he sprawled on a bench, his snow gear scattered around him on the floor.

The deep snow outside and a little free time were too great a temptation, and soon a mammoth snow battle was in progress. Peace wasn’t fully restored until it was time for Old Faithful to blow. It turned out to be a subdued spectacle, a next-to-invisible shaft of blue-gray steam against the blue-gray sky. But the contrast to a summer eruption only made the wonder of the situation more intense. It was strange to stand in winter where so many thousands of people had stood in the summer, strange because they now stood high above the ground on a platform of snow in the heart of a kingdom that until a few years ago was inaccessible in the wintertime. It was like being able to visit the far side of the moon.

Going home there was time for a stop at some mud pots, some more close-up wildlife study, and a lot more snow. Almost everybody ran out of gas, and some snowmobiles broke down, but there was a mechanic bringing up the rear with fuel and spare parts, so no one had to winter it out.

In a sort of farewell gesture the sun broke through for a while down the home stretch and displayed a silver river, with silver rushes, silver swans, and a snow-silver forest beyond.

By the time the machines were parked, everyone was cold, wet, tired, sore, and limp. Mascara had run down over cheek bones, noses were red, and hair was plastered to foreheads. These young Mormons were beautiful.

What had they learned from the experience? Only what they already knew—that they were friends, in spite of the fact that they came from two arch-rival Pocatello high schools, that God’s works are beautiful, that doing wholesome things with good people is fun—but it was good to learn it all again.

Photos by James Christensen

“One of the best things about this experience was the chance for all of us to get a little closer together and to learn a little bit more about each other. It turns out that we’re all a little crazy!”

“I was impressed by the fact that no one had to keep everything up. Like the mud pots—they were just there. Nobody had to clean them or anything. We could see how they naturally look, even if they are ugly.”

“I thought a lot about ecology. It’s wonderful that a big section of land like this can be preserved just for wildlife, where people can look but not touch. It’s where nature intimidates us for a change.”

“… like the waterfall we saw. Wouldn’t it be amazing if some artist had created that waterfall? You’d say, ‘That’s a job well done.’ Well, the Lord did create it, and this was just our chance to say, ‘It’s a job well done.’”