My qualifications for telling funny stories about Yellowstone National Park is simple; I owned and managed a small motel two hours away for twenty-one years.  I even cleaned the bathrooms everyday for fifteen years and I have knee problems to prove it.  And that's not even the funny part.  The very best part is meeting all the cool people from around the world; hearing their stories and making them laugh at mine.  In over two decades as an innkeeper you hear so many crazy things, and answer a zillion stupid questions, that there's a lot of funny crap in there somewhere.  

     The middle of June on a hot afternoon, in walked a blonde mother in short-shorts and a cropped t-shirt.  This pretty mother of two filled out the registration card for a double room, and told me that, "We're going camping in Yellowstone!"  I looked her up and down, several times, and said, "I hope you brought something warmer than that."  She gave me a smile that would've melted ice, and said, "But it's 85 degrees outside!"  I giggled and told her that it would be less than 50 tonight and really cold in the park, and maybe she should buy some sweatshirts....she didn't believe a word I said.  

     Several days later, guess who walked into my motel office with a smile, sexy shorts and a story to tell----that's right, the blonde mom.  They needed a clean room and TV.  She said that her son had left a Pepsi outside the tent one night, "...and in the morning it was frozen solid!!  Is it always that cold in Yellowstone in June?"  I said, "No, sometimes they get snow, you were lucky."  I'm not sure she believed that either; but others would learn about life in the mountains the hard way.

     On a cold day in early June a fella walked into the office for a room.  He'd been in Yellowstone National Park and they'd kicked everybody out of the campgrounds; a snowstorm had blasted it's way through the park and left over a foot of snow!  The rangers had made everyone leave their trailers and scram.  He wanted to know when him and his wife could retrieve their trailer.  I smiled, and in my best Woody Allen told him, "Oh....sometime in early July, maybe."  The poor guy went nuts...."We can't afford to wait that long to get our trailer out of the park!"  I calmed him down and told him it was just for a laugh; give them a couple of days to plow it clean.  Forty-eight hours later Yellowstone was open and he was smiling again:  A bored motel owner has to get his laughs when he can.

     After early September, Yellowstone National Park begins its swift and steady march towards an early winter.  Fall in the park was my father's favorite time, and you can see snow anytime you're in the high country....or, you can get a suntan.  One evening a senior woman asked me a question about Yellowstone.  She asked, "What are those tall sticks they're putting up all over the park....we were just there....do you know what I mean?"  I said, "Yea, tall sticks maybe 10 or 12 feet high, with yellow or orange tops----those are so they can find the road in the spring when they plow the snow."  She looked at me with this vacant expression and shot at me, "No they're not, what are they really for!!"  I explained what they were for....again.  She didn't believe me....again; she seemed to think I was lying, or pulling her leg.  Real snotty she said, "If you don't know what they're for then say so!"

     Those tall sticks at the sides of the roads, that are being put up late in the season, are really for finding the road in the snow....snowdrifts 30 feet high have been reported on the road to the Old Faithful geyser basin.  Heck, we've had drifts nine feet high, and eighty feet long, right behind our little place here in the Wind River Canyon; right now it's 60 degrees, windy and the snow is finally melting----thank you.

     I spoke with a guy whose job it was to keep people away from the Elk near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone.  It was the fall rut, and the Bulls were making their stand.  You'd think a wild animal this big would obviously be a deterrent; it isn't.  He said people get hurt all the time; how do I get his job?

Wind River Canyon Blog written by Michael John Balog - Hogbats Photography, Wind River Canyon, Wyoming.  

For more photographs of wild animals, and beautiful birds, visit HogbatsPhotography.com

Thank You.