Twilight of a Yellowstone ‘winterkeeper’ in the age of climate change
STEVEN FULLER IS A LIVING LEGEND IN AMERICA’S OLDEST NATIONAL PARK AND AN ENDANGERED 21ST-CENTURY ICON
By Todd Wilkinson
Steven Fuller will soon welcome his 47th consecutive New Year’s morning in Yellowstone. He’ll likely commence it, as he has done for decades, by skiing into a whirl of falling graupel and trees jangling like wind chimes. With fumaroles billowing geothermal steam around him, he’ll glide solo into the far “back side” of Hayden Valley when its two dozen degrees below zero, his silhouette quickly fading into diaphanous light.
Bound for his favorite cluster of prismatic paint pots that shall not be named, Fuller’s course will intersect with fresh furrows of a bison trail, tracks of a wolf pack and branches of fir covered in hoarfrost. Stopping to admire these patterns of “animal calligraphy” scrawled in the crystalline snow, he’ll raise his camera to make yet another portrait of his homeland. It’s a place that everyone has heard of—at least hundreds of millions around the world—but none know as intimately.
As the “winterkeeper” at Canyon Village — a development that sits nearly astride of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in the geographic heart of America’s first national park— Fuller has one of the rarest occupational titles in a warming world.
The other day while catching up, he told me he had witnessed more than 16,500 sunrises in Yellowstone “and looking out my front windows I have been thrilled by what I have seen every time. Each one holds greater meaning.”
In his bones, Fuller knows that change is coming as the clock of nature and temporal existence keeps ticking. Old Faithful’s eruption seems predictable, reliable and eternal; his tenure in Yellowstone — it’s been a longer one than any of his peers in the park’s storied history — is ephemeral, he admits as seasons of memories flash by.
On our spinning, increasingly-crowded planet with 7.5 billion human souls, Fuller is, in extraordinary ways, one-of-a-kind — a modern anachronism. He is a jack-of-all-trades engineer keeping Canyon’s buildings operating during the busy summer season. But philosophically, he is a throwback — a mixture of Henry David Thoreau, Henri Cartier Bresson, Ansel Adams, and with pinches of Lao Tzu, Edward Abbey and Noam Chomsky thrown in for good measure.
None of them, however, have courted solitude as he has. When it comes to Fuller’s reclusive relationship with winter, he has cultivated a tapestry of poetic idioms — his own Fullerian language — for describing snow and atmospherics that would make even the Inuit proud. Some are meteorological allusions; others architectural; still more customized to describe the otherworldly realm that is his wild backyard which brushes up against more than four million annual tourist visits.
Mountain Journal, (mountainjournal.org) which has been publishing Fuller’s journal vignettes, was founded as a non-profit journalistic watchdog to illuminate the spirit of America’s last best ecosystem in the Lower 48: Greater Yellowstone, for which Yellowstone Park is its center. Fuller has had a sort of hermetic geographical experience that has all but vanished in the Anthropocene — or at least from the Lower 48 states.
Scientists note that profound changes are underway in Yellowstone. Even a seemingly small rise in average temperature can have big effects, noted ecologist Mike Tercek in a recent special climate change edition of the journal Yellowstone Science. “Scientists predict that we will experience 3 to 8 degrees of warming in the next 100 years,” Tercek wrote. “In other words, the planet will experience about as much warming in the next 100 years as it did in the 8,000 years at the end of the last ice age, but this time it will be 30 to 80 times faster.”
As a result, forest fires could dramatically alter the look of Yellowstone today and warmer temperatures would not only reduce the depth and duration of snowpack but it could result in severe impacts to species that need cool water and wetlands habitat. “The Yellowstone of the here and now probably won’t exist as we know it today,” Fuller says and that saddens him.
I first met Fuller and his former wife, Angela, in 1982, upon taking a summer job during college working as a cook at Canyon Village. I credit them with deepening my own sense of connection to the park. Angela would go on to gain distinction as a world-class hotelier, overseeing Jenny Lake Lodge in Jackson Hole and the revitalization of the historic Pollard Hotel in Red Lodge, Montana.
As for Steve, he’s never left Yellowstone. His employer isn’t the National Park Service but the concession operator, Xanterra, which runs the lodging at Canyon Village. A Mojave-Desert-born son of a National Park Service ranger, Fuller studied history at the San Francisco campus of Antioch University. Then he spent two years in Europe, where he met Angela, a British citizen.
Eventually tiring of European cities, the young couple set off for Africa, a continent that continues to pull Fuller back every year. In Uganda, Fuller taught in a Shiite Muslim middle school. He sailed to India and Southeast Asia, the only American traveling in steerage class on his boat. Returning to the States, he interned for The Associated Press, covering the U.S. Senate. He also worked as an emergency-room technician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Then he and Angela made their way to West Yellowstone, Montana.
Winterkeepers mentioned in the annals of Yellowstone were an eccentric lot, a mixture of antisocial, hard-drinking libertarians who wanted to get away from people (and suffered occasional mental breakdowns) to hardy, rugged individualists.
“Going back to the nineteenth century, winterkeepers tended to be basically backwoods good ol’ boys, and not necessarily with a high level of education. They were looked upon as refugees from civilization, trying to get away by hiding out as hermits,” Yellowstone Park historian Lee Whittlesey told me years ago. “Steve Fuller has done a lot to change that prosaic image, but he has his own Thoreauian place as an anomaly in the twenty-first century.
Yellowstone’s first winterkeeper was George Marshall, who spent the winter of 1880–81 at his Marshall Hotel in the Lower Geyser Basin. By 1887, there were also winterkeepers at Old Faithful, Canyon and Norris.
Until the advent of motorized transportation — snow planes in the 1940s, and snowcoaches and snowmobiles in the 1960s — there was no winter tourism to speak of in Yellowstone. It was the sole domain of its winterkeepers.
Fuller inhabits a historic wood-framed, cedar-shingled house (circa 1910) that is set maybe a quarter mile above the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone — the place where Thomas Moran stood and sketched in 1871, ultimately inspiring masterworks that, in turn, inspired Congress to set aside Yellowstone as the first national park in the world a year later.
Notably, his rustic quarters are also a stone’s throw away from the site of the historic Canyon Hotel, designed by Robert Reamer that, in its day, was considered the most inspiring guest lodge in the world, superior in its charm even to the Old Faithful Inn.
Once upon a time, tourists staying there could watch grizzly and black bears being fed in nearby open-pit dumps. But today the hotel is long gone, its remnants having returned to the earth but its departure significantly improving Fuller’s views, some stretching for 150 miles.
When the Fullers arrived in the park in 1973, and subsequently raised and home-schooled their daughters, Emma and Skye, at Canyon, wolves had been eradicated and grizzlies were on their way toward extirpation.
In some ways, Fuller says, Yellowstone’s frontcounty today is paradoxically more harried and yet its backcountry wilder considering the restoration of those apex predators. The fact that more people aren’t yet invading and overrunning the outback is vital to wild Yellowstone’s persistence and its only hope for staying that way, he notes.
“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.
Fuller has a photo portfolio of hundreds of thousands of images of Yellowstone. He has visual impressions of the park’s wildlife and landscapes in all seasons, representing a library that is likely unsurpassed.
Fuller’s eye and technical skill first gained national attention when his pictures appeared in a National Geographic magazine feature, “Winterkeeping in Yellowstone,” in 1978. The story, unprecedentedly long for the time, made him a bit of a folk hero. Later, a photograph titled “Garish Moose, Yellowstone Lake” won the prestigious International Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award and earned him invitations to give public talks at both the National and Royal Geographical Societies in both the U.S. and U.K.
“Through Steve’s photographic vision, we all get to experience Yellowstone in a way that few of us will ever witness, regardless of how many times we visit the park,” says acclaimed Dubois, Wyoming-based nature photographer Jeff Vanuga. Vanuga, who has led safaris around the world and taught and shot with some of the biggest names in photography, says Fuller’s perspective is novel among photographers, past and present. Vanuga instead groups Fuller with nineteenth-century romantic landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran — luminists who exalted in portraying panoramas glowing in the backlight of sun, mist, and moon.
“Steve’s work has influenced my own vision of Yellowstone by allowing me to see the nuances often overlooked by the casual observer,” Vanuga says. “The predatory spider in a thermal pool, a bone fragment from an expired animal lying in a crystal-clear thermal feature, a backlit orb web covered with dew, or the luminous grand landscape.”
The way Fuller treats landscapes is often in juxtaposition to the landscapes themselves. “I’ve always been drawn to stark, fierce landscapes,” he says, “whether in the sunburned deserts of Africa or the deep, cold, albino winter landscapes of Yellowstone, especially when either is animated by archetypal wildlife.”
Fuller’s favorite expanse of land on earth is Hayden Valley; next are the Norris Geyser Basin and the mosaic of forests and meadows flanking the corridor of the Firehole River. Animals in his viewfinder — and wildlife does frequently appear — are never fierce or imposing. He is not a sharp-focused, headshot opportunist interested in portraying wildlife as trophies. Instead, creatures more often are smallish — reference points for conveying the scale of a vast landscape. In Yellowstone, he has particular reverence for bison. In Namibia, his favorite getaway, he has encountered lions, elephants, rhinos, and hyenas, on foot and next to his tent. Though at opposite ends of the temperature gauge, he craves what these stark landscapes represent: fast-evaporating wildness.
“The older I’ve become, the more I’ve begun to appreciate the sentient connections between living things here and the places they inhabit,” Fuller says. Standing in his quaint living room, the walls dominated not by his own photographs but row after row of several thousands of books he’s read, Fuller glances out the window.
On a clear day, he can see the Tetons in Jackson Hole, one hundred miles distant. He recalls the day a treasured acquaintance, an old bison bull, died in Hayden Valley. Long part of the neighborhood, the bull succumbed to the elements and old age.
Afterward, Fuller watched as another old bull came to the carcass and stopped, appearing to contemplate the lifeless body and the loss. When that bison moved on, the park’s scavengers — coyotes, foxes, and ravens — moved in. They made quick work of the remains. Fuller says people who dismiss this anecdote as groundless New Age anthropomorphizing — he isn’t a New Ager — need to spend more time in nature. He points out there are similar accounts of African elephants saying “goodbye” as he witnessed in these Yellowstone bison.
Fuller tells of cow moose and cow elk that lived in the meadows around his home. Each year, they bore calves. In recent years, though, they’ve vanished. The consequences of growing wolf and grizzly populations as well as climate and habitat changes have been profound for some of the things he loves.
“One day, I returned home on my snowmobile and came upon a pack of wolves standing over the steaming red meat of those elk. Alas, gone was a poor elk cow, whom for years I knew well. I appreciate the importance of predator and prey, but this was personal,” Fuller says. “I take pleasure in the wolves’ return, the sonic texture they add to the night, and the ecological intactness they bring to the ecosystem, but I’m not a wolf groupie.”
In more than four decades at Canyon, Fuller has had countless close calls with lightning, with wildfire, and with blizzards that forced him to bivouac miles from the nearest human. During Yellowstone’s 1988 fires, trees burned near his cabin. He has busted skis and had snowmobiles break down when he’s been miles from safety and shelter and temperatures are fifty degrees below zero. Then there was a grizzly bear incident in Hayden Valley which he’ll write about in his column.
“You live here, stuff can happen, you accept it, but is it any different, really, from anywhere else?” he asks, saying he prefers his perils — the possibility of avalanches, hypothermia, being mauled maybe by a bear, getting gored by a bison — to being run over by a truck while crossing an urban street or dying of a heart attack in an office cubicle.
Joe Sawyer, an engineer in Bozeman and one of Fuller’s closet friends, has accompanied him on skis, horse rides and hikes through the Yellowstone backcountry as well as sojourns through the remotest corners of Namibia. “Steve’s gift is his ability to illuminate the magic of the ever-changing natural world around us. His integrity, devotion to form and place give us hope that one day we will all be able to bathe in the beauty of that place he so wonderfully illustrates through his prose and imagery,” he explains. “I guess this is my attempt at saying Steve is a dream keeper of special moments in time.”
How long will it be before the kind of winters Fuller once knew become only a memory?
Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain Journal, has been journalist for 35 years. He has been a correspondent for National Geographic and The Guardian. He is the author of several critically-acclaimed books about scientific whistleblowers, the harrowing life of a famous grizzly bear mother and a biography about Ted Turner’s evolution as a capitalist-turned-committed conservationist and humanitarian. Read Mountain Journal’s stories free at mountainjournal.org