Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  LOCAL LOWDOWNSANDY BIERLE, owner of Flying Pig Adventure Company

  Sandy and Steve Bierle, both wildlife biologists, went to college in Missoula and “fell in love with Montana,” Sandy says. But after graduation, they couldn’t find year-round jobs in the state. “With wildlife degrees, the work is often seasonal,” Sandy says. The couple ended up in South Dakota and “throughout our time there we were gunning to get back to Montana,” says Sandy, who’s originally from the Midwest. Thanks to family connections, they learned the Faerbers, who had founded Flying Pig Adventure Company in Gardiner, were looking to sell their business, so the Bierles bought it in 2011. Steve died in 2015 and Sandy now runs the business herself, with the help of the Gardiner community, “the best staff in the world,” and her three tween/teenage sons. 511 Scott St. West, (406) 848-7510, flyingpigrafting.com

  Q: Was buying the business and moving to Gardiner a difficult choice?

  SANDY BIERLE: Since we had three boys, we wanted to make sure it was a good fit. Gardiner is a bit unusual. When we came out for a visit though, one night we were sitting in the Boiling River, the full moon was coming up, and it just all came together. We knew we wanted this epic for our kids.

  Q: Did you think about selling the business and leaving after Steve’s death?

  SB: Never. I was like 100 percent “no.” The town of Gardiner—it’s quirky and full of characters and it’s not always pleasant, but it’s full of the best people. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. It was after Steve died that I decided to put down roots and get a home here. I built a house on the river with my architect brother.

  Q: Were you a big rafting person before you bought the business?

  SB: Being a marine biologist, I was always in love with the water. I wasn’t a skilled technician in terms of whitewater rafting, but we loved it. Steve added the guided fishing.

  Q: What about your boys?

  SB: They’re sort of river rats. They spend all their days on the water.

  Q: Do they work at Flying Pig?

  SB: The shop becomes our home base in the summer. We’re there all the time with our extended family—the guides and staff. I work with all of these kids in their 20s and they’ve just been a lifeline to me. When Steve died, so many came back because they wanted to contribute. I hire people with different backgrounds and this gives my kids exposure to people from all over the world who share a common passion.

  Q: Is rafting the Yellowstone River scary?

  SB: The main trip we do is not really extreme in terms of rapids; it works very well for families and people who want to get a little wet but don’t want the adrenaline rush of big water. We do a longer trip once a day—or as an overnight—that goes through Yankee Jim Canyon and that section has some higher waves—some upper Class III and once in a while low IV rapids. It’s a little more exciting and more intense.

  Architect Robert Reamer, who also designed Old Faithful Inn and Canyon Hotel in the park, designed the arch. The original design for the arch was even grander than what was built and included two ponds and a waterfall, which were never constructed. As Roosevelt laid the cornerstone, a time capsule was placed inside the arch. Some of the items in the time capsule include a 1903 edition of the World’s Almanac, the 1902 Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Montana, a copy of the Northern Pacific Railway marketing pamphlet for 1903, US coins, copies of the Livingston daily papers, and a Bible.

  Red’s Blue Goose and Rosie’s Deck

  High school sweethearts Red and Rosie Curtis survived the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in northeast Oklahoma. And then World War II happened. Red went into the Army. When he got out, “there were no jobs,” says his son Chuck. “He started driving trucks across the country.” On one trip, Red—he had bright red hair—stopped in Laurel, Montana. In a cafe there, he got to chatting with a local gentleman, who couldn’t stop talking about working for the railroad. “My dad walked into the Northern Pacific office right then and started working for the railroad right away,” Chuck says. Rosie moved out to Livingston and Red worked for the railroad, on the passenger service from Livingston to Gardiner, until about 1963. The family then returned to Oklahoma to take care of aging parents. “I’ve spent almost every summer of my life I can remember in Paradise Valley though,” Chuck says.

  YELLOWSTONE RIVER

  At 692 miles, it’s the longest undammed river in the continental United States. It’s the principal tributary of the upper Missouri River. There is no trail going to its headwaters, which are fed by snowfields above 10,000 feet in the Absaroka Range. It flows into (and out of) Yellowstone Lake. It thunders over three ginormous drops, one 109 feet, the next 308 feet, and the last 132 feet. It is considered one of the greatest trout streams in the world. On a sandstone formation overlooking this river near Billings, you can still see the etched “signature” of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. “It” is the Yellowstone River.

  Returning east after reaching the Pacific Ocean, William Clark became the first white man to explore the Yellowstone. Native Americans had been using it for millennia. The name is believed to come from the Minnetaree Indian name Mi tse a-da-zi, which means “Yellow Rock River.” Lewis and Clark translated it as Yellow Stone, and that’s what stuck.

  In the early 1990s, Red and Rosie were bored of retirement, and of Oklahoma. They and Chuck began looking for some sort of business in Gardiner, Montana. “We chose Montana because we knew it,” Chuck says. They bought the Blue Goose Saloon. “I am told it was the original post office in town,” Chuck says. Red was always told that the saloon was founded by Air Force veterans after World War II. “He was told ‘Blue Goose’ was the name of a bomber those guys flew. Since he was Red, we changed the name to ‘Red’s Blue Goose.’”

  Although the name changed, little else did. And it’s stayed that way in the decades since. “When you walk into the Blue Goose it’s like walking back in time,” Chuck says. Except for the beer selection and food. The former is heavy on local craft brews and the latter might be cow or bison from a local rancher.

  Adjacent to the Blue Goose is Rosie’s Deck, which is lined with rocking chairs and “is the nicest view in Gardiner,” Chuck says. “Animals literally walk by right underneath it.” At Rosie’s, you can order drinks, but no food is served there. You’re allowed to bring your own though. “To be up there at night, looking at the moon and hearing coyotes howl, it will send chills down your spine.” 206 W. Park St., (406) 848-7434

  LOCAL LOWDOWNDANNY BIERSCHWALE, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Yellowstone Forever Institute

  Danny Bierschwale lived in seven or eight different states when he was growing up. His dad was a minister. “When I was in diapers, my dad was working for an organization called A Christian Ministry in the National Parks,” Danny says. “He was based in Cooke City. I think that gave me a deep-rooted connection to the park.” Danny’s dad was moved from Cooke City before Danny was old enough to appreciate the area, but “we visited the park when I was older and I remember seeing bears and bison and the thermal features,” he says. During college, Danny worked as a resident coordinator managing a dorm in the Old Faithful area. “That experience that summer really helped further my connection to the natural world and national parks.” Danny moved to Gardiner full time in 2007 to work for the Yellowstone Association, which merged with the Yellowstone Park Foundation in 2016 to become Yellowstone Forever Institute. Yellowstone Forever Institute is the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone Forever Institute, Danny is director of strategic partnerships, and in awe that he’s found a job with an office directly across from the Roosevelt Arch.

  Q: Can you see any wild animals out your window right now?

  DANNY BIERSCHWALE: There are some bison roaming around. That is a very unique aspect of where we live. I often feel like I’m living in the show Northern Exposure. We don’t actually get moose so often, but we get every other variety of wildlife. Right now there’s a fox that has been hanging around. It’
s great to see it, but hopefully he’ll move on eventually. You never want wildlife to get used to humans. That’s when problems start.

  Q: Have you ever been trapped in your house by bison or elk in your front yard or something?

  DB: I’ve often walked out my front door and had elk grazing on the trees in the yard. When I first moved here, I remember looking out my back window and watching a bear and a couple of cubs that had climbed onto the roof of the gas station behind my house. I sat there and watched them for a while.

  Q: If you don’t go hiking in Yellowstone, where do you go?

  DB: I will often recreate in the national forest surrounding the national park. I can bring my dog with me there; you can’t bring dogs hiking in the park. There is an old mining town just outside of Gardiner called Jardine and it provides quick and easy access to the Beartooth Wilderness. I’ll often go up near Eagle Creek and Bear Creek.

  Whether you have a day or 3 weeks or are interested in geology, history, wildflowers, or wild animals, Yellowstone Forever Institute has a class for you. Based in Gardiner in the former Yellowstone Association building, the institute offers hundreds of programs annually and has something for almost all ages. In one of the institute’s overnight field seminars, learn alongside experts like wildlife biologists, artists, geothermal scientists, or photographers and then hang out at the historic Lamar Buffalo Ranch Field Campus in the park’s remote northeastern corner. 308 E. Park St., (406) 848-2400, www.yellowstone.org

  ROAD TRIP 2 ENCOUNTERING LOCAL CHARACTERS

  There’s archaeological evidence showing Paradise Valley has been continuously occupied for 12,600 years. It is possible its current crop of residents is its most interesting though. On any given day, you could run into Earl Craig, Montana’s poet laureate who works as a farrier—that’s someone who shoes horses—when not writing poetry; Margot Kidder, known in the wider world as Lois Lane in four Superman movies in the 1970s and 1980s, and locally for being one of dozens of protesters arrested on the steps of the White House in a protest of the Keystone XL pipeline; or John Bailey, the fly-fishing expert who coached Brad Pitt in casting for the movie A River Runs Through It. And then there are all of the writers and movie stars (Jeff Bridges met his wife Susan while he was filming a movie at Chico Hot Springs, where she worked as a waitress at the time). Since the latter are often in Livingston to lay low, we’re not going to mention them. But, if you’re in a bar and think the person next to you looks like Michael Keaton, it very well might be.

  Yellowstone Gateway Museum

  While Livingston is plenty interesting these days, it’s worth taking time to get to know its past, especially when its past is on exhibit in a school built in 1907 and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A visit to the Yellowstone Gateway Museum is worth it just to get a peek inside the North Side School, which the museum has kept mostly intact. “We’re an old school with four big classrooms, so we have four main exhibits,” says museum director Paul Shea. When Paul came on as the Gateway Museum’s director in 2009, he had the task of re-exhibiting the museum’s entire collection. Within the four main permanent exhibits, on Native American cultures, expeditions, transportation, and pioneer life, he “uses objects to enhance the story line, rather than the object being the story. And every exhibit has to have a children’s component. It’s not just a museum for adults,” says Paul, who first came to the area in 1979 to work a summer in Yellowstone. “I came up and hit Yellowstone and it was like getting hit upside the head. Yellowstone chooses her own and when she chooses you, you don’t get away. It changed my life, and, as this museum shows, the lives of countless others. To me, and a lot of people, Yellowstone is a spiritual place.” 118 West Chinook St., (406) 222-4184, yellowstonegatewaymuseum.org

  LOCAL LOWDOWN TIM CAHILL, Writer

  Tim Cahill’s journey to becoming a travel writer was circuitous. First, he traded law school for a master’s degree in creative writing. Then, while studying for the latter at San Francisco State, he climbed up Mt. Tam and played dead. This was in service of researching turkey vultures, which eventually began to circle overhead. A photographer friend needed Tim to write an article to accompany some bird images he wanted to send to the San Francisco Examiner. Naturally, with such unorthodox research methods, the resulting article was a hit with the newspaper’s editor and Tim was asked for more.

  Within a year, Tim was hired on at what was then a nascent Rolling Stone magazine. For 7 years, he worked alongside the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Tim Farris, and David Felton, helping to usher in a movement called New Journalism. When Rolling Stone moved to New York, Tim stayed in San Francisco and became a founding editor of Outside magazine. Tim quickly became one of the magazine’s star writers, having convinced the publisher that readers would love an international adventure column and that he was the perfect man for the job. When Outside moved to Chicago, Tim went freelance, which, at the time, was every bit as unorthodox as his ornithological research methods.

  Since then, Tim has written hundreds of articles for National Geographic, Life, Travel & Leisure, Reader’s Digest, Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, and even Yoga Journal. He’s contracted malaria, fallen off cliffs, investigated the murder of an American in the jungles of Peru, and set a Guinness World Record for the fastest Pan-American traverse, all while introducing readers to new people and places. He has won a Lowell Thomas Gold Award, a National Magazine Award, and his work has been included in Best American Travel Writing three times. Tim has written nine books. His first, Buried Dreams, a true-crime account of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, was a national bestseller. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that if anything could inspire the most slothful of couch potatoes to get out there for an adventure, it would be his book Hold the Enlightenment.

  Tim’s first screenplay was for the IMAX film Everest, which became one of the top 20 films of 1998 and bested Titanic in per-screen ticket sales. Another screenplay he co-authored, for the documentary film The Living Sea, was nominated for an Academy Award. Tim has lived in Livingston since 1979.

  Q: How is Livingston the same as it was in 1979?

  TIM CAHILL: The population is about the same—about 7,000 in the town and 16,000 in the county—and you find all kinds of different and interesting people in town. You might walk into someone who just got back from a fact-finding mission to North Korea or someone who speaks Arabic and knows the Koran.

  Q: Any drawbacks of living here?

  TC: The wind. It can blow for 3 days. By some accounts, this is the windiest town in America. We have regular gusts to 70 or 80 miles per hour. We’ve had the wind literally blow an empty freight car off the railroad track. The wind can get to you; it’s a psychological thing. It depletes you of serotonin.

  Q: Did you ever think about leaving?

  TC: Not really. Here’s a little something from sports. People talk about lifting weights and they say you are not really going to be able to do a snatch and jerk in a canoe. You need a solid base. Once you have the solid base, then you can lift the weights over your head. That’s the way I like to think of our little community. It is very solid.

  Q: How is Livingston different than it was in 1979?

  TC: The two bars that I used to go to were the Wrangler and the Long Branch. They had live music pretty much every night and it wasn’t unusual to have an actual fistfight in the alley behind the bar. One of those bars is now the Katabatic Brewery, which makes craft beer, and one is Jalisco’s Mexican restaurant. And if there is a fistfight on the street today, both participants will be taken to jail and will have to deal with assault charges.

  Q: Did you ever get in any fistfights?

  TC: I’m good at running away from fights.

  Chico Hot Springs

  Chico Hot Springs in the tiny town of Pray, at the end of a county road and at the base of Emigrant Peak, has only had five owners since Bill and Percie Knowles founded it as a boardinghouse for miners in 1900. Seabring Davis and her husband, Colin, are th
e current owners. Colin started as the general manager at Chico in 1995 and he and Seabring bought it in 2016. Prior to their purchase, Mike and Eve Art owned it for 45 years. They get the credit for making Chico the Montana institution it is today. In 1972, algae grew in the hot spring pools, and other parts of the resort were worse off. Mike and Eve and their daughters, Jackie and Andrea, moved out west from Cleveland, Ohio—Mike discovered the property while in Montana on a hunting trip—and began fixing the place up. They started with the dining room. Mike believed that if they served the best food in the state, that would draw visitors. He was right, but the cleaned-up pool and refreshed rooms didn’t hurt either. There are menu items that date to the earliest days of the Arts’ ownership that Seabring calls “Chico classics”: the beef Wellington entree for two, the flaming orange dessert, and the pine nut–crusted halibut. Almost any night, whatever the season, Chico’s dining room is full. So are its rooms. 163 Chico Rd., (406) 333-4933, www.chicohotsprings.com