It was on Halloween night that I first realized there was a problem. My three children—dressed as Darth Vader, a pirate fairy, and Tinker Bell—were making their way down Lee Street, in Old Town Alexandria, Va. The houses were decked with spider webs and all manner of spooky, expensive-looking accoutrements. Police had closed the street to traffic and hundreds of families milled about. It was Bobo paradise.
My children walked up to a house where a witch sat on the porch with a cauldron of candy. They yelled, “trick-or-treat!” She invited them to choose two pieces each. They huddled around the pot. And then I heard my oldest, Cody, who is 8.
“You can’t have that one, it has nuts,” he said to his sister with the peanut allergy. “Oh no, don’t take that one,” he said to his littler sister. “That could be a choking hazard.” After a few minutes of fussing around and finding potential dangers in each piece of candy, Cody concluded that prudence dictated they each take a single lollipop.
“But you can have two pieces,” the witch reminded them kindly. “Thank you so much for offering,” Cody answered. “But we’d better stick with these. They’re the safest.” And with that he led his sisters off the porch and back toward me, a look of relief in his eyes. In that moment, I grasped how fully I had failed him.
All boys have need of some recklessness. If they do not come by it naturally, it must be bred into them. The trick is titrating just enough of the stuff so that they are game for life’s adventures but not liable to do something catastrophically stupid, like going to law school. And so it was in this moment, as I stood on Lee Street, that I resolved to put more adventure into his life.
In the end, I settled on taking Cody to Yellowstone for a week of camping and communing with nature in all her brutal splendor. I emphasize that this trip would be for his benefit, not mine. Because while I enjoy nature, in measured doses, I have matured to the point where I have certain needs. For instance, there is only one pillow on which I can sleep—it is almost completely flat, with small indentations perfectly conformed to my neck from three decades of use. Also, I require a double espresso every morning, before 6:30 a.m. This is a partial list of what my wife delicately refers to as my “eccentricities.”
But parenthood requires sacrifice—the two words are practically synonyms—so in early June, I packed up my son, and a great deal of gear, and took him to Yellowstone, one of the last places in America where you can still have real adventure.
Real adventure requires real risk, and Yellowstone has that in spades. The week before we got to the park, there were two “geyser accidents.” In one, a 13-year-old was burned at a thermal area near Old Faithful. The injuries were severe enough that he was hospitalized. In another, a 23-year-old fell into an acidic, scalding-hot spring near Porkchop Geyser. He died in so grisly a manner that rangers were unable to recover a body.
Over the last decade, 16 people have been burned badly enough at Yellowstone that they’ve had to be helicoptered to the burn unit at the University of Utah. Lots of minor burns go unreported. “Most people who get thermal burns feel a little sheepish about it” and don’t report the injuries to rangers, reports park geologist Hank Heasler.
And the geothermal dangers are just the start. There are steep cliffs and switchbacks on hiking trails. The driving can be harrowing, too. I’ve been through all 50 states, and Yellowstone’s Dunraven Pass (elevation—8,878 feet; lanes—two; guardrails—none) ranks high on the list of roads I never want to travel again.
Then there are the animals. Last year, five visitors were gored by bison. (There are some 4,900 of them shambling about the park.) That seems to have been exceptional. The National Park Service says there are usually only one or two gorings a year—and helpfully includes a video of one of them on its website. In 1995, perhaps sensing that things weren’t spicy enough, the NPS decided to reintroduce wolves to the park, the wolves having all been killed off or driven from Yellowstone over the course of the 20th century. The animals have done quite well for themselves: By 2014, there were 104 of them running around.
And then there are the bears.
The brown bear, also known as the grizzly bear or, more perfectly, Ursus arctos horribilis, is one of the main features of Yellowstone. There are more than 700 of these large creatures wandering the park, and they are never far from your consciousness. Signs everywhere warn that you are in “Bear Country” and list precautions on (1) how to avoid contact with bears and (2) what to do should you encounter one. There is an average of one bear attack per year in the park; three visitors have been killed by bears over the last five years. As the National Park Service sternly explains, “Your safety cannot be guaranteed.” This is something of an understatement.
So much of one that there’s an entire book on the subject, titled, charmingly, Death in Yellowstone. It chronicles some 360 deaths at the park (this number omits hundreds more from auto accidents), some of them both novel and terrifying. In 1939, for instance, a man working on a road project in Yellowstone’s Tower region was killed by hydrogen sulfide gas, which began seeping from the ground without warning. This was not a broken gas line or man-made mistake. It was just nature, in her fickleness, deciding to reach out and kill at random. As is her wont.
The chapter on bear deaths runs to 43 pages, the longest in the book. A sample:
Encouragingly, bear deaths have decreased in recent decades, since the park got serious about securing trash and preventing people from feeding the bears. But nothing in Yellowstone is really safe. In 1970, after a child fell into a hot spring and was boiled alive, one of the local papers, the Billings Gazette, ran an editorial, which concluded, “remember that Yellowstone Park is wild. The Park is raw nature. And it can kill.”
Archaeologists believe that humans first encountered the perils of Yellowstone 11,000 years ago. The first white man to see the place was probably John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition who detoured south through the Montana territory to investigate in 1807. He passed through one of the park’s geothermal regions and came out describing a vision of “fire and brimstone.” No one believed him, and for the next 40 years the area was jokingly referred to as “Colter’s Hell.”
No real survey was taken until the Cook-Folsom-Peterson expedition of 1869, and even this group touched only a small piece of Yellowstone. It took another two years for Ferdinand Hayden to mount a follow-up exploration and produce a serious map. Hayden’s findings about the wonders of Yellowstone led President Ulysses Grant to immediately designate the area a “national park”—the first such entity not just in America but in the world. The idea was to preserve this vast natural treasure for the reunited America, for all generations.
Only it didn’t quite work. With no mechanism to enforce the park’s protection, Yellowstone was looted by poachers, squatters, woodcutters, and vandals. So in 1886, the Army encamped at Yellowstone and assumed the job of keeping the park orderly. They laid down the law quickly. By 1903 the situation was civilized enough that Theodore Roosevelt—then the president—went camping in the northeast section of Yellowstone. Today you can stay in primitive “Roughrider” cabins—where you can see through cracks in the boards used for the walls—just a short way from where TR pitched his tent. Spending a night in a Roughrider cabin in June, with the sun out until 10:00 p.m., the nighttime temperature touching the 30s, and the only heat coming from a small wood stove, is less luxurious—and more wonderful—than you can possibly imagine.
The modern Yellowstone takes up 3,468 square miles and contains only a single espresso machine. You can think of it as divided into five distinct regions—the Tower Fall area, the Mammoth Hot Springs, the Lake, the Canyon, and the Geysers—which functionally makes it five parks in one. Kind of like Disney World. Except a Disney World where the rides can kill you.
The most famous section of the park is the Geyser region, which is a bit like Disney’s Magic Kingdom. It’s here that you’ll find Old Faithful (which, to extend the analogy, is Yellowstone’s Space Mountain). It’s one of the few places in the park where mass crowds of people gather throughout the day. But though it’s impressive, Old Faithful is almost a sideshow. What makes the Geyser region unique is that it’s the only place on earth that frequently doesn’t look like earth.
The Grand Canyon, the Mendenhall Glacier, the Great Barrier Reef—there are plenty of places more awesomely impressive than Yellowstone’s Geyser region. But none of them looks quite as alien. In one basin, for instance, sits the Grand Prismatic Spring, a 300-foot-wide, 160-foot-deep pool that dribbles out 560 gallons of 160-degree water every minute. It looks like a large, shimmering eye, with deep blue at the center giving way to narrow bands of green and yellow around the iris and then a shocking orange, which bleeds along the run-off. It looks like something from a Star Wars movie.
The color gradations in the Grand Prismatic Spring are the result of the single-celled organism archaea, which thrives in the pool’s chemistry and produces different hues at different temperature bands as water flows away from the hot center of the spring.
As interesting as it is to contemplate how much the Grand Prismatic Spring looks like something we might recognize from science fiction, I couldn’t stop wondering what someone would have made of it 200 years ago, before there was even that fictional context. Imagine living your life seeing forests and rivers and mountains, and maybe the occasional town or city. Everything you see looks like something else. There is little for which you do not have a frame of reference. Even a wonder like Niagara Falls would be recognizable as a mammoth waterfall. But then you happen upon this steaming, shimmering eye of God. It would have been the most remarkable experience of your life because it is completely unlike anything you have ever seen—or will see—again.
At least that’s the impression it made on me. Cody, who has seen Star Wars movies, was more taken with the Sapphire Pool a few miles away. The Sapphire Pool is much less grand than the Grand Prismatic Spring. It is irregularly shaped and perhaps 30 feet long. Its water is the purest, clearest blue you will ever see and through its placidity you can gaze into the pool’s twisting, cavernous depths. “It looks like you’re staring into the center of the earth,” Cody whispered when he first saw it. In a world full of video games and iPads and Star Wars, the Sapphire Pool was so startlingly powerful that we returned to it four more times over the course of the week, at Cody’s behest.
An interesting side note: Yellowstone gets a lot of earthquakes—add that to the list of perils—and in 1959 one of these quakes transformed the Sapphire Pool into a geyser which spewed water 150 to 200 feet into the air every two hours or so. This activity gradually subsided and by 1968 the pool had returned to its earlier form.
Like politics, parenting can be understood as war by other means. Yet, while there might be a dozen theories of generalship, there are (at least) a hundred schools of thought on parenting.
Anchoring the two ends of the spectrum are what I think of as helicopter parents and IMINT parents. The helicopter parent is a well-known phenomenon: These are adults who hover in the foreground of their children’s lives, watching, directing, applauding, rescuing—taking on whatever responsibility they deem necessary in a given moment.
At the opposite end are the IMINT parents, who are much less common. People often refer to “free-range” parenting, but this is a misnomer. Very few responsible adults would allow a child to actually wander about unmolested by any supervision. The truth is closer to IMINT, the abbreviation for “imagery intelligence,” which refers to the collection of photographs, mostly from satellites and high-altitude reconnaissance. When people say that they “free-range” their kids, what they really mean is that they watch periodically, from a far orbit, in such a manner as to get high-level snapshots of their children’s progress, without being noticed by the child. They then use this intel to make parenting decisions.
I like to think of myself as somewhere in between these two poles, perhaps a Predator-drone parent: always watching, but from a distance, often unseen, and able to call in close-air support as needed. But then, I would think that. The phenomenon of helicopter parenting is the inverse of the French Resistance—everyone insists they aren’t participating in it, but most people secretly are. Perhaps even me.
Because whenever I reflected on the Halloween tableau, I couldn’t stop wondering how Cody had become so reflexively anxious. From you, Dad. I learned it from watching you.
As a consequence, I determined that his Yellowstone adventure would be free of excessive worry. I would teach him to understand nature, and respect her power, but not to be fearful.
I started off by getting him a knife.
The spiritual connection between boys and pocketknives rivals the intensity of the bond between girls and horses. It is primordial, unfathomable. Give a boy a Swiss Army knife—even a boy who has never before seen a Swiss Army knife—and he is instantly entranced. Cody was. He stroked it, examined it, fidgeted with it. He picked through all seven of its tools, studying them individually, and then splayed them out at once like a peacock. He began inventing scenarios where he might use it: “If a tree falls on our campsite, I could use the saw to cut it apart,” he said. “And if a snake bites one of us, I could use the leather punch to drill another hole so we could suck out even more venom,” he said. “If a bear attacks us on a hike, I can use the knife to fight him,” he said. This last scenario burned so brightly in his imagination that he decided to keep the knife in a sheath on his belt. Just in case. Some evenings I would catch him sitting, gazing at the knife in silent fascination, as if he were staring into a fire.
Fires, of course, are also endlessly seductive to boys. Cody’s favorite part of camping is the making and tending of the campfire. He devises needlessly intricate methods of starting the fires. He burns everything he can find—paper towels, sticks, dried pine needles, bits of croissant. One night in Yellowstone he took the cardboard center from a roll of paper towels, stuffed it with pinecones and bits of newspaper, punctured air-holes in it with the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife, and then dropped it in the fire. His face transformed into something resembling the ecstasy of St. Teresa.
I encouraged, or, more accurately, from Predator-drone altitude, did not discourage any of this. Instead, I tried to let him enjoy the wild. We talked about how to build a fire, keep embers from floating out of the pit, and douse it before bed. But then I let him do with it as he pleased. I showed him how when you whittle at wood with a knife, you always cut away from your body. And then I left him to it. When we explored the Sapphire Pool and the Grand Prismatic Spring and other geothermal features, I explained the importance of staying on the boardwalk paths, and then let him wander without hovering behind his shoulder. And every day we hiked.
We hiked the long, vertiginous trail along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. We hiked a straight, flat, and quiet trail out to the Lone Star Geyser. We hiked to the top of the hill overlooking Old Faithful and along a beautiful meadow to the black-sand shore of Lake Shoshone.
On average, we hiked between five and seven miles a day, which, at 8,000 feet above sea level, is enough to tax even the boundless energies of an 8-year-old. Cody and I are both early risers—it is rare that either of us sleeps past 5:00 a.m.—yet we waited until mid-morning to begin our expeditions. That’s because, early in the stay, a cheerful park employee named Julia told me that “if you set out at first light, it’s a great opportunity to see wildlife.” Which I took to mean “a great opportunity to meet a grisly death.” Because no matter where we were, I was, in a decidedly helicopterish way, worrying about the bears.
When I say that Yellowstone is plastered with warnings about bears, I’m not exaggerating. It is difficult to go far without a sign cautioning that you are in Bear Country, that bears are dangerous, that you should travel in groups of three or more, making a lot of noise, and that you should not go anywhere without bear spray. When you enter the park, rangers give you literature about bears. When you check into a campsite, you’re given a lecture about bear safety.
The reason for these warnings is a lawsuit. In 1972, 25-year-old Harry Walker and his buddy Phillip Bradberry hitchhiked into Yellowstone, went down to Old Faithful, and then, like a couple of idiots, wandered off the trails into a thermal area and pitched a tent on a hillside, 16 miles from the nearest campground. On their second night, a bear started rooting through the trash and food they kept next to their tent. As I said, a couple of idiots. When they emerged from the tent at dawn they surprised the grizzly. It charged. As Death in Yellowstone explains, Bradberry fell down an embankment and then ran for help. By the time rangers got to the scene, “about 25 percent of [Walker’s body] had been eaten,” including “his entire pelvic region.” (It is uncomfortable to report that in many cases of bear attack, the pelvic region is the first to go.)
This being America, Walker’s parents sued the National Park Service. And were awarded $87,417.
The decision was reversed on appeal, but it spooked the Park Service into trying to lawyer-proof Yellowstone. Walker’s folks insisted that there was no way their son could have known about the danger of bears, or hiking off trails, or pitching camp in the middle of nowhere, or leaving food and trash next to his tent. So officials in Yellowstone set out to make sure that you’d have to be dumb as a rock not to understand the risks of the park. And they got the job done.
Maybe a little too well. I kept thinking that Yellowstone gets four million visitors, and only one or two bear attacks, every year. Those sound like pretty good odds. Except that of those four million tourists, only a tiny percentage make it onto trails in the backcountry, where you’re more likely to encounter a bear. So if you’re a hiker, that cuts the odds down right quick.
And if you’re the worrying sort, it doesn’t help that the instructions for dealing with bears can be confusingly contradictory. The official advice says that you should wear bear bells in order to make noise so that you don’t surprise a bear. I mentioned this to one ranger and he replied, with a laugh, “Oh sure, the bells are great. We find them in bear scat all the time.” If a bear hits you, one set of guidelines posted near trailheads says that you should fall down on your stomach, cross your hands over the back of your neck, and play dead. Another set, which I picked up at a ranger station, emphasized that if a bear hits you, you must “FIGHT BACK!”
At least when it comes to bear spray—essentially an industrial-grade pepper spray—the instructions at Yellowstone are of one mind: Don’t go anywhere without it. But down at Yosemite—which also has bears wandering around—bear spray is strictly prohibited. Which calls to mind the lawsuits again: If bear spray actually works—and isn’t just a talisman hikers keep in a hip holster to pretend they’re not playing ursine roulette—how could the Yosemite administrators deny the public its protection?
I tried to keep such thoughts tucked away on a high shelf. Meanwhile, I explained the workings of bear spray to Cody and talked him through every scenario I could think of.
“So if the bear charges and if it’s not a bluff and the bear spray doesn’t work and the bear mauls you, then what am I supposed to do?” he asked. I told him that in such an unlikely chain of events, he should run back along the trail while the bear feasts on Daddy’s pelvic region. He was entirely satisfied with this answer.
All in all, I thought I handled the bear question as well as any Predator-drone parent could. We undertook our hikes with a healthy respect for the situation but not any real anxiety. We even made it something of a game, where Cody would shout “Drill!” and we’d see how long it took me to draw my bear spray and pull the safety. “Hiking in bear country requires constant vigilance,” he told me solemnly. I agreed.
We were hiking along the Mystic Falls Overlook trail when it happened. It’s a reasonably popular hike that begins just north of the Sapphire Pool in the Biscuit Basin, approaches a lively waterfall, then gains 500 more feet of elevation while going up the mountain and rewards you with a panoramic overlook. From there you can see clear out to Old Faithful, some three miles away. Cody and I hadn’t seen any other hikers for the better part of an hour and were walking through a forested patch shy of the summit when we heard a deep growl in the woods. It was perhaps 20 yards ahead and to our right.
We froze and I pulled the bear spray. We waited a moment, my left hand on Cody’s shoulder, the bear spray in my right. Then we heard it again. The woods were thick enough that we couldn’t see more than a few yards off the trail. The growl had the kind of bass resonance that suggested something large and padded by a lot of meat. Cody yanked his Swiss Army knife from its sheath and stood at the ready.
When the growl sounded for the third time, it had moved so that it was passing us to the right. I elected to take us forward, on an opposing vector, so the distance between us and it would increase. We made as much noise as we could. After a few minutes, when we were clear, Cody looked up at me and said evenly, “Dad, that’s the most scared I’ve ever been in my entire life.”
And so I told him that fear is natural and that there’s nothing wrong with it. That anyone would be scared in a moment like that. But what’s important is that you put your fear to one side so that you can think clearly and do whatever needs to be done.
It doesn’t read like much on the page, but it was a good little speech. And the truth is, that growling could have been anything—maybe a bear, but maybe an elk, possibly even a large pronghorn.
Part of the reason I took Cody to Yellowstone in the first place was that I wanted him to learn about fear—real fear. He already knows about the fears that middle-class kids carry around these days—about making friends and fitting in and achieving whatever it is their parents hope for them. But he knew nothing about real fear. The kind that tingles in your belly. And while being scared is part of life, a good part of growing up is learning how to master your fears so that they don’t master you.
This all sounds high-minded, but it’s something that used to come as a matter of routine to nearly every boy. That is no longer the case because we have turned our country into one gigantic safe space. On the whole, this is a good thing; probably even a very good thing. But it means that today, in order to acquaint your children with even tiny bits of danger, you need to seek them out. And Yellowstone might be the best place in America to do just that.
Three days later, Cody and I had dinner at the Roosevelt Lodge, near where TR had camped. “Remember when we heard that growling on the trail by Mystic Falls?” he asked. I told him that I did; that it was a moment I was not likely to forget. “Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “I think we should hike that trail again.”
And so we did.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
