Yellowstone & the Shoshone Forest

Some notes I wrote as we were passing through these incredible and austere landscapes:

Yellowstone

    There we passed among the high desert sagebrush, the mudpots and hot springs smoking sulphur, deep carved canyons and saw-tooth peaks. It is as likely to snow in August as anything. It is the burning, freezing corpse of an ancient mountain.
    There live the grizzly bears and the black, the prong-horned elk, the few remaining North American bison not interbred with domestic cattle. When the bison venture beyond the park they are killed, and the bears too. So they keep to this inhospitable place, with its stunted trees and grey snags, its boiling rivers, its year-long winters.
    I looked at these cracked rock faces, and fields of dead white calcium, the clouds close and dark and fast, and thought the place was not made for us. Nor even the bison or the bear. It is the burning heart of a wild country.

The Shoshone Forest
   
    We come down through rain in this steep mountain gorge, the water spitting up from our tires. The air is winter-cold in August, our fingers numb in our gloves. Past deep wet woods, green shadows, misted meadows. And above us rising steep and bare, the walls of stone, their feet and heads hazed with dead forests. It is a long while that we pass each one, wide as they are, and I look up from the road at their deep crevasses cut by water and ice, their jagged steeples. They seem open and wounded to me, huge hurt hearts set out before the world, this valley, its snow and sun. At once they are not there for anyone to see. As Peter Matthiesen writes in The Snow Leopard: "The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning." Solitary and self-composed.