My brother and I were looking for work in the summer after our freshman year in college. A help-wanted ad in the Council Bluffs Nonpareil stated that Hamilton Stores Inc. was looking for grocery store clerks and some other miscellaneous positions I do not remember. The key attraction for the position for us was the fact the job was in Yellowstone National Park. After begging our dad and a few phone calls, my brother and I found ourselves on a greyhound bus headed out of Omaha headed toward Yellowstone.
We were placed by the HR department as clerks at the grocery store in Canyon Village. After a few preliminary orientation talks and a tour of the store, we were shown to our rooms in the dorm. After we were done unpacking, my brother and I were left to our own devices. Just off the parking lot outside the dorm, we saw an asphalt-covered trail that led into the woods so we decided to take it. After a mile or two, we heard a deep rumbling. We decided it had to be the waterfalls we've heard about. Encouraged, we kept going. However, the trail headed in a different direction from where the rumbling came. Being good scouts and Iowa farm boys, we unwisely decided to cut through the woods. After about 15 minutes we were second guessing ourselves. We were in the mountains, the woods were thick, and it was getting dark. However, we still heard the falls so we kept going. After a few more minutes, we saw more light coming through the woods indicating a clearing ahead. Eventually, we stumbled out of the woods and the brush onto a highway. A couple a hundred yards up the road, we saw a bunch of cars and RVs in a small parking lot. We headed toward them. It was the scenic outlook for Upper and Lower Great Falls. A sign indicated this was a trail-head of a path that led down to the top of the Lower Great Falls. The trail was asphalt-covered with a bunch of switch backs. It was less that 2 miles down so my brother and I decided to take it and raced down the trail. We passed old people complaining about their knees going down the path and met young families with fathers carrying their toddlers on the way up the trail. Everybody looked out of breath. When we we arrived at the top of the Lower Falls, a slight mist covered my face. The sound of thunderous, rushing water filled the air. The golden hues of the canyon walls mixed with the greens of the vegetation in the setting sun. My experience matched the scene described by Rudyard Kipling so many years before:
All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of color--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs--men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green. The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink it was--that overhung the deepest deeps of all.This was my first and best real experience of Yellowstone. I hiked over two hundred miles that summer on the trails around the canyon. I saw the Lower Great Falls from several angles and it always moved me. Needless to say I am enjoying the Ken Burns DVD series and it pleases me to imagine that Kipling and I covered the same paths around 80 years apart.
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