Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks, welcome to The Roundup. We're a Cowboy State Daily podcast that focuses on interesting people in the Cowboy state. We've had so many wonderful guests over the past - oh my goodness, 10 months that we've been doing this podcast now - today, I promise, is going to be one of the most interesting.
First though, before we get into our conversation with Yellowstone expert, someone who's been immersed in the Yellowstone life for more than 40 years, I want to talk real quickly about the Wyoming Business Alliance's “Business From the Basement” podcast. If you're a business person, if you are an entrepreneur, anything that has to do with business in Wyoming, that podcast is going to give you great ideas and great tips. So we look forward to having you check them out.
But right now, I want to put the focus on this gentleman who is on the podcast with me today. This is Jeff Henry. And Jeff has been, well, he's been in Yellowstone since he was six months old. That was the first time that he went to Yellowstone, and then he has made it his life and his love to be in Yellowstone.
And so we're really glad to have Jeff Henry with us today. Jeff is an author. Jeff was a fishing guide. He's been a researcher, he's a photographer. He's done amazing things and brought some real life to Yellowstone. So hello, Jeff. We're so glad to have you on the podcast today.
Jeff Henry:
I'm glad to be with you. Wendy,
Wendy Corr:
Jeff, you have lived such an interesting life, and a life that we can't really imagine, because the life that you've had has been in so many ways lived in the hidden part of Yellowstone. You have been a winter keeper for so many years in Yellowstone, and you have immersed yourself in Yellowstone in ways that we just can't even understand.
Jeff, tell us a little bit about how you got to Yellowstone and why you decided that that was going to be your home away from home.
Jeff Henry:
Well, my mom and dad first brought me here when I was six months old. They had really cool pictures of me at iconic places in the park, like fishing bridge and Old Faithful geyser. And then mom and dad brought me here several more times as I was growing up.
And on top of that, for whatever reason, I was always drawn to this area. From the time I could first read, I read about this area, and I especially studied maps of this area. It had a special draw for me for whatever reason I can't necessarily explain, and then I came to work here on May 25, 1977. I still try to celebrate my anniversary every year.
And, I have to say right off the bat that all through my Yellowstone career, I've been very, very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to get what I consider to be awesome jobs that have allowed me to, first of all, stay in the park, and also allowed me, or enabled me, to learn a great deal about different aspects of the park.
Right out of the box, I got a job as a fishing guide on Yellowstone Lake, and I did that for four summers, and my first summer, I thought I died and gone to heaven, being a fishing guide on Yellowstone Lake. That's spectacular scenery. The fishing was, in those days, especially, was spectacular itself. I was only 24 years old, and it was about as good as it could get.
After that, I went on and worked, oh, a long list of jobs. I won't belabor the point, but the jobs included labor crew, truck driver, maintenance man, park ranger, grizzly bear researcher, many others. Starting very early in my career, I started working as a winter caretaker, or a winter keeper, as we say in Yellowstone, and I've done that for 46 winners, pretty much.
Now there were some winters that I didn't do that much of it for various reasons. I missed a couple winters or a couple winters because of illness. I missed one winter because I went to law enforcement school so I could become a park service law enforcement Ranger.
But even those winters, I did at least a little bit early in the winter, late in the winter, when I returned, so at least a little bit every winter, for 46 winners, and for 43 or so those winters have been full time.
Wendy Corr:
That's amazing. Oh my goodness. So winter in Yellowstone, I mean, I've been in there on a snowmobile tour, but to actually live there? What's the most, I guess, difficult, what's the most challenging part of living in Yellowstone in the winter?
Jeff Henry:
Well, in a way, I'd say that almost everything you do in the winter is challenging. Certainly in the past, it was true that Yellowstone was a pretty harsh place in the winter. It's magical. It's beautiful. It’s thrilling. It's inspiring, but it also is difficult.
It takes a lot of energy to get along, and especially when you do things like my photography, which took me out in the backcountry, sometimes by myself, you really have to pay attention to what you're doing. On the morning when it's say 40-50, below zero, if you make a mistake, you're on your own hook. And it could get really serious, really fast.
Most challenging thing I've ever done, oh, I don't know, the list would be long. I've had snowmobile breakdowns that have made it necessary to hike, I don't know, 10-12, miles, maybe at the max, to get back to some place where I could get help.
You know, most of my time in Yellowstone was spent in the days before cell phones. And even now with cell phones, the majority of the park doesn't have service. So still, even now, in 2024 when you go out and about, either by yourself or just with one or two other people, you really are on your own to a great extent.
Wendy Corr:
And so that has been something that you have really learned to experience. In fact, you've put it in books, which I just think is phenomenal. You've had a couple of books out, one winter guide, the winter guide to Yellowstone, and one how to survive in Yellowstone in the winter. Right?
Jeff Henry:
I wrote the Yellowstone winter guide quite a while ago, and I've revised that once, I wrote a guide to survival in snow country. I wrote a winter history book, a book about the history of winter in Yellowstone. I've done two photography books, coffee table type books of winter subjects in Yellowstone. The list is probably longer than that, but I can't think of the title.
Wendy Corr:
What made you decide to share your experiences in winter in a book form like that? Did you just say, I've got all these pictures, I need to do something with them? What was your impetus there?
Jeff Henry:
Well, I guess fundamentally, or in the beginning, I just really loved where I was. I love what I'm seeing. I do, I use the words thrilling and inspiring. And Yellowstone in winter is especially thrilling and inspiring for me, and that's why I was motivated to start shooting photographs in the first place.
I started shooting photographs seriously in about 1982, that's about when I got my first professional quality equipment, and I guess my next step was, my deep love for the place and for the season motivated me to want to share what I saw and what I loved with anybody else who might be interested.
For many, many years I made my living from my photography. Most jobs in the park, as you probably can guess, don't pay that well. So I made my real living from photography. For many years, I did make my living that way, publishing photographs and places like calendar companies, magazines and so forth. That business went away, oh, mid 2000s or so, as I'm sure you know, when with the onset of digital photography,
Wendy Corr:
Well, I know that you've had some really fantastic experiences, not just in winter in Yellowstone, but also as a researcher. How did you get involved in doing coyote research and then as part of the interagency grizzly bear study teams?
Jeff Henry:
Well, between those two, my first love is the job I had with the interagency grizzly bear study team. And again, as I said in the very beginning of this interview, I've always been in the right place at the right time to just fall into great jobs. And in answer to your question, I was in the right place at the right time, and I knew the right people, and I had interests that it had enabled me to learn a lot about grizzly bears.
I've always been interested in nature and wildlife, and I spent an awful lot of time on my own, independently researching grizzly bears. In 1985 I met the right people just by chance. They learned of my interests and my knowledge, and I was hired to do a winter kill carcass survey in the Firehole River Basin, which includes the Upper Geyser Basin and the lower Geyser Basin, that feature famous features like Grand Prismatic Spring and Old Faithful Geyser.
The ground there in the Firehole River Valley is warm, geothermally warmed, and therefore it's good winter habitat for ungulates. In those days, there were an awful lot of bison and oak that wintered there. It was in the time before wolves, so that ungulate populations were high. And there are great many of those animals that spent the winter there in the Firehole Firehole River Valley. Winter kill everywhere. They die from exposure and starvation.
Grizzly bears utilize that carrion in the spring when they came out of hibernation. And the grizzly bear study team hired me to do a carcass survey, so I would start roughly in the middle of the winter. So I’d keep track of which animals died, where they died, and then when the bears came out in the spring, I calculated what percentage of each carcass was consumed by grizzly bears, as opposed to what percentage was consumed by other scavengers like eagles and ravens and coyotes.
It was a wonderful job. I got to work independently. I skied and snowshoed and hiked all over the firehole Basin. I put in, I've never figured out how many miles. It's probably 1000 or 2000 miles of human powered locomotion every spring. I saw incredible wildlife behavior. It's got a lot of photographs, of course. So a wonderful job. Perfect fit for me.
Wendy Corr:
That is just phenomenal. Again, something that those of us who visit Yellowstone in the summer, during tourist season, just can't even imagine spending that kind of time as a human being in that wilderness area were there, there had to have been times that you, you know, encountered wildlife, that you encountered grizzlies or other predators while you were there.
What sort of situations did you find yourself in in that way?
Jeff Henry:
Well, I always played it really cautiously. I wasn't cavalier about the potential danger. And I can say, Oh, I've never totaled it up, but I probably had a total of close to 1000 carcasses in the eight years that I did that job. But each carcass I would go back and visit a number of times, so I probably had something on the order of four or 5000 carcass visits.
And I really want to point out that I never had anything, all those thousands of carcass visits, I never had anything remotely resembling a dangerous encounter. I saw bears - I think only one time that I actually chased the bear, unintentionally, I chased the bear off a carcass.
It's always very careful about it. I usually approach the carcass, I could usually spot the carcass from the distance, or I could determine that there was a carcass present by the presence of scavengers like ravens and eagles that I could see from the distance. And then I would intentionally approach the carcass from upwind, so that if there was a bear on the carcass, it would know I was coming. I wouldn't just startle it in close range.
So I never, never had anything resembling a dangerous encounter in those thousands of visits. That is, yeah, you're right - in answer to your question, you know, I did see all sorts of really fascinating wildlife behavior in those days. There were a lot of elk that wintered in the Firehole basin. So I saw a lot of elk behavior, beautiful scenery, including elk. Bison were there in large numbers. Bison are still there in large numbers. Saw coyote behavior.
It was just a wonderful time to be out. You know, the park was closed and quiet. And back in those days, even the park residents were few in the spring of the year. There are a lot more people who work year round in the park now than but it was a very quiet interlude for me.
And I'm not anti-social at all, but I do like solitude. It's one of the many reasons I like to winter caretakers - long, winter nights are good for reading. I love to read and research. So that's an answer to your question. I did see a lot of special things. I'm very, very fortunate to have had this.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely, oh my goodness. Now, one of the things that I'm sure - I know that you were in Yellowstone during, or you were working there around the time of the Big Yellowstone fires in 1988. And given how really intense the wildfire season has been this summer and this fall here in Wyoming, tell us about your experiences during that time.
Jeff Henry:
Well, in those years, I was a seasonal park ranger. In that particular summer, 1988, I was stationed at Madison Junction, which, as it turned out, that summer, was ground zero for some of the most spectacular fire behavior.
And I was a ranger, but I was also known for my photography. So early on, when it became apparent that the 1988 fires were going to become something really special, I was pulled out of the Ranger ranks and assigned to shoot photographs for the park archives of the fires. So that was another plum assignment.
You know, again, I have to say I'm just the luckiest guy in the world to have been in the right place at the right time for all these plum assignments. So from about mid July until about mid September that year, I had carte blanche to travel around the park to wherever I thought the hottest action was going to be on a given day and shoot photographs of the fires.
I had unrivaled access, and I took advantage of it. I took one day off in two months. I regret having taken that day off. I wish I had just worked straight through. So yeah, it was, it was a wonderful assignment. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was grueling, energetically grueling. It was hard on one's health to be exposed to so much ash and smoke for such an extended period of time. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Wendy Corr:
Again, what a singular experience to have to be able to get out and take those pictures. That's just fantastic. And also, then you've been able to watch the aftermath of that. People over in Bridger Teton National Forest, the people in the Bighorns now, they are going to have to deal with the aftermath of these fires.
Now, in the years since, in the, you know, goodness gracious, how many years has it been? 36 years. Since then, you've seen the aftermath of the fires, and you've seen the new growth, and you've seen the new life. Tell us about what they can expect to see in these areas that have just been so devastated by fire this summer.
Jeff Henry:
I hope that they see what I saw. I saw a regeneration of Yellowstone's plant communities that commenced - even in the fall of 1988 some of the areas that burned earlier in the summer started to green up by the time the snows came.
In the short term, we were fortunate, in a way, that the winter of 1988-89 was a heavy winter, so there was a lot of snow pack that furnished a lot of moisture for regrowth during spring. The regrowth was profuse, and it has continued. The regeneration has continued to be impressive.
In Yellowstone, most places, the trees that sprouted in the spring of 1989, especially the lodgepole pines, are probably all on average, 4-5-6 inches in diameter now, and they're probably 20 to 30 feet high, depending on their location.
Steep slopes haven't regenerated as well as more gentle terrain. Places with more available moisture have regenerated better than drier sites. But generally, overall, the regeneration here has been really good.
I will caution that I think that the world is a warmer and drier place, especially here in the Northern Rockies, than it was in 1988 and 1989, so I would guess, and it's just my guess, which is worth about two cents less than nothing, of course. But I would guess that the regeneration there in the area where that Fish Creek fire, and what is it called, the Pack tTrail fire near Togwotee Pass? I would guess that the regeneration there might not be as rapid or as profuse as it was in Yellowstone.
Just because I know that the difference in climate, I think the climate is - well, undeniably, the climate was both drier and warmer than it was in 1989. I don't know that country all that well, around Togwotee pass, but I think it's pretty steep. Most of it's pretty steep country, and that probably won't regenerate as well as a lot of the flat or Yellowstone Plateau country did.
Wendy Corr:
I was just going to say, you really have been on the front lines there, watching this happen, and having such a long history with Yellowstone, being able to say, I remember this here - and now every year, I'm seeing this change and seeing this grow back. And so that's really a unique view.
Jeff Henry:
It's been good for me as a photographer, because I have my own personal photo checkpoints where I've taken photographs in frequent intervals in the 36 years since the fires. And I did write about my experience in the ‘88 fires, and in my fire book called’ The Year Yellowstone Burned’ that I did in 2015 and I included information about the regeneration up to that point, i.e. 2015, in that book.
Wendy Corr:
Let's talk about your books here real quickly. I just had a chance, I went on Amazon and I found three of your books, the two winter books, but then also ‘Yellowstone: The First 150 years.’ And I just thought, what a great way to encapsulate so much history.
You've used historical photographs. You've just done all of this research. And like you say, you like to research, which is a plus. How long did it take you to put that whole book together? Because it was so extensive.
Jeff Henry:
Well, I was lucky in a way. That year, that was my summer of 2020, i.e. the summer that things were locked down, so I didn't have a lot of life's customary distractions. I was able to sit at my desk and work diligently without interruption - to a greater extent than I normally can.
So that was my summer of 2020. I produced that book pretty much in the summer and I published it. It came out in December of 2021, in time for the park’s 250th anniversary in 2022, and that was the most recent book I've done.
Again, sort of a tangent here, but the area where I live, here in southern Montana, was badly flooded in 2022, and the flooding damage included my mother's house. So my life for the past two years has been restoring my mom's house, and I haven't done any books for the last two years.
Wendy Corr:
Yes, that was a good reason. That was the big flood there. It's hard to believe that it's been two years already since the big flood there. Tell us about, have you witnessed anything else in Yellowstone on that scale, other than - so the fires and the flood really changed the features of Yellowstone in so many ways. And you were there for both of those.
Jeff Henry:
I was lucky enough to be here for both of those. I've been here for at least a couple of other benchmarks, cultural benchmarks, like the restoration of the wolves in 1995, the change in winter management, I think that was 2002 that that occurred.
So, yeah, I've seen a lot of Yellowstone's history, and it sometimes occurs to me that, and I don't want to sound like I'm boasting at all, but I've been lucky enough to be in Yellowstone for almost a third of its existence. I've been here for almost 50 years, and n the park is 152 years old. That is, again, I have to say that I'm just a very, very fortunate person.
Wendy Corr:
That is definitely something that very few people can boast. This is, of course, you mentioned the wolves, and I think that that's really a great, great topic to go off on. You have seen life before the wolves in Yellowstone, and life after the wolves. From your very unique perspective, has this been a benefit, or is it a double edged sword?
Jeff Henry:
In my opinion, it's a great benefit. And yeah, I did have a lot of experience in Yellowstone before wolves. I guess if I do the arithmetic, I was in the park for 18 years with no wolves, and now I've been in the park for, what would it be 29 years, I guess, since the wolves were reintroduced.
And personally, I had some degree of involvement with the restoration of wolves in the park. I was lucky enough to get hired by Defenders of Wildlife to go to Canada to photograph the capture of the first wolves that were brought to Yellowstone.
I even have one photograph of all 14 of the original contingent of wolves that were brought to Yellowstone in January of 1995, when they were drugged, ready for shipment on a plane and all laid out like cordwood on the floor of a garage in Alberta. So all the 14 wolves in that original contingent are in that one photograph.
And then, in answer to your question, in my opinion, having wolves present in Yellowstone has added a whole new dimension to the park. It's like an order of magnitude more complex in the park. Because of the presence of wolves, it’s had an influence on pretty much all other species in the park, even species of vegetation. And I think it's all to the positive. That's in my opinion, of course.
Wendy Corr:
But again, you've got such a unique perspective, because you've been there for both of those, the before and the after. Let's talk about one other thing, since we're talking about the changes and the real benchmarks - tourism. Tourism has exploded in the years that you have been at Yellowstone. In what ways do you see that as either a benefit or a detriment, the huge increase in tourists?
Jeff Henry:
Well, it can be seen both ways. It is very crowded in the summer. You know, I often like to point out that at least one of the summers - in my early days in the park, total visitation for the whole year was less than 2 million people. And now this year is going, as I understand it, total visitation is going to be pushing five for one calendar year.
So it's very crowded in the park. It's not as easy to get around as it used to be. The principal attractions in the park especially are really crowded - Old Faithful Geyser, Grand Prismatic Spring, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Places like that are really crowded.
I will say that if you're of a mind to, like I am, it's still easy to get away from the crowds. 90-whatever-percent of the people who come to visit Yellowstone stay on the roads and in the developed areas. So if you just take a short walk, just a quarter mile, half mile from the road, and get over that first ridge away from the road, you can be by yourself for the whole summer.
I think it can be seen - I think the increased visitation to Yellowstone can be seen as a positive, because that's the way that the park, and parks in general, Yellowstone in particular, and parks in general, develop a constituency. You have to have people who appreciate the parks to ensure their continued survival. And the best way for people to appreciate parks is to visit them, to learn about them, to appreciate them, understand them. So I see that as a good thing.
Visitation has grown so much, though, I do think that at some point there's going to have to be some sort of limitation put on Yellowstone. And that's just my opinion. Many other parks have limits on visitation. Now it would take one form or another, like you can't enter Zion Canyon now in a private car, as I understand it. It's the same as some roads in the Grand Canyon. It's the same with the Going To the Sun highway in Glacier National Park. And I think that that's probably going to be in Yellowstone's future at some point.
Wendy Corr:
At some point, yes, well, we'll all be here for that, I'm sad to say, because there is so much of that. And we'll probably end up seeing that sooner than later.
Jeff, we're getting close to out of time, but I want to talk just real briefly about where you are, and the house that you're in. You have collected an amazing selection of memorabilia over the years. What are the special things that you have, that you keep with you, that you keep in your house, that bring you joy from your years in Yellowstone?
Jeff Henry:
Well, first of all, I always wanted to build a log house, and I wanted to do it with my own hands, and I've done that. But even better for me, for being a Yellowstone junkie, is I worked out a deal with a contractor in Yellowstone who was building some new housing for employees to clear his construction site. And I cut the trees for this house myself in 1992, so the house is built primarily, not completely, but probably 80% out of logs from a construction site near Yellowstone Lake.
And Yellowstone Lake, by coincidence, is my favorite part of the park, is where I first worked. And I think for old parkies like myself, the first location where you worked is likely to remain your favorite location. So I not only have a log house, which I always wanted, but I have it's made out of logs from Yellowstone Park, from the vicinity of Yellowstone Lake.
And then the other logs, the other 20% of the logs are 1988 fire kills that I got from a timber sale near Cooke City, Montana, just outside the Northeast entrance to the park. As far as other knickknacks in the house, the floor here in my living room was in the Old Faithful Inn until 2004. The old floor was taken up at that time and replaced with new flooring. I salvaged the old flooring, and here it is on my living room floor.
I have antique signs that I salvaged out of dumps from the park for old lodging facilities that are no longer in existence. I have a bathtub in one bathroom that was in the Canyon Hotel which burned down in 1959 after the fire. Some horse wranglers at Canyon salvaged this bathtub and used it for a water tank for their horses, for let's see, it would be - I got it in 1995 I think, so that would have been, what would that be, 36 years after the fire?
When I got the bathtub, some of the enamel finish was still blistered from the heat of the great fire that burned down the Canyon Hotel. Then I had the tub refinished. But anyway, I have a bathtub from the Canyon Hotel.
I have antique furniture that was in the Lake Yellowstone hotel that I bought at an auction in Kalispell. Kalispell, Montana, of all places, that was in the Lake Hotel in the 1920s. The list goes on. I can't bore you with any longer list, but yeah, again, I'm just a very lucky person.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely! If you could single out one year to, just to kind of wrap up here, Jeff - if you could single out one year in your many, many years of history at Yellowstone National Park, what do you think was the best year for you, for the park, for your experience in Yellowstone?
Jeff Henry:
Oh, so one year? You know, maybe a toss up between my very first summer, 1977, when everything was fresh and new to me personally, and also, I was a very young guy with lots of energy. But I suppose I'd have to say 1988. It was so exciting. I knew at the time it was historic. I got to shoot lots of photographs with special access to a really historic interval in the Park’s story.
It just so happened that a lot of my co workers that summer, other rangers I worked with, both before the fires and afterward, were good friends of mine, so that summer I had a good time socially. As a seasonal Ranger, my season continued till Christmas that year, after the fires went out, I was put in charge of a rehab crew of 28 people, and we restored a lot of hiking trails and did some other projects in the wake of the fires.
And then I continued to work after the rehab crew was laid off, I continued to work as a seasonal Ranger on snowmobile patrol until Christmas. So I guess I'd have to say - in answer to your question - I'd have to say 1988.
Wendy Corr:
I think that's just fantastic. Oh my goodness, Jeff, this has been just a phenomenal conversation, and just such unique insights and unique experiences that you've been able to share with us, and we are grateful. Thank you so much. Where can we find your photos? Where can we get your books, that just have so much of this history?
Jeff Henry:
I have a website that a friend of mine, who's much more technologically capable than I am, put together for me. And the website is www.yellowstonephotosandbooks.com, and you can find my contact information there on that website, that'd be perfect. It has my postal address, I think it has my phone number and it has my email address.
Wendy Corr:
Excellent. I will be sure to link that in the show notes today, for the podcast. So, this has just been so interesting. Jeff, thank you for your time today. This has been just a fascinating conversation.
Jeff Henry:
Well, thank you very much, Wendy, and I hope that our paths cross someday so that I can meet you in person.
Wendy Corr:
I agree. I agree! Folks, thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Roundup. If you have gotten value out of this, like I have, please visit Jeff's website, go on and explore, and just get a window into his world, because I know I certainly am going to do that. Thank you for tuning in.
Don't forget the Wyoming Business Alliance’s ‘Business from the Basement’ podcast! If you're a business person, that's the place to go if you want to get value for your business here in Wyoming.
But Jeff, thank you so much. Folks, thank you for tuning in! Have a great week. We'll see you next time!
