This Month in Yellowstone
Skip Baese - Canyon Village

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Sometime around January 12 at 10 a.m. Skip Baese (Canyon Village Volunteer) stepped out the door of his residence to find four bison on the walk out front. He explained that these bison are usually in the area and frequently bed down in the road or in the meadow area between the housing area and the maintenance complex. It takes far less energy for them to move through areas where the snow is packed down so they spend most of their time on roads and trails, much to the dismay of crosscountry skiers. Bison frequently damage beautifully groomed crosscountry ski trails.

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During the second weekend in January, Skip and his wife Neysa Dickey took an early afternoon ski outing on the North Rim Ski Trail. It wasn’t terribly cold, somewhere between 0 and -5 F. When they reached the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone at Grandview Point, the wind made it feel much, much colder. They were well prepared for the cold and so were able to continue skiing down the trail to Lookout Point. That’s where Skip took this wonderful photo of a frozen Lower Falls.

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It pays to step out of the Canyon Village Warming Hut slowly. It was around January 10 when Skip stepped out of the warming hut to be greeted by this female bison. Bison are insulated well enough that snow frequently stays on their fur through the coldest part of the winter. Occasionally melting snow refreezes on their fur creating dangling ice balls that strike each other creating a tinkling sound as the bison walks.

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While Skip was up on top of the General Store roof on January 18, he took this photo of the Canyon Village area showing snowmobilers and the warming hut. The snowmobiles are parked away from the warming hut to help maintain a safety zone for the snow coaches that bring visitors through on a regular basis.