Steve Fuller
Yellowstone, Wyoming

Since 1973 I have been living in an incredible old wooden house overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and the Lower Falls. Every day I feel how extraordinary it is to be here in this unusual and relatively diminishing unspoiled land complete with large animals that belong here. Where else in the lower 48 states can you have this? I’m living in a national icon and witness the daily transformation of a natural environment. So many in the world are damaged or incomplete.

It’s extreme living on the Continental Divide, and I have many wonderful personal memories. Frost pillars on cold winter mornings that hang over the canyon like a biblical manifestation. Double rainbows in the meadows in front of my house. The epic fires of ’88. The grizzly that came into our home and took food right off our table. And most recently, the herd of bison, over 400, that came galloping over a chain of hills at sunrise and crossed the river while mist hung over it.

The annual freezing of Lake Yellowstone around Christmas time creates the “Music of the Lake” phenomenon when the ice metal forms. A true acoustic event, it is an aural aurora borealis on extremely cold nights. It is memorable for three or four nights as you stand on the shore in a vast of whiteness with the stars overhead, a great void where lush rich sounds can play! In the springtime, the plume of vapor can be seen from both falls, and our house actually quivers with rhythmic vibrations during the night from the sound of the Lower Falls’ roar because the volume of water is highest at night after the melting from the day.

Steve Fuller is a Yellowstone resident.