short distance from Fuller’s cottage, and the thunder of water roaring through the chasm is always in the air, accented often by wind and the calls of wildlife. Today, Fuller is witness to a unique paradox. As expanded tourism and technology—where he once only had a short-wave radio, today there are phones and Internet—have intruded upon his job and isolated winter existence, by
THE FUTURE OF Yellowstone’s winterkeepers is more predictable, and it does not look good. Fuller and Dale Fowler, a winterkeeper since the 1980s and now stationed at Lake Hotel, are the only ones left who still live solo and full time in the park during the winter. There are a handful of other people in the park whose job descriptions call them “winterkeepers” but none emanate as authentically as
Winterkeepers mentioned in the annals of Yellowstone were an eccentric lot, a mixture of antisocial, hard-drinking libertarians who wanted to get away from people (and suffered occasional mental breakdowns) to hardy, rugged individualists. “Going back to the nineteenth century, winterkeepers tended to be basically backwoods good ol’ boys, and not necessarily with a high level of education. They
Fuller took this image of a bull moose feeding on emerging aquatic vegetation in the Yellowstone River following a mid-August thunderstorm a couple of decades ago. Today, there are fewer moose here, and this wetland is often dry by August.
some metrics Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1973. Then-addicted to feasting on trash and in danger of disappearing, the park’s grizzly population is now stable and subsists on a natural diet. Wolves were exterminated from the park in the 1930s. At present, close to one hundred of them now live in Yellowstone. Fuller hears their howling from his front porch. Still, the arrival of wildlife at certain times is more unpredictable and the weather less reliable. At a marsh where he, ages ago, made an award-winning photo of a moose at sunset—later printed on postcards, circulated worldwide, and pictured above—the wetland is now dry. “The joker card being played is climate change, and Yellowstone isn’t an insulated island,” Fuller says. “How will grizzlies be faring in twenty or thirty years? How will all of the megafauna worldwide be? We don’t know. We don’t know if the season that we call winter will be as it is or be a pale imitation.” 90
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Fuller and Fowler, witnesses to and survivors of the old school. Whenever it is that he and Fowler retire, Fuller thinks they’ll be the last winterkeepers. New materials used in construction have produced stronger roofs better capable of handling the snowpack, rendering winterkeepers’ shoveling less necessary. And if shoveling is still necessary, contracting out to workers who don’t live in the park is less expensive. Rumors have also been circulating for years that Canyon Village may begin offering year-round services and lodging, meaning it will no longer go into hibernation like the resident grizzlies. In his transcendental classic, Walden, Henry David Thoreau reflected, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Fuller’s Yellowstone winterkeeper life is eminently more remote than Thoreau’s.
were looked upon as refugees from civilization, trying to get away by hiding out as hermits,” Yellowstone Park historian Lee Whittlesey told me years ago. “Steve Fuller has done a lot to change that prosaic image, but he has his own Thoreauvian place as an anomaly in the twenty-first century.” Yellowstone’s first winterkeeper was George Marshall, who spent the winter of 1880-81 at his Marshall Hotel in the Lower Geyser Basin. By 1887, there were also winterkeepers at Old Faithful, Canyon, and Norris. Until the advent of motorized transportation—snow planes in the 1940s, and snowcoaches and snowmobiles in the 1960s—there was no winter tourism to speak of in Yellowstone. It was the sole provenance of its winterkeepers. In 1970, the only heated building open to tourists at Old Faithful in winter was a bathroom. In 1971, the first Old Faithful Snow Lodge opened, ushering in the modern era of