Yellowstone Venture: To Wyoming and a Log Cabin Mountain Resort

Yellowstone Venture is an autobiographical tale of a real life, mid-life, crisis and its resolution. In 1985 Joan, the girls, and I lived in a suburb of Atlanta. Joan was a surgical technologist working at Henrietta Egleston’s Hospital for Children and I was a mid-level bureaucrat working for the Department of Agriculture. Six months later we were in Wyoming, eleven miles from the East Gate of Yellowstone National Park. Home was no longer the old five thousand square foot Victorian we restored, but a two-room log cabin we were desperately trying to winterized. We owned and were operating Elephant Head Lodge, a small log-cabin mountain resort. It was a family operation. The girls, Gretchen and Nicole, were partners. Once just daughters, now they were wranglers, waitresses, and cabin girls. In the summer we had guests from around the world. The rest of the year we were isolated. We have no neighbors, only visitors: buffalo, elk, moose, deer, coyotes, big horn sheep, and Claws, a grizzly who wouldn’t hibernate until he had terrorized us. My mid-life crisis was over. The girls and I thought it was great. Joan wished she were dead.