In these dark times (and I don’t mean short winter solstice days), the holidays upon us, I thought some light reading would be good since practically all my reading these days is about our national decline on one front or another. A book about Yellowstone would be the ticket, and recently one had arrived by an author I didn’t know named Rick Lamplugh. I picked it up on Christmas Eve and dove in, looking forward to a respite and to some degree I got it, though I should have read the subtitle more carefully – A Year’s Immersion in Grandeur and Controversy. This little book is a primer in both qualities of this iconic park.

Rick Lamplugh writes not as a scientist, park manager, or authority on any of the issues but as an outdoorsman and concerned citizen who has been captivated by the Yellowstone country. He tells stories, delves into park history related to the issues he describes, and offers natural history insights into the Yellowstone community as he explores it. He writes for fellow citizens not familiar with the park and its issues, and his book is especially timely as public lands in America are beset with challenges and challengers.

Those of us who have been to Yellowstone know of the grandeur. Lamplugh and his wife Mary volunteered for three winters at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch and fell so in love with the park that they decided to relocate from Oregon to Gardiner near its north entrance. At the ranch, they had become deeply interested in Yellowstone’s abundant wildlife, especially its bison and wolves and some of the issues involving them, but were not aware of other issues. They bought a house, could see the grandeur out their windows,

But we have also been surprised to learn that Gardiner sits smack in the middle of a number of controversies: the dispute over hunting Yellowstone wolves outside the park; the debate whether wolves help or harm the ecosystem and the local economy; the concern about overuse of and development around the park; the community effort to stop a possible gold mine on the park’s border; the outrage over the plan to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list; and the battle to stop the slaughter of park bison.

At the Buffalo Ranch, they “had stayed blissfully unaware of most of these controversies,” but as residents of Yellowstone country, they committed to immersing themselves in these struggles by learning all they could about them and taking stands.

The controversies are described, and Lamplugh and Mary are clearly on the side of conservation and protection of wildlife and other park resources, and against such outrages as a gold mine on the boundary of the park, the annual winter slaughter of bison that migrate across the park boundary, and proposed delisting of grizzly bears that will put them also in the sights of hunters outside the park. At the same time, they have a great time in their year of explorations described in this book, and therein I found the escape I sought. In his personal, folksy, even occasionally corny style, Lamplugh describes adventures and misadventures with an obvious and contagious delight. A novice skier, he describes in detail a spectacular head-plant he does on one outing. On another Mary nearly blunders into a moose, and he is charged in his Gardiner driveway by an elk. They watch wolves hunt bison, and on another outing the see coyotes, ravens and magpies dance as they all feed on an elk killed by wolves then stolen by a grizzly – very typical Yellowstone adventures and wildlife interactions. A chapter summarizes a controversy, then the next describes an outing, often with humor, offering relief.

Relief, though, was scant because this book was written before the election of 2016, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what that election portends on the issues Lamplugh describes. The Trump administration seems to be falling over itself to rescind every decision to protect the natural world made by preceding administrations. Proposed delisting of Yellowstone’s grizzlies is a controversial example. The Obama administration was moving toward delisting, but had not done so, and only months after taking office Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke declared the recovery of Yellowstone grizzlies a victory and announced its delisting. Lamplugh describes what happened to wolves when delisted in 2011 – so many were killed in Wyoming that the feds listed the wolves again in 2014 in that state. But then an appeals court said Wyoming’s wolf management plan was okay, and the killing resumed. Lamplugh observes that “Given the immediate and ugly slaughter once wolves lost ESA protection, I have no doubt that unprotected grizzlies will die too, as cash-strapped fish and game departments rush to bring in fees from trophy hunts.”

On the gold mine front, though, the news is better. The Obama administration gave the mine opponents a respite in 2016, declaring proposed mine sites off limits for two years so the issue and impact of mining could be studied. “No one knows,” writes Lamplugh, “what might happen with legal challenges to setting the public land aside.” The Montana Department of Environmental Quality next approved exploratory drilling in July 2017, but then Zinke announced a twenty-year moratorium on all mining in the area. Zinke was the Montana congressman before his gig at Interior, and has been relatively good to his home state while razing environmental protections elsewhere, and I’m sure Lamplugh is relieved, at least temporarily.

Lamplugh writes also of crowding in Yellowstone and other popular national parks – four million visitors to Yellowstone in 2016. Something must be done to slow or reverse the growth of visitation beyond what the park can handle. He quotes Superintendent Dan Wenk from a National Geographic article ironically read by millions. “I believe we are rapidly coming to a point where one of two things is going to happen. Either we as a society agree to limit the number of visitors in order to protect resources that are incredibly sensitive to disturbance or we allow the numbers to go unchecked – knowing that we are diminishing, perhaps irreparably, the very things that attract people worldwide to this one-of-a-kind national park.” Lamplugh has some ideas about how to address this challenge, but raising entrance fees to the extent recently proposed by the Trump administration is not one of them.

Deep Into Yellowstone is an entertaining and light introduction to Yellowstone National Park and its ongoing controversies by an unabashed conservationist and fan of this park. The Lamplugh’s cast their lot with the park and the Yellowstone landscape. In closing, he says “Yellowstone is no longer a place to love and leave. And with that belonging comes a duty to fight for this wildland and its wildlife for years to come.” He makes a strong case for the urgency and necessity of the fight.