Four years before I was born, in the summer of 1984, my parents hiked to the fire lookout on Yellowstone’s 10,210-foot Mount Washburn and wrote their names in the lime-green federal supply service logbook stored inside. They were newly engaged. She was a 22-year-old nursing student from rural Minnesota who’d left behind the cornfields for a summer job folding sheets and working reception at the park’s Canyon Lodge; he was a 24-year-old ski patroller who spent off-seasons pumping gas at the Yellowstone Park Service Station (YPSS) at Canyon Village. Taking advantage of the long daylight of the Wyoming summer, they dashed out of work and hiked the six-mile trail from Chittenden Road, reaching the two-story, panoramic lookout with just enough time to get back to the car before dark.
8/14/84
Amy Peltier, Litchfield MN
Note to Steve Brown—I’ll meet you here Aug 25, 2018
I love you! —Amy
Steve Brown, Sandpoint, Idaho (also Canyon YPSS) Wow what a surprise to meet my fiancé on this obscure mountain outpost. Thanks for showing up, Amy. P.S. Try not to eat so many flowers on the way down.
My dad doesn’t remember the flower joke. My mom doesn’t remember why she picked 2018. August 25 was the day summer park employees celebrated “Christmas,” with extravagant holiday decorations and gifts—a way to wind down the season together. This explains the many Merry Christmas messages written in the same register ten days later, including another from my mom after she’d hiked up the mountain again with two of her summer friends.
8/24/84 Never thought I’d come up here with 2 easterners. Love ya Foz and Sheila. See you up here next year, Christmas Eve.
Amy Peltier
Litchfield, Minnesota
Canyon Employee0
My parents met at the employee bar in the basement of Canyon Lodge. She was with friends, and he bought her a beer. It was only a matter of weeks before my dad called his sister to tell her he’d met the woman he was going to marry. His grandmother helped him buy a ring.
Over the two summers they worked in the park, my parents went adventuring. They drove my dad’s 1970 green Chevy truck down a nearly impassable road deep into the Beartooths and hiked to Grasshopper Glacier—named for the thousands of extinct insects found frozen in its ice. They paddled a Huck Finn–style log raft around an alpine lake in the Wind River Range. Sometimes they just walked the loop of boardwalks around the park’s Norris Geyser basin after work, or along the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River to the Artist Point overlook. After my mom went back to school in Minnesota, they wrote hundreds of letters. When she graduated, my dad took the bus out to marry her.
I know what they wrote on Washburn because after a lightning strike burned one of Yellowstone’s historic fire lookouts to the ground, my mom texted our family’s group thread, frantic that the summit books might have burned, too. And so I went to look for them. I started thinking about how my family, and so many like ours, had left little fragments of themselves in notebooks and ammo cans on top of mountains. The spontaneous messages drafted in a surge of summit exhilaration, or love or loneliness, or in memory of someone who wasn’t there. Or simply in wonder at the supplicatory beauty of this blue-green earth.
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