Greetings from Yellowstone National Park

In 2007, in my second summer working for Xanterra in Canyon Village, YNP, I met my wife. It was her first excursion outside of Russia, and she was randomly placed in the world’s first national park by Work&Travel USA. Originally hoping to be working in Boston, she nearly left in the first few weeks. Luckily for me, she was enchanted by Yellowstone’s magic–the boiling water and bubbling mud, June snows and July thunderstorms, bison, bears, and ground squirrels, and everywhere (to my advantage) the perfect location for countless romantic dates. I remember eating moose tracks ice cream while walking around Yellowstone Lake and then listening to music played by a string quartet inside the lavish, and pale yellow, Lake Hotel. We rode bicycles around Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon, stargazed while taking night hikes near Canyon Village, and camped in numerous incredibly beautiful locations within the park–I learned Russian, and she soon stopped carrying her English-Russian dictionary; I introduced her to my parents via the Old Faithful webcam (a grainy screen-shot of us standing in front of the geyser served as their computer background that fall), and many of the hikes, including one up Mount Washburn that concluded with a sunset occurring simultaneously with a full moon’s rise, are forever ingrained in my mind. Summer end came faster than we liked; I left for Texas, and she for Russia. We did the long-distance thing, and gradually moved closer to each other until we were finally able to live in the same place. It was there that we were married last year, and though it was our holy-grail of honeymoon locations, we were unable to make it back to YNP. Our 6-year hiatus from Yellowstone may be almost over, however; We just moved from one of the furthest locations from YNP that a person can be in the states (Miami, FL) to the southwestern US, and I’m fairly certain that we will finally be able to come back to the Park in 2014. Yellowstone is an incredibly wonderful Park; in the two summers that I was there I perhaps saw 1% of it, and I can’t imagine a lifetime that would be long enough to see and fully appreciate the rest. I am grateful to YNP for so much (including my wife), and I eagerly anticipate watching our children see for the first time, and then a hundred times more, the Park that we love so much.

Sincerely,
Abram