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Winterkeeper

For 30 years Steven Fuller has lived a hermetic life as the snowbound caretaker of America's first national park

By Todd Wilkinson

It's late February, the air temperature has plummeted to 35 degrees below zero, and our lungs burn and billow steam like the volcanic fumarole vents around us as Steven Fuller, his friend Joe Sawyer, and I glide forth on skis, following a lone bison's trail across a succession of crystalline snow dunes in Yellowstone National Park. When we approach the mouth of Nymph Canyon, Fuller's chest tightens. It was here, last summer, that a grizzly bear stood up on its hind legs and roared, causing Fuller's frightened one-ton steed, Rivers, to rear up and fall over backward.

The horse wreck was a sobering reminder of just how much wilder Yellowstone's backcountry is today than it was more than 30 years ago, when Fuller first came here to be a winterkeeper. His life in the park began when he agreed to take the job, which, it seemed, no one else wanted.

“The assignment had a reputation for attracting eccentrics, some of whom were apparently driven mad or at least to drink heavily by the isolation,” Fuller recalls. “My boss said, ‘We're sending you in the first of October, and we don't want to see your smiling faces again until the first of April.' ”

The pool of applicants was so sparse that when Fuller and his then wife, Angela, expressed mild curiosity, they were hired on the spot. To earn their paltry salary (several thousand dollars per season), they would be snowbound; their only connection to the nearest plowed road, 50 miles away, would be an antique, exhaust-spewing snowmobile. Their quarters were a drafty cottage dating back to the early 1900s. Their larder was canned food, though one of Fuller's ancient predecessors told him how he could survive by poaching deer.

As for the actual job, Fuller was handed an arsenal of shovels and a long saw, and told the work would arrive from the sky. His duty: clearing, by hand, a mountain of accumulated snow that threatened to collapse the roofs of hundreds of cabins used by tourists during the summer.

Today, half a lifetime later, he's still in Yellowstone, shoveling as much as 300 inches of snow, which is what falls in the park's backcountry during an average winter. After raising a pair of daughters, amassing a renowned portfolio of photographs (his pictures have appeared before the Royal Geographical Society), and remaining at his post longer than any of his long-dead forerunners, Fuller, now 62, has become a park legend.

“Winterkeepers in Yellowstone have tended to be near-mythical figures,” says Yellowstone Park historian Lee Whittlesey. “Going back to the 19th century, they've tended to be basically backwoods good old boys, and not necessarily with a high level of education. They were looked upon as refugees from civilization, trying to get away by hiding out as hermits. Steve Fuller has done a lot to change that prosaic image, but he has his own Thoreauvian place as an anomaly in the 21st century.”

A Californian by birth and a Renaissance man of sorts, Fuller has a bachelor's degree in history, is a skilled plumber, and has worked as an emergency-room technician in Boston and a schoolteacher in Africa. He's also a global traveler drawn to extreme environments, from the harsh desert of Namibia to the jungles of Malaysia.

Fuller resides year-round just above the lip of the great lower waterfall that thunders into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, and since the 1970s more than 100 million tourists have passed along the main highway in front of his government-owned house. Yet the knoll rising behind his lodging has undergone a profound transformation.

“It may sound hard to believe, but Yellowstone, in its backcountry, is more of an Alaskan-style wilderness today than ever before, and Steve Fuller has been a witness to its re-wilding,” says Whittlesey. “You can't pretend that it's totally pristine, because humans have been exploring it for 10,000 years. But there are fewer buildings in the backcountry, fewer roads, and fewer people than there were a century ago.”

There's no mistaking the backcountry's fierce wilderness, where predators now have free rein. Wolves, exterminated in Yellowstone during the 1930s, were returned to the park in the mid-1990s, and today can routinely be heard howling at night. The park's famous grizzly bear population, once addicted to feasting on trash and in danger of disappearing, subsists healthily on a natural diet that includes moose, bison, trout, and whitebark-pine seeds. Some of the bruins go much of their lives without ever encountering a human up close. It was one such bear, Fuller believes, that brought him to death's door. (In his more than three decades in the park, Fuller has had countless close brushes with lightning, with wildlife, and with blizzards that forced him to bivouac miles from the nearest human. During Yellowstone's famous fires of 1988, trees burned to within feet of his door.)

During a horse ride through the rolling labyrinth of Hayden Valley, camera in hand, he and his gelding, Rivers, entered the draw of Nymph Canyon. About a hundred yards into the shadowy corridor, horse and rider came upon a bull elk carcass, half consumed, like countless other prey animals that Fuller has found taken by large predators. “I thought nothing of it,” he recalls, “but I should have probably been paying better attention.”

A short distance up the trail, with no warning, a furry 400-pound brown mass rose up out of its day bed. As the grizzly reared to its full height, the terrified Rivers flipped over backward. The horse fled, leaving behind a semiconscious Fuller, who, through his haze, braced for the onslaught of the bear. Luckily, the grizzly opted not to approach. Fuller eventually staggered to his feet and tried to find his mount, which had sought refuge on a sagebrush flat more than a mile away. Fuller ended up walking five and a half miles home.

Rivers hasn't been the same since. “He was always looking for a bear. I could feel his heartbeat go up whenever we went into closed timber country,” Fuller notes. “He had touched the power of Yellowstone's primeval wildness.”

Todd Wilkinson is an environmental writer based in Bozeman, Montana.

© 2006  National Audubon Society