GRANITE PEAK PUBLICATIONS: Accompanying travelers to the national park since 2002

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June 25 Book Event in Cody, Wyoming

Categories: News, Park environs, Through Early Yellowstone
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Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center

Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner, MT, is one of the institutions participating in the Collecting Yellowstone conference, June 24-29, 2019. Photo courtesy NPS.

Later this month Granite Peak Publications editor Beth Chapple will be traveling to Yellowstone National Park to do research for the next edition of Yellowstone Treasures. Here’s some of what she has planned.

The best part is I will be sharing our books at a fair that’s part of the Conversations on Collecting Yellowstone Conference, in Cody, WY, outside the East Entrance to the park. The Vendor Fair is both for the conference attendees and open to the public, so please let others know, and try to join us! The exhibitors will be art dealers, artists, booksellers, book publishers, and more. Here’s your chance to look at all things Yellowstone! Beforehand and after the conference I will be driving from Bozeman through the park. Looking forward to the drive on the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway into Cody.

Collecting Yellowstone Fair

WHERE

Taggart’s Ballroom
Holiday Inn of Cody, next to Buffalo Bill Village
1701 Sheridan Ave, Cody, WY 82414

WHEN

Tuesday, June 25, 2019
1:30-5:20 pm

Here’s more about the conference, though registration is closed. With the upcoming sesquicentennial of the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 2022 in mind, special collections librarians at Brigham Young University and the University of Wyoming have organized librarians, archivists, curators, collectors, vendors, and researchers who work with Yellowstone National Park materials to converse about areas of common interest, discuss concerns, look for opportunities and generally get to know their colleagues. As a result, the first conference on Collecting Yellowstone materials is underway!

The goal objectives of this conference is to bring together individuals/institutions with significant Yellowstone National Park materials to:

  • Learn about the various YNP collections across the United States
  • Become acquainted with their colleagues
  • Discuss collections, discovery, acquisition and related topics
  • Identify trends and issues that impact collections now and in the future
  • Connect with scholars actively involved in YNP research
  • Meet with collectors and vendors of Yellowstone’s vast history

Check back for a trip report and a conference report in July.

Hear about Yellowstone Books in Montana

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Janet Chapple with First Edition Yellowstone Treasures

The author with the first edition of the Yellowstone Treasures guidebook in 2002


Author Janet Chapple is always happy to talk about Yellowstone National Park and her two books on the subject. She will be speaking at two bookstore events in Montana this month. June 14 is her appearance at This House of Books in Billings, a co-op store that has posted a nice image of a watercolor from Through Early Yellowstone to the blog on their website. On June 22 you can catch her presentation and book signing at Country Bookshelf in Bozeman. I will also be in attendance. You’ll find more details about both talks on our events page. Hope to see you there!

—Editor and Publisher, Beth Chapple

Happy Birthday, NPS

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August 25th is the official 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service. Every year the national parks offer free admission on this day, but for the centennial the free days have been extended through the weekend, to August 28th. Enjoy!

Yellowstone Park is holding a big, sold-out celebration at Arch Park at the North Entrance, with shuttles from Gardiner. If you didn’t get a ticket, you can still participate virtually via Livestream.

If you do have plans to visit Yellowstone any time soon, be sure to keep track of the fires and other construction and road alerts at the official Yellowstone website. Sean Reichard has written several posts recently about the various fires being fought. Here is one of his articles this week: “More trails close as fires grow in Yellowstone National Park.”

Welcoming Yellowstone, Land of Wonders to the BLC

Categories: History, Janet Chapple's Other Writing, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders
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Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West greets The Land of Wonders

A very responsive audience, essentially all of whom indicated they had visited Yellowstone some time in their lives, listened to Suzanne Cane and me this past Monday at the Bill Lane Center. We read them some of our translations of Jules Leclercq’s well-crafted paragraphs and showed engravings from his 1886 book, La Terre des Merveilles, and contemporary photos of Yellowstone scenes.

Created and endowed by long-time publisher of Sunset magazine Bill Lane, the BLC’s goal is to advance “scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America.” With Yellowstone and all 400 of the other National Park Service units temporarily closed due to the government shutdown, everyone there enjoyed reminiscing about visits to the park and hearing Leclercq’s words, such as these that show his sensitivity to preservation of the wonders of the park:

The crater of Old Faithful is already covered with hundreds of names carved by visitors on the smooth surface of the rock. In a few hours the inscriptions are covered with a siliceous coating, which preserves the most insignificant names.

The crude hand of vandals does not stop there; it is truly revolting to see them taking the brutal ax to the fragile and delicate concretions under the pretext of searching for specimens of geyserite.

In building these admirable monuments, in artistically fashioning them, in sculpting and ornamenting them, nature has employed a slowness, a meticulousness, a patience of which men would not be capable, and it takes but one minute for irreverent hands to disfigure the work of thousands of years. There are few craters that have not been damaged by ax and spade, and, if care is not taken, they will gradually crumble to pieces under the attacks of these ruthless destroyers.

It is the duty of the American government to halt these devastations, to prevent the criminal profanations of a sanctuary wherein no mortal should enter without a religious feeling of respect.

I got a hearty laugh here when I interspersed, “And it is the duty of the American government to reopen the parks!”

Here’s your chance to learn what Yellowstone was like in 1883

Categories: Janet Chapple's Other Writing, News, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders
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Excellent travel writer Jules Leclercq traveled across the U.S. by train and throughout the then-new Yellowstone National Park on horseback and wrote an engaging account of his experiences. Co-translators/editors Janet Chapple (author of Yellowstone Treasures) and Suzanne Cane (French teacher and librarian) will read some of his revelations and show engravings from his book, La Terre des Merveilles, and contemporary photographs in a series of programs this coming winter and spring: Yellowstone, Land of Wonders. Previous presentations have been enjoyed in Rhode Island, the Bay Area of California, and at Mammoth and Old Faithful in Yellowstone.

— Thursday, February 6 at 7pm: Barrington Public Library, 281 County Rd., Barrington, RI. (Suzanne alone).

— Tuesday, April 8 at lunch time: The Atheneaum, Benefit Street, Providence, RI. (Suzanne alone).

Other dates to follow.

[edited 10/10/13]

Learn more at Suzanne’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/YellowstoneLandOfWonders?ref=stream&filter=1

Leclercq_profilepicture

Coming up next month are two events centered around the newly published translation of a really old and fascinating travelog about Yellowstone Park.

Belgian travel writer and judge Jules Leclercq visited the park when it was only eleven years old, arriving by train and horse-drawn carriage, and riding horseback in a loop around the park for ten days with a guide. In those early days, that was the only way to see these wonders that had just been set aside by an 1872 act of Congress, establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in the world.

land-of-wondersLeclercq’s book, La Terre des Merveilles, although published in French in 1886, has never before been fully translated and published in English. He was already an accomplished travel writer at age 35. As one reviewer wrote, he was “enthusiastic, energetic, observant, curious, and companionable.” In addition, he studied the existing literature about Yellowstone and included a great deal of the knowledge he gained in his book.

Leclercq describes camping near geysers, washing clothes in a bubbling hot spring, and meeting such diverse characters as local guides and tourists from the United States and Europe. He is aghast at the vandalism he sees around him and advocates for military protection of the incomparable features he describes so aptly.

With Suzanne Cane from Rhode Island, I spent about five years translating and annotating the book, which we call Yellowstone, Land of Wonders in English. Now it is available from the University of Nebraska Press and all online and brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Suzanne and I will be giving presentations, including showing some of the book’s engravings and related contemporary photos of Yellowstone. We’ll also read a number of our favorite excerpts from the book. Join us at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Map Room on Thursday, June 27, 8:30 pm or at the Old Faithful Inn third floor mezzanine on Saturday, June 29, at 8:00 pm. We’ll also be signing books in the Old Faithful Inn lobby on June 29 and 30 from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. See you there!

2013

Cutting edge science and Yellowstone

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Every day last week I attended the American Geophysical Union annual [2012] meeting with a press pass. Along with some 25,000 researchers and others interested in research advances in the geological sciences, I attended short presentations about cutting edge research; poster sessions, where a scientist explains his or her work to individual listeners; and three press conferences or lectures on earth science-related subjects.

I learned as much as I could about three questions: What is underneath Yellowstone and how did it get there? What are microbiologists learning about the microbes that live in hot springs? How have humans been affecting the earth in the last century or so—and what should be done to reduce the damage?
It takes a while to digest all that, but in the next few weeks I will write blog posts and perhaps a new nugget about what I learned.