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

All posts tagged museum

Through Early Yellowstone becomes a Foreword INDIES finalist

Categories: Bio, History, News, Through Early Yellowstone
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Through Early Yellowstone book 2016 finalist
We’re celebrating at Granite Peak Publications since we learned that our historical anthology, published in 2016, has a good chance of winning top recognition for that year! Through Early Yellowstone: Adventuring by Bicycle, Covered Wagon, Foot, Horseback, and Skis is a finalist in two categories in this year’s contest run by Foreword Reviews, the foremost organization in helping promote outstanding independent press publications. The categories we entered are: Adventure & Recreation and Travel.

During the 21st century I have loved researching in libraries on both coasts and in Montana and Wyoming to locate the best early Yellowstone writings that need to be preserved in a modern book. By 2003 I had divided my findings into 11 categories, including early expeditions, the public entering the new park, early visits by various means, wildlife, poetry and songs, and other subjects. Wow! Even a sampling of the 85 articles I’d read and enjoyed by 2003 was way too much to fit into one collection.

Still, I kept reading. By 2007 I had read a great deal more but managed to pare my findings and categories down to a manageable number of articles and thought it was time to start seeking a publisher. Compiling what I was then calling Magnificent Playground required using my subjective judgment to reproduce the best written and most entertaining of these. In my letter to one university press, I acknowledged my awareness of two other Yellowstone historical anthologies, Old Yellowstone Days, edited by Paul Schullery, and Ho! for Wonderland, edited by park historian Lee Whittlesey and Betsy Watry. I intended to complement these two predecessor collections, not to compete with them. I wanted to avoid repeating descriptions of the many wonders of the park as much as possible, while giving readers a fascinating taste of early, long-out-of-print visitors’ accounts written by entertaining and talented writers and intrepid adventurers.

My editor/publisher/daughter Beth and I decided to publish the book with Granite Peak Publications, which up to that time had concentrated on putting out Yellowstone Treasures. Beth was particularly good at eliminating authors I had become enamored of but who did not fit well into the collection for our readers. I decided that we needed to include the short writings that I call snippets to show how the idea of an area that begged for preservation as the first national park gradually became a prime destination for travelers from all over the world.

The completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad (NPRR) across Montana in 1883 made access to the park much more convenient than before. A majority of the accounts in Through Early Yellowstone were written by people who used the NPRR and then traveled by horseback or horse-driven coach. Automobiles entered the park for the first time late in the 1915 season, and by 1917 they had taken over completely. It seemed to me the logical point for this anthology to end.

I am proudest of having found and been able to reproduce twenty-seven watercolor sketches, which (as the artist wrote to a friend) “are almost untouched travel sketches, quite half, if not more, of the Park ones being taken on the logger-head of the Mexican saddle of my Cayuse [Indian pony].” The artist, Thomas H. Thomas, visited from Wales in 1884. He wrote a delightful two-part article for a London magazine called The Graphic that turned many of his watercolors into engravings. In my book we reproduce many of the engravings along with his articles and roughly half-size reproductions of his watercolors. These reside in the archives of the National Museum of Wales and have never before been seen in this country.

—Janet

Historic Yellowstone buses you can ride

Categories: History, Transportation
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1937 Yellowstone Bus Everett Washington

A 1937 White Model 706 bus on display at Historic Flight Foundation

For me, guidebook editor Beth Chapple, last month was the month of the Yellowstone bus. Not only did I discover that one of my nearby aviation museums has a beautifully restored bus, but Wyoming Office of Tourism sent one over on a week tour of Seattle, to convince people to visit their state!

Historic Flight Foundation keeps famous, well-restored airplanes from 1927 to 1957 in a large hangar at Paine Field, Everett, Washington. But among the planes, including a Grumman F8F Bearcat and a Beechcraft Staggerwing, is a little known secret: they own one of the tour buses built in the 1930s to convey tourists around Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks. The museum’s website doesn’t even mention it, but it’s a beauty they’ve had since 2012. The bus was created by the White Motor Company of Cleveland in 1935. Yellowstone Park ordered 27 of the White Model 706s for the 1936 season and there were 98 in use in 1940. In the mid 1960s the remaining buses were sold.

The buses were brought back to Yellowstone in 2007, and now anyone can take a half- or full-day tour of the park in one. It’s a great way to learn from your tour guide and see wildlife.

back of Yellowstone bus

HFF’s 1937 bus has THREE license plates on the back, including Montana’s (not shown).

When the bus visited Seattle, it posed at the city’s most photogenic places, including the Fremont Troll and the Space Needle. Driving the Wyoming Tourism bus was guide Leslie Quinn, according to Beth Shepherd’s post, called “Yellowstone National Park: The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” We at Granite Peak Publications know Quinn as the Xanterra interpretive specialist who wrote the latest wonderful review on our Reviews page, which we also feature on the back of the guidebook. There’s something very cheerful about glimpsing one of the historic yellow buses with the retractable canvas top.

Art for February birthdays

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Moran painting of Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River

Snapshot of Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Wyoming, 1906, painted by Thomas Moran.

I just took this photo in the De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. (Apologies for the fuzzy quality of photos taken with my iPad.)

It’s appropriate to post this, because painter Thomas Moran’s birthday is coming up. He was born in England on February 12, 1837. Many people think that Artist Point on the canyon rim was the place Moran sat to create his famous paintings, but that was at another spot, now called Moran Point. See this page in the Yellowstone Online Tour to straighten out that fact.

And why do I find myself in San Francisco today? I traveled to the Bay Area to celebrate a few family birthdays, guidebook author Janet Chapple’s among them. Happy February Birthdays!

–editor Beth Chapple

Western art in Cody

Categories: News, On the Web, Park environs
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Just found out via Twitter that the Whitney Western Art Museum of the Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody, Wyoming, has recently acquired a new painting by John Mix Stanley. What’s special is that more than 200 of that artist’s works were destroyed in a fire in 1865, so not many survive. Another bit of news is that the museum will gather about 60 works by Stanley for an exhibition called Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley, which will open June 6, 2015. If you are interested in American art of the West, make plans to enter or leave Yellowstone Park by the East Entrance this summer!

–posted by Beth Chapple, editor

Janet celebrates her 75th anniversary in the park, part 4

Categories: Bio, Flora and Fauna
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Continuing from “Janet celebrates her 75th anniversary in the park, part 3” . . .

ranger station museum Old Faithful 1953My sister Joan was a life-long games person, becoming a fine contract bridge player and a tournament Scrabble player in her later years, besides making games out of every chore in her life—including the routines she recommended to her piano pupils. She could make a game out of anything, including something as simple as balancing on the logs that surrounded the Old Faithful Ranger Station and Museum. We would collect state names on license plates to see if we could find at least one car from each of the then 48 states. And we played lots of card games and board games, too.

As often as Mother would allow it, we would go into the museum to mosey around and talk to the rangers. One of the rangers called us “Dimples.” Perhaps he was the same one who gave us a copy of Cubby in Wonderland by Frances Joyce Farnsworth and signed it “From Ben Lundquist, 1942.” We loved that book and its sequel, Cubby Returns. Some years ago I read those books to my grandsons.

I remember the specimens of park rocks in the museum and the samples of plant matter such as the cones and needles from the different evergreens of the park. There were a few small stuffed animals. I think there was a large bear, too, but I’m not sure about that. I would have stayed well away from it.

I also remember the model of a geyser, but I don’t think I ever saw it working. (I have read somewhere that Jack Haynes built a geyser model, and perhaps it is still in the archives. But I have found a reference (in Yellowstone Nature Notes, July 30, 1926) to models made by Chief Naturalist Ansel F. Hall and placed at Old Faithful and Mammoth. [See my September 13, 2010, post on this blog for the exhibits you can now find at the new Old Faithful Visitor Education Center.]

In back of the ranger station and museum was an amphitheater with a screen (now part of the huge west parking lot). I don’t remember the pictures shown on the screen or the subjects of the rangers’ talks, but I do remember well the sing-alongs that always ended the evenings. I know we sang “Home on the Range” and “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” and many others.

Our local world was bounded by the Inn, the bunkhouse, the museum, and the geyser, but I remember that a favorite place where Joan and I played was around the bridge over the Firehole River behind the geyser. To this day I am strongly attracted to that spot, and I always spend a little time there early in the morning when I visit Old Faithful.

More from Janet’s memoirs in the last post of this series . . . .
CREDIT: The photo of the Old Faithful Museum is from the Haynes Guide, 1953.


The full article “Celebrating an Old Faithful Area Seventieth Anniversary,” was published in August 2009 in The Geyser Gazer Sput, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 5-8.
Janet wrote a longer version of these memoirs at the instigation of Park Historian Lee Whittlesey, and they are now preserved in the library of the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner, Montana.

Arizona trip report, May 2012

Categories: Bio, Janet Chapple's Other Writing, Trip Reports
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Just to let my readers know I’m still around, I’ll summarize the high points of the trip my husband Bruno and I took in the first half of May to Arizona. The impetus for the trip was the graduation of my grandson Zeno Dellby—in computer science from Arizona State, Tempe.

The day after the graduation, pilot Beth took me for a flight-seeing ride north of Scottsdale. It’s always a treat to fly in a Cessna 172 with her.


Leaving the Phoenix area we spent a couple of hours at their Desert Botanical Garden, a beautiful place on a not-too-hot day in May.

Three nights on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon took me back there for the first time in 29 years. The last time I was there, I hiked to the bottom, stayed at Phantom Ranch, and back up the next day. Never again! Bruno took some nice shots, but I was disappointed by the amount of haze we had in all our views of the canyon, dulling the colors of the billion-year-old and more geological formations. It’s largely caused, as the rangers and others explain, by industrial pollution from as far away as China. The night we heard a ranger lecture about the geology was when the full moon was at its perigee, or closest point to the earth. No picture, but what a gorgeous sight!

Onward to meet friends at the Museum of Northern Arizona, in the outskirts of Flagstaff—an excellent small museum about the geology, archeology, and art of the area. Then on to get a glimpse of Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona, where we took a Pink Jeep Tour to the Honanki ruins (12th-13th century cliff dwellings) and enjoyed staying in an outstanding B&B (the Creekside Inn), not to mention doing some great eating there and elsewhere on the trip!

All-in-all a fine respite from working on books about Yellowstone. More about those later.

At Old Faithful Village, 2010

Categories: News, Science, Thermal features, Trip planning
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Old Faitful visitor center

Old Faithful Visitor Education Center dedication, August 25, 2010

We were there when the new Old Faithful Visitor Education Center was dedicated and opened on August 25th. A sizeable group of visitors and interested employees of the park attended. The ceremony began with a real mounted color guard presenting the flag and continued with short speeches by Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis (who will retire next month), NPS Director Jon Jarvis, and others important to the creation of the new building and its exhibits. It ended with lots of Yellowstone National Park pennant-waving and with the miracle of Old Faithful Geyser erupting just as keynote speaker, historian Paul Schullery, was concluding his inspirational remarks.

At one point Schullery asked for a show of hands of people who remembered the first visitor center (then called a ranger station and museum), razed in about 1970. Of course, I raised my hand, since the exhibits at that museum and the kind rangers who worked there are fond memories of the years I got to live nearby as a little girl.

The building itself is very roomy and quite impressive, with a long curved counter where rangers can answer your questions, an excellent bookstore, and a pair of exhibit rooms, dedicated to showing and explaining all the important aspects of Yellowstone’s hydrothermal features. They cover the caldera, the rocks formed in it, the various types of thermal features and their characteristics, life forms found near them, discoveries of features under Yellowstone Lake, microorganisms, and possible similarities to other planets and their moons. The centerpiece of the main room is a life-forms diorama, and of the young scientists’ room, a model geyser that builds up to a small eruption about every nine minutes.

Old Faithful exhibit

“Life in Thermal Areas” exhibit at the visitor center

I was grouching before seeing it about the new museum being called an “education center,” thinking that people on vacation, especially schoolchildren, might not enjoy being told they are being educated. But I have to admit the curators have done an excellent job. Now—if only all those electronics can be kept operating!