A RANGER’S PERSPECTIVE ON GEOPHYSICAL EXPERIMENTS IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK: MY TIME IN THE BACKCOUNTRY WITH BOB SMITH

I first met Bob Smith in 1978 when he was detonating explosives in Hayden Valley for seismic profiling to obtain a better understanding of the subsurface beneath Yellowstone. Since then, I have accompanied Bob and his students/collaborators on many trips in and around Yellowstone, including many backcountry horse trips. We helped the University of Utah in citing locations to install seismograph stations and GPS stations while the Yellowstone Seismic and Geodetic networks were being built out. Bob Smith and I share a mutual interest in Yellowstone history and we spent many days on horseback in the fabled Yellowstone backcountry in the exact spots where famous Yellowstone historical figures such as Ferdinand V. Hayden and Henry Washburn once explored. Here, I explain my part, as a Yellowstone Park ranger, in the many wonderful scientific discoveries that have been made about Yellowstone by Bob Smith and his many collaborators.