Yellowstone Expedition comes full circle

By Avery Howe

Every fourth grader to go through Greybull Elementary School has been to Yellowstone National Park since 1988, thanks in large part to efforts by former science and math teacher John Kunkel. 

“To me, the outdoor environment is the perfect classroom,” Mr. Kunkel said in an interview with the Standard following that first trip. 

While many things about the Yellowstone Expedition have changed over years, that fact has not, according to Mr. Kunkel. 

“It is important to show them parts of the park in a way that they’re not just tourists, they’re actually understanding some of the natural history of the park, how valuable it is to maintain the park as it is. Leaving nothing but footprints and taking nothing but memories,” he said.

Kunkel was honored in a GES awards ceremony on Thursday after recently returning from this year’s Yellowstone Expedition with youngest granddaughter Amelia Kunkel’s class. The trip marked 37 years of outdoor learning in the park, which Mr. Kunkel worked to establish as a part of the fourth-grade curriculum in Greybull. 

“It was good to see the old students who are now parents chaperoning at the park, come kind of full circle,” Kunkel said. “The group this year just did a fantastic job in making it a wonderful experience for the kids.”

Among the adults on this year’s trip were two of Kunkel’s former students in Chris Dalin and Misty Hernandez, both of whom were on the first expedition in 1988. Hernandez returned as a teacher, chaperone and mother to fourth-grader Levi, while Dalin tagged along as the students’ chef and chauffeur. 

When the original class went, they camped in unheated cabins at Buffalo Ranch. They swam in the Boiling River, hiked Specimen Ridge, cooked their own meals and conducted their own field studies with the help of Yellowstone Rangers. 

“I still have my clipboard and I use it in my classroom. It has my little stickers, and it says, ‘Misty Good,’ and I remember getting that for Yellowstone,” Hernandez said.

This year Hernandez was excited to take her son, Levi, on his first trip to the park. When Kunkel made a surprise appearance, she was elated. 

“I just thought that was really neat because I had that experience with him, and then my son was getting the same experience because he was a part of our group,” Hernandez said.

Dalin has been attending the Yellowstone Expedition as the school’s food service director for three years, starting when he chaperoned, drove bus and cooked for his daughter Ruby’s class three years ago. 

“Nobody teaches you in culinary school how to cook for 60 people out of a cooler,” Dalin commented. “That’s something you learn camping.”

He remembered making his own meals on the Yellowstone Expedition in 1988. 

“I’m sure it was government cheese, but there was this huge block of cheese, and my dad was cutting it with his big old hunting knife,” Dalin said. 

Now Dalin packs a grill and supplies on a trailer for the Expedition – he estimated he made 180 sandwiches this year. 

This year students stayed in heated cabins, equipped with bathrooms and kitchens, at a lodge in Island Park, Idaho. They hiked the Grand Prismatic, saw Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and counted 12 bears, nine mountain goats and a slew of elk and bison. 

“For me it was just kind of the icing on the cake to have Mr. Kunkel there,” Hernandez said. 

Both recalled Kunkel as a great teacher, one of their favorites.

“He was always doing something crazy, pushing the envelope,” Dalin recalled. 

Mr. Kunkel received the Wyoming Elementary Science Teacher of the Year award in 1994 due to his work on the Yellowstone Expedition and was taken to Washington, D.C. to meet former Vice President Al Gore and celebrity Bill Nye the Science Guy. 

“(Nye) had heard about our trip,” Kunkel remembered. “I had a chat with him.”

The Yellowstone Expedition has earned its acclaim as not only an academic experience, but a social one. Students are taken away from home for days and sent out to explore, some of them for the first time. It has been adopted by other schools around the state. Dalin described it as a “hardcore” fieldtrip, the chance to see a worldwide attraction right in our own backyard. 

“It’s gone on for so long, it’s a shared community experience,” he said. 

The Yellowstone fires of 1988, collectively the largest wildfires of the park’s history, took place the summer after that first trip. 

“For those of us that were able to go back the following year, the contrast between how the Park had changed because of the fires was really dramatic. And now, over the years, to see how all of that has recovered is pretty remarkable,” Kunkel said. 

The students in his 1995 class were some of the first to see the wolves be released from their Slough Creek pen during the reintroduction project. 

Though Kunkel retired in 2008, the Yellowstone Expedition has continued. It was always important to him that the school board help finance the project as a part of the fourth-grade curriculum. 

“I didn’t want the kids out doing car washes and candy bar sales to raise money for Yellowstone; I thought it was important that the school back this program up,” Kunkel said. 

“I just want this program to continue. Second to none, and the fact that the kids get to go every year is wonderful. I never would have thought it would go this long, but after 37 years I just hope it keeps going.”