The week before the president visited was a rather hectic one at Yellowstone as every division collectively messed themselves preparing for it. Even geology got involved, as my supervisors were placed on a geyser emergency team for the visit and put on stand by in an undisclosed location to be ready in case something went wrong (Old Faithful doesn't go off?). They also were nice and removed the rather suspicious-looking temperature loggers (a small circular base emitting a radio frequency with a 2 meter wire extending from it) from any pool the President would be near.
The most entertaining part of the preparation was hearing what the wildlife people had to deal with. As anyone who has been to Yellowstone knows, there are a lot of bison there. These bison don't give a crap about cars and will stand in the middle of the road and just stare at you.
Well, apparently it is a major security issue if a presidential motorcade has to make an unscheduled stop (i.e. to avoid hitting a bison), so there were park rangers put in charge of keeping the bison herds away from the motorcade route. How they did that I don't know, I got the feeling while I was in Yellowstone that a bison wouldn't move even if I was bumping it with my car.Additionally the president's family was going to have a picnic lunch at a location where two ravens known for stealing picnic lunches liked to hang out. The bird people were told to 'get rid of them'. Ravens are smart though. Imagine trying to catch something on the ground that can fly and knows you're trying catch it. Don't know how they pulled that one off either.
Finally, both of these issues ended up being irrelevant as Obama ended up flying in to Old Faithful instead of driving and the picnic was for the staff while the president ate indoors at a lodge. All in all the president was in the park for maybe 3 hours. Just a bit less than the reported average length of a visit to the park (I don't get that stat either). Instead of being annoyed though at the much ado about nothing issues created by the president's visit, my supervisor came away very impressed with the professionalism and quality of the work done by the secret service in preparing the park for the president to visit. Those guys don't mess around and know exactly what they're doing in a very elaborate system. Apparently there are multiple advance teams of agents leap-frogging each other in advance of the presidential visits and also a small fleet of aircraft carrying motorcade vehicles around the country, so that everything is ready before Air Force 1 is even in the region.
As for me, I spent the day Obama was in the park staying as far away as possible. Traffic was already bad enough without having to deal with an Obama-jam. The bison and elk jams were already annoying me enough.
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