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I stepped off the dirty chrome Greyhound bus in Livingstone, Montana, several thousand metres above sea level, and wondered why the rain was so warm. Looking up, I saw a bone-dry, guano-caked bus shelter. Looking down, I saw that the change of altitude had made my body depressurise with an explosive nosebleed. A lurid delta flowed across the front of my one tolerably clean t-shirt. This being a frontier town, my grisly apparition attracted barely a glance. Perhaps they thought I'd just looked at someone's new pick-up truck the wrong way. I did however get a sympathetic discount and a free roll of toilet paper when I bought another t-shirt at a nearby drug store.

I'd decided to spend my long summer break from university working abroad with the help of the BUNAC Work America' programme. The previous summer had seen me filing Social Security claims in Manchester. Oddly, this convinced me I was at heart a wilderness man. So it was that I found a job in Yellowstone National Park, that tangled knot of wild nature, ferocious geology and rapacious tourism high in the Rocky Mountains.

Two more slow bus-rides later, I arrived at my destination, groggy and with a familiar tang of copper in my nostrils. What I initially took for heat haze was in fact an endless, teeming cloud of mosquitoes. In the months to follow, revulsion for these whining fiends faded to irritation, occasionally relieved by maniacal laughter when one of the blighters found a vein, causing it to flood its own body and explode with a bubble-wrap pop.

At home, I'd wanted to tell anyone who'd listen that I'd be grappling with bears, moose, landslides, firestorms and the kind of danger you'd be pushed to find in the S to Z section of Social Fund claims to year ending 1990. The few who listened treated me to Yogi Bear' impressions and, with an eye to my undergraduate beer belly, urged me to keep off the pickernick baskets'.

Ranger Smith' I wasn't. My job would involve cleaning cabins, mopping floors and counting the takings at the resort of Roosevelt Lodge for the then minimum wage of $4 per hour. The resort lay in a spectacular river valley in the north of the park. It was once used by President Theodore Teddy' Roosevelt for hunting grizzlies, hence the nickname for the stuffed variety of bear. Dispersed through the surrounding forest, with its 100-foot lodgepole pines, hunkered log cabins of varying quality, the best for the luxury travellers, the worst for the staff to share.

My first cabin was a crash-course

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