It’s not every day that you get to celebrate a 150th birthday, but here we are. On March 1st, 1872, Yellowstone was established as our first National Park. While it was still a pretty lawless area for another decade or two, people now generally behave. Folks are no longer squatting on the lands or hacking off pieces of famous stones to take home (at least, we hope not). The dangers of the park are no longer murdering, lawless men, but rather charging bison (for those who venture too close) and scalded fingertips from hot spring temperature checks.
Yellowstone covers 2.2 million acres of land spanning 3 states (although 96% of the park is in Wyoming). It’s severe but beautiful country, with six months of winter and only six weeks of summer each year. The mountains loom large, stretching to the sky on either side of the road, striped with colorful strata. On the ground, scrubby shrubs – usually sage bush stripped of leaves by the pronghorns – intersperse with clutches of grass.
Towns are small and spread far apart, and the animals roam city and park with a certain entitlement. Elk rest their big, white rumps in remote pastures as well as on the local school’s baseball diamond, mule deer nibble by streams and wander past campgrounds.
Bison come in two flavors: domesticated stock on farms and wild herds that roam free. Baby bison, with their bright red coats, trail after their mothers, pestering them for milk. And Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, who have not yet fled the crowds to higher elevations, create their own lane on the freeway to migrate from field to field. With their giant horns, ringed for each year of their life and growing out of their skulls for maximum sturdiness, they strut from grass patch to grass patch, afraid of no one.
We drove for a little under two hours from our Bozeman base camp to one of the east entrances to the park, spotting wildlife with the enthusiasm of the first day of a trip. Every glance out the window was beautiful, and far too many pictures were taken. There were so many details that were hard to capture in a photo – the brilliant blue of a male mountain bluebird flitting through an adjacent field, the delicate aura of a yellow cottonwood. We passed fields of large boulders, tossed all over the place as a glacier soldiered through the valley and thus aptly named “glacial erratics”. We then switched from the freeway to the old stagecoach road, a bumpier but more scenic alternative. We saw deer, elk, and bluebirds by the dozen, as well as pronghorns loping alongside fenced-off research areas to see what the park looks like when it’s not overgrazed. These pronghorns, while delicate-looking, are actually the fastest land mammal in North America, reaching speeds of 55 mph.
After we entered the park, we wound next to the Gardener River, also known as the “boiling river” because of the plumes of steam that arise where underground rivers connected to thermal springs join with the above-ground river. While currently closed due to the Covid pandemic, the river has a few put-in points where the frigid ice melt warms to 104 degrees Fahrenheit where it mixes with the thermal water. Beside toastier water, the other effect of the thermal springs is to dissolve the calcium carbonate in the rock, which then gets redeposited as a stone called travertine by the hot springs. This material, which is apparently often used for countertops, also creates iconic landscapes in Yellowstone National Park. We wandered on raised bridges around the geothermal springs and their travertine monuments. The raised bridges not only protect guests from the scalding water, but also from highly unstable ground, as the thermals gradually dissolve the rock beneath the surface and leave it increasingly unstable.
While wandering the travertine landscape, which felt like momentarily entering another world, we did spot a family of marmots, including two adults and a baby. Their tails were incredibly expressive as they moved about, sometimes standing up on their back paws to peer about.
Our hike was rewarded with a bag lunch enjoyed in one of the Yellowstone hotels. We sat under a map of the United States with each state made out of wood, with the map spanning an entire wall. Only one capital city is mismarked on the map, and it just happens to be the one for Maryland. After eating, Josh taught me how to play checkers! And he wasn’t too bitter when I won.
Spotted: Mount Everts, a peak named after Truman Everts, who was lost in Yellowstone for 37 days before crawling back into camp with scalded feet. Between his crawling and his 30-lb weight loss, he was almost shot by his own rescue party because he was unrecognizable. And then he wrote a book! https://www.yellowstonepark.com/park/history/truman-everts/
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