Yellowstone National Park (American Safari part 2)

After driving through Grand Teton National Park we went into Yellowstone. Yellowstone is known for certain prohibitions.

And
There are also less obvious ones, such as no removal of firewood. The government wants to keep it as closed an ecosystem as possible, which is very impressive.

Our guide had tons of information for us on the park and how it came to be. One of the most interesting points he made was that while the park itself has about 2 million acres the surrounding National Forests add an additional 12mm acres around it as a buffer so there are 14mm acres in total of preserved land.

Yellowstone suffered a devastating fire in 1988, with 800k acres burned, or almost half of the park. You can still see the effects 20 years later.

Established practice before this fire was to immediately extinguish any fire. With hindsight this proved to be a major mistake, since small fires would have cleared out the underbrush without posing systemic risk. As it was, underbrush was allowed to accumulate for decades, so when the big fire started it was uncontainable. Effectively, there were tons of fuel for it stored on the ground.

Now, people understand that fires are an important part of the life cycle of forests. indeed the Ponderosa Pine needs fire to heat its pine cones so they are hot enough to burst and spread their seeds into newly fertilized soil. By trying to protect nature (and perhaps tourism dollars) humans were interrupting a process that had developed over millions of years.

Incidentally, very few animals died during the fire, since they could smell it and run away. Rodents and whatnot burrowed underground and avoided it that way.

Here's a beautiful waterfall.



We were eaten alive by mosquitoes on the way to it, so I'm happy the picture came out. Memo to self for next time - wear long pants on a nature trip.

The most famous part of the park is obviously the Old Faithful geyser. What's less well known is that there are tons of other geysers and geothermal areas in the park, and some of them are even more impressive.

Much of the park is actually the caldera of a super volcano, which is 5,000 times bigger than Mt. St. Helens. You don't really know it's a caldera since it's so big, and the crater is very shallow. Scientists have found a bulge rising in the middle part of park, under the lake, as the magma pushes upwards. It erupts every 600,000 years or so, and it has been 640,000 since the last eruption...

Assuming the volcano were to fully erupt as it has done in the past the detonation would take out a good chunk of the Northwest and the resulting cooling of the planet from the ash could cause an extinction level event, much like the meteor strike in Yucatan is supposed to have caused dinosaur extinction.

Anyway, the heat so close to the surface does make for some great scenery, so we might as well enjoy it while we're still alive...

You can see the inn at Old Faithful in the distance. The area around Old Faithful is full of interesting things to look at.

Incidentally the brown color is not from minerals, but from bacteria. These are extremophiles or thermophiles and like to live in water that's just below the boiling point. A lot of NASA exobiologists go to Yellowstone to study them. The blue is similar to the color you'd see in Iceland in the Blue Lagoon, and comes from silica.

This is not Old Faithful, but is far more frequent and looks cool. The plume goes about 50 feet in the air.

This is the Castle Geyser. You can see it's a lot older than the other ones because of the buildup of silica around the mouth. It's beautiful.
Old Faithful is somewhat less frequent than before because of dropping water levels. It used to go off every hour or so and now it's every hour and a half. A geyser works as follows - water fills up an underground cavern and gets heated up until it hits the boiling point. Then it turns into steam and pushes out of the ground. Since there's less water now it takes longer to fill up, hence the delay.

It's pretty impressive, and shoots about 150-200 feet into the air.

You don't really want to be downwind of it.

Here's the inn. It was built about a hundred years ago and designed by a guy in his 20s.

It's the largest timber structure in the world apparently.

There's a yearlong waiting list to stay there.

Doesn't this pool look nice and inviting, like a jacuzzi?

Every year people boil themselves by hopping in without thinking. There are walkways around these features with prominent warning signs, but sometimes people go in anyway.

This is a mud pot. It's like a geyser but with softer soil, so it mixes with the water and becomes hot mud that simmers like a thick stew.

Here's the Grand Canyon (of Yellowstone). The falls are higher than the ones at Niagara.

The colors are quite impressive, and you look at it from a high promontory.

I gotta have more bison!


The bison know they own the place so they will languidly saunter down the road holding up traffic for minutes at a time. The locals call them bisonjams.

We had lunch overlooking a gurgling river which was very peaceful.

Where's Wapiti?

Wapiti is the Native American term for elk. This one managed to climb up a fairly steep riverbank to sit in the sun.

After lunch we drove back home. It was an unbelievable experience, and having a guide who had that information was invaluable.

Oh, and we also saw a wolf.