That’s right – they’re all here in Yel­low­stone, and by the thou­sands.  Ten thou­sand geo-thermal won­ders – half of all that exist in the entire world.  Two thou­sand buf­falo.  Twenty thou­sand elk.  Plus a water­fall twice as high as Nia­gara Falls, a park that’s larger than two entire states, more than a thou­sand miles of trails, and his­toric hotels built for the rich a cen­tury ago – includ­ing the largest log struc­ture in the world, the enor­mous Old Faith­ful Inn.

But that’s not all:  You can fish or boat on the largest moun­tain lake – Lake Yel­low­stone – in all of North Amer­ica (20 miles wide by 14 miles long – a shore­line of 110 miles!).  And if the econ­omy has you bummed about hav­ing to put off that African safari for a year or two, think instead of vis­it­ing “the largest sanc­tu­ary for west­ern large mam­mals in the lower forty-eight states.”  Granted, you won’t come face to face with a rhino.  But a one-ton bison can be just as intim­i­dat­ing.  And in addi­tion to the elk and moose and griz and buf­falo there are wolves, black bear, bighorn sheep, ante­lope, cougar, coy­ote, mule deer…and those are just the larger critters.

Are feath­ers your pref­er­ence?  Yel­low­stone is known to America’s 46 mil­lion bird­ers for its trum­peter swans, osprey, bald eagles, golden eagles, white pel­i­cans, sand­hill cranes, great blue herons, Canada geese, ravens, mag­pies, killdeer, yellow-headed black­birds, dip­pers, and more.  Even if you can’t tell a blue­bird from a duck you’ll get a kick out of the vari­ety.
But enough of lists…you get the idea.  There’s so much to see and it’s easy to get here.

There are air­ports nearby (West Yel­low­stone, Boze­man, Jack­son…), should you choose to fly.  But if lower gas prices have you think­ing of a fam­ily road trip, of see­ing the USA in your Chevro­let (other makes are allowed), know that just dri­ving in can be a won­der. (“Won­der­land,” by the way, was a com­mon 19th cen­tury name for this place, before it became the world’s first national park way back in 1872 and was later offi­cially mon­ick­ered Yellowstone).

Five paved-road entrances beckon you to the heart of the park, a figure-eight road sys­tem designed to take the vis­i­tor to and through an unfor­get­table land.  But even before you reach this huge quarter-million-acre ther­mal and ani­mal sanc­tu­ary of Rocky Moun­tain wilder­ness, you’ll have tra­versed the “Greater Yel­low­stone Ecosys­tem.” Like a jewel in a vel­vet box, the park is nearly sur­rounded by the Gal­latin, Madi­son, Absaroka, Gros Ven­tre, Wind River, and Teton Moun­tains, plus five national forests.  As the old say­ing goes, get­ting there is half the fun.

As the direc­tor of an active-travel tour com­pany I’m often asked “What’s your favorite trip?”  If I’m just back from some­where I almost always answer wher­ever I’ve just been, because I’m think­ing of the peo­ple – the guests and the guides – whom I’ve just enjoyed for a solid week.

But my favorite favorite place?  You guessed it – Yel­low­stone.  Much of the rea­son is all that I’ve already men­tioned, the won­drous sights and even the sounds of the place – the whoosh and gur­gle of explod­ing gey­sers, the bub­bling, plop­ping sound of mud pots, the gig­gle of kids when see­ing these things for the very first time (my guides are unan­i­mous in pre­fer­ring fam­ily trips for this pre­cise rea­son).  Clark’s Nut­crack­ers and huge black ravens fly over­head, mak­ing their dis­tinc­tive sounds, while nearby buf­falo grunt their dis­plea­sure at hav­ing to move to remain in the shade.  There’s always some­thing hap­pen­ing in the Park.

And then there are the sto­ries.  Din­ner­time for group travel is when one hears what every­one has seen and expe­ri­enced dur­ing the day, and in Yel­low­stone that adds up to a lot.  That would be true even if you only drove through the Park and took the board­walk strolls around the hiss­ing pools and gey­sers.  But the road sys­tem cov­ers only two per­cent of what there is to see.  Our tours take peo­ple off the roads and into the back­coun­try by moun­tain bike and on foot trails, and just north of the park bound­ary  (still in the Yel­low­stone Ecosys­tem) by horse into the high coun­try guided by real cow­boys.  You can imag­ine the sto­ries that spill out at din­ner after these activities.

For all the nat­ural his­tory of the array of ani­mals and geo­logic won­ders of Yel­low­stone, the Park’s human his­tory is equally fas­ci­nat­ing.  We have to imag­ine the reac­tions of the Crow and Black­foot and Shoshone Indi­ans as they trav­eled through today’s Park lands, and of John Colter (a for­mer mem­ber of the Lewis and Clark Expe­di­tion) who was per­haps the first white man to see this region – alone and in win­ter to boot!  Luck­ily, there are bet­ter records of moun­tain man Jim Bridger mar­veling at the sights two decades later in 1825..

Like Colter when he had attempted to tell the truth of what he’d seen, Bridger was faced with smiles and shak­ing heads when he reported boil­ing springs and pet­ri­fied trees.  So, in per­fect fur-trapper style, he cranked things up a bit.  He told, with a straight face,  of catch­ing trout deep in the cooler waters of those springs and pulling the fish up ever so slowly, cook­ing his din­ner on the way out.  The unstretched sto­ries of pet­ri­fied trees like­wise weren’t believed, so they became “peet­ri­fied forests where peet­ri­fied birds sang peet­ri­fied songs.”  He swore of the use­ful “eight-hour echo that you can wind up by shout­ing ‘Time to get up!’” when you went to bed.

Three some­what sci­en­tific expe­di­tions (1869 – 1871) were required to make Amer­i­cans believe what had been ear­lier rumored, and all make inter­est­ing read­ing.  But more fas­ci­nat­ing, for its human ele­ment, is Tru­man Everts’ lengthy Scribner’s Monthly mag­a­zine arti­cle “Thirty-Seven Days of Peril” (now avail­able as a book titled “Lost in Yel­low­stone”), in which he describes becom­ing sep­a­rated from the 1870 Washburn-Langford-Doane expe­di­tion and hav­ing to live in the wilds until rescued.

Though he took care of hun­dreds of wounded Civil War sol­diers on the field at bloody Fred­er­icks­burg, he had trou­ble car­ing for him­self after his horse bolted on day two of his sep­a­ra­tion from the group.  “My blan­kets, gun, pis­tols, fish­ing tackle, matches – every­thing, except the cloth­ing on my per­son, a cou­ple of knives, and a small opera-glass  were attached to the sad­dle.”  Our tour guides point out to guests the plant that sus­tained him, today called the “Everts This­tle.”  The poor lost man had been four days with­out food when he chanced upon one and, find­ing it “not unlike a radish,” ate sev­eral.  (He cooked them in a “small, round, boil­ing spring, which I called my dinner-pot.…”)

Everts was “over­joyed at this dis­cov­ery” and, with “hunger allayed,” went to sleep beneath a tree – only to be awak­ened in the dark by the screech of a moun­tain lion.  He hur­riedly climbed the tree and kept the cat at bay by throw­ing branches and howl­ing back.  Hun­dreds of this­tles, two min­nows, some grasshop­pers, a small bird and a month later, the man who found him reported, lacon­i­cally, “He is alive and safe, but very low in flesh.”  He wasn’t kid­ding, for Everts’ weight was guessed at only fifty pounds.  Another writer, who inter­viewed his res­cuer, described his con­di­tion more fully:

…he never saw so for­lorn a look­ing human being as was Evarts [sic] when found.  A few tat­tered rags upon an ema­ci­ated skele­ton, frozen, scalded, singed and fes­tered into the sem­blance of a two-legged ani­mal, hideous beyond description.…

Tru­man Everts was wast­ing away, but no one has ever been lost so long in Yel­low­stone and sur­vived.  The man had grit.  In fur­ther proof of his stay­ing power he mar­ried a sec­ond time at sixty-five, fathered a child at seventy-five, and died a decade later.  (I include his tale not only because it is fas­ci­nat­ing, but because his report’s pub­li­ca­tion in 1871 riv­eted the nation and helped the push toward sav­ing this huge piece of wilder­ness as a national park.)

Don’t think human his­tory becomes dull once Yel­low­stone becomes a park in 1872.  Just five years later, when gold is dis­cov­ered on the lands of the Nez Perce Indi­ans and the tribe is ordered to a reser­va­tion, they chose a fight­ing retreat to Canada instead and routed them­selves through Yel­low­stone.  While in the Park they encoun­tered a num­ber of tourist par­ties, includ­ing that of a Mrs. George Cowan, who later wrote a lengthy descrip­tion of their cap­ture.  Her hus­band, a Civil War vet­eran, was shot first through the thigh and only min­utes later in the head by an Indian hold­ing a pis­tol at point-blank range.  Left for dead by the Nez Perce, he awak­ened after a few hours (the soft pis­tol ball had flat­tened against the skull and didn’t pen­e­trate), but when he stood up he was seen by another Indian and shot – this time through the hip.

More hours passed as he faded in and out of con­scious­ness.  Then he came to and, hear­ing only silence, began crawl­ing toward water (he no longer could walk).  Five days later he’d cov­ered the ten miles to a for­mer camp at Lower Geyser Basin and was found by two Army scouts.  They fed him, wrapped him in blan­kets against the night chill (almost all of Yel­low­stone is above 7,000’), built a warm fire and, explain­ing that they had to con­tinue scout­ing and would send an Army patrol out to res­cue him, rode off.

Later in the night a high wind blew the flames into the nearby trees, cre­at­ing a for­est fire; George Cowan barely man­aged to crawl away to safety, burn­ing his hands and knees.  But he was picked up later by an Army patrol and packed out of the park, then trans­ferred to a wagon that flipped down a ravine when the horses bolted.  Thank­fully, its occu­pants had been tossed out before the descent.  The thrice-up, burned, and now severely bruised Cowan required all fall and win­ter to recover from his visit to Yellowstone.

But don’t get the wrong idea.  For every old-time story of some­one lost, shot, or eaten by a bear (inevitably an East­erner who has tried to pet the nice griz or feed the black bear by hand), there are count­less mag­a­zine arti­cles writ­ten by vis­i­tors extolling the peace­able beau­ties of “Won­der­land” (that name died a slow death).  In fact, as early as 1883 a group of cycling enthu­si­asts ped­aled the dirt roads on high-wheelers.  John Muir, more often asso­ci­ated with Yosemite, vis­ited two years later, and suf­fered noth­ing worse than the equiv­a­lent of a fender-bender today – he was thrown from his horse.

In 1887 Owen Wis­ter, author of many West­ern nov­els (includ­ing The Vir­gin­ian) and a friend of Theodore Roo­sevelt, wrote that the Lower Falls of the Yel­low­stone River (the one that’s twice the height of Nia­gara Falls) is “the most beau­ti­ful thing I have ever seen.”  Then he and his hell-raising bud­dies shocked the tourists by wash­ing their under­wear in a geyser, and bought black­berry brandy from a hotel clerk to “…check dis­tur­bances which drink­ing queer water from highly chem­i­cal brooks often raised in human inte­ri­ors.”  You’ll find the water puri­fied today.

If Rud­yard Kipling had rid­den horses through the park with Wister’s band of cut-ups he might have enjoyed him­self.  Instead, think­ing to see Won­der­land on his long trip to Lon­don from India he man­aged to get stuck in a car­riage with two “old peo­ple from Chicago”; the mis­sus “chewed gum and talked about her symp­toms,” while the hus­band at every geyser com­plained about the “dref­fel [dread­ful] waste of steam-power.”  What­ever the cause, the author of The Jun­gle Book was not a happy man.  He begins his arti­cle with “To-day I am in the Yel­low­stone Park, and I wish I were dead.”  Things don’t improve much from there:

“The Park is just a howl­ing wilder­ness of three thou­sand square miles, full of all imag­in­able freaks of a fiery nature.”

“The ground rings hol­low as a kerosene-tin, and some day the Mam­moth Hotel, guests and all, will sink into the cav­erns below and be turned into a sta­lac­tite.”  [It hasn’t hap­pened yet.]
“…we walked chat­ter­ing to the uplands of Hell.  They call it the Nor­ris Geyser Basin on Earth…There were no ter­races here, but all other horrors.”

Need­less to say, Kipling wouldn’t have made it as a park ranger.  Or as an Austin-Lehman Adven­tures guide!

I’ve writ­ten too much about this one-of-a-kind place on earth, and there’s still more than a cen­tury of his­tory to tell…like the con­tin­gent of “Buf­falo Sol­diers” in 1896 who pedal to Mam­moth Hot Springs from Fort Mis­soula and back (you’ll see pho­tos of these stal­wart bik­ers when you visit Old Faith­ful Inn) – a dis­tance of 790 miles with full field kit; the next year they rode their heavy bikes with field gear from Mon­tana to Mis­souri!  And then there’s Teddy Roosevelt’s visit in 1903.…

The tales go on and on, just like Old Faith­ful.  So come, and add your own.