by Dan Austin

Remember Dorothy’s words sung over and over as she skipped along the yellow brick road? – “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” Had she been in the magical northwest corner of Wyoming instead of the Land of Oz, she might have been singing “Geysers, hot springs, fumaroles, mud pots! Elk and moose – and grizzly bears!”

That’s right – they’re all here in Yellowstone, and by the thousands. Ten thousand geothermal 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. 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. 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 seldom-used trails, and just north of the park boundary (still in the Yellowstone Ecosystem) by horse into the high country guided by fourth-generation Montana cowboys. But first we raft the Yellowstone River, racing through its Class 2 and Class 3 rapids. 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, 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 parklands, and of John Colter (a former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) who is believed to have been 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, and the reactions of those he spoke to afterward.

Like Colter when he 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.

More mountain men and explorers followed, with Yellowstone amazing each of its millions of visitors. Thanks to its protected status, it always will.