My Experience of Yellowstone
 Forthcoming from DeeAnn Pederson
The Nature of Yellowstone
By Bradford Glass
Yellowstone National Park became the world’s first national park in 1872. Encompassing 2.2 million acres in the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, the park is a protected habitat for wolf, coyote, elk, bison, moose, grizzly and black bear, an abundance of other animals and birds, and phenomenal variety of scenic beauty. The land is rich in vegetation, with 60 percent of the park covered by Lodgepole pines. Since its birth as a national park, it has attracted travelers, explorers, artists and vacationers from around the world who come to experience spewing geysers, rugged terrain, beautiful scenery, cascading waterfalls and abundant wildlife.
Volcanism has created and shaped the Yellowstone area with three cataclysmic eruptions over the past 2 million years. Massive debris was ejected and scattered over thousands of square miles. The last eruption, 600,000 years ago, created a caldera 30 miles across and 45 miles long. Yellowstone is situated in an area where the earth’s crust is thin, which explains today’s unusual thermal activity of geysers, fumaroles, geothermal pools and mud pots.
The Yellowstone River, flowing here for over 2 million years, has carved a 1500-foot deep "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone," and leaving the majestic "Lower Falls" to drop 308 feet, one of the most photographed sights of the area.
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"Where The Buffalo Roam"
"Amber Mist"
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In the 1800s, some 10 million American Bison roamed the west. Hunted nearly to extinction, the vanishing herd was holding out on the high plateau of Yellowstone in the late 1890s. The capture of infamous poacher Ed Howell by Army Scout Burgess is legend. It may have been the pivotal moment in saving these American icons from extinction. Today as you explore the park, bison are everywhere. Massive and dangerous animals, they are an awesome sight, up close and personal.
It is here where we are learning, sometimes the hard way, about the differences between wild and managed lands, and about man’s attempts to tip the scales of nature, both in creating imbalance and trying to restore it. Fires, long suppressed in our protected lands, are an important part of a forest ecosystem. Without fire, many trees and plants won’t reseed. Worse, when the inevitable fires do come, the damage is devastating. The story of the wolf is almost identical to that of fire. Wolves filled an important niche in the ecosystem of the American west. Hunted nearly to extinction due to their perceived threat to human endeavors, their absence created havoc in the populations of their prey. Now being reintroduced, notably here in Yellowstone, nature’s balance is being restored. With both fire and wolves, however, human attitudes change even more slowly than the recovery of an ecosystem, and even more slowly than the learning process that could tip our own scales.
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