Yellowstone, Part II: Nature Preserved

In setting apart this chunk of the land as the world's first national park, Congress preserved a part of the west.  Things commonplace in the frontier became unique to Yellowstone as homesteaders settled and developed the land.  The southeast part of Yellowstone holds a spot in the backcountry thirty miles from any road - the most isolated place in the contiguous forty-eight states.

The park's preservation also set aside a major wildlife habitat. Yellowstone and the surrounding national forests (and Grand Teton NP) make up the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem - the largest in-tact ecosystem in the forty-eight states - full of grizzly and black bears, wolves, and plenty of bison and elk, amongst other animals.

Additionally, though not known for its mountains, Yellowstone does lie in the Rockies and sits on the Continental Divide; I have enjoyed the peaks I've reached over the summer.  Morever, the park is home to numerous beautiful waterfalls and wildflowers.  (Shown is Undine Falls.)

And of course, we have a splendid canyon - the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Together, all of these features (thermal and other) come together to form the variety of attractions the make Yellowstone National Park great.

Last night Hilary and I safely returned to Houston (after a delay caused by President Obama arriving at the Bozeman, MT airport as we were supposed to leave).  Yellowstone was great fun, but it feels wonderful to be back in Texas.  Thank you all for reading this weblog and keeping up with our summer adventures.

Foon!

Hilary and I hiked a few miles 

south of the canyon to Wrangler Lake for our final camping trip in Yellowstone. Halfway there it started to rain, which made Hilary upset. When we got to the halfway-up-the-shin ford across Sour Creek, I decided to be a sweetheart and carry both packs across, then come back and carry Hilary across (a performance that I repeated the next day).

During the trip, I finally field-tested the "foon" Zack Van Brunt so kindly gave me in response to my Sporks? post.  It worked well for both my soupy entrée and for the chocolate 

cake for dessert.  It has also worked well for eating solid chicken in the EDR.  These pictures demonstrate how unhappy I was eating breakfast with my hands, then how my mood improved once I implemented the foon.

Yellowstone, Part I: Thermal Features

All I knew about Yellowstone before I got here was that it is home to the famed Old Faithful Geyser.  Upon arriving, I kept hearing the term "thermal feature," which struck me as amusingly formal. Whatever people meant by the phrase, it seemed that we have more stuff than just Old Faithful.

"Thermal Feature" is essentially a blanket term describing any sort of geothermal activity that brings hot water to the earth's surface.  Such phenomena include hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles (steam vents), and geysers.  They are fueled by the Yellowstone supervolcano - one of the largest active volcanos in the world.  The most recent eruption, 640,000 years ago, was 1000 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.  The volcano forms a hotspot under the park, where the earth's crust is only several miles thick rather than the usual twenty to thirty miles.  

The heat, along with the right underground "plumbing," has created about 10,000 thermal features here - a greater concentration than anywhere else in the world (runners up include Iceland, New Zealand, and Kamchatka).  Yellowstone also has the majority of the earth's geysers, including Steamboat, whose 400 ft. eruptions make it the world's tallest active geyser.

People disregarded reports of the area from early trappers and mountain men as tall tales, but after a couple of formal expeditions surveying the region, in 1872 Congress made Yellowstone the world's first national park to preserve this outstanding collection of thermal features.

Above is a picture from Hilary's and my trip to Artist Paint Pots two weekends ago.  Below is Grand Prismatic, the largest hot spring in Yellowstone and the third largest in the world (the first two are in New Zealand).