This month's World Heritage Site

Yellowstone National Park
Letting Nature Take Its Course

By Toni Dabbs

It might be Nature's laboratory, with stuff in various stages of liquefaction dripping, gurgling and steaming... like so many experiments on Bunsen burners.

Sometimes, it's difficult to believe that the wonders of Yellowstone National Park are natural, rather than Disney-made. Geysers spray steam into the air at regular intervals. Pools of rainbow hued mud bubble gently. Travertine terraces climb heavenward, like crystalline stairs.

Although people are believed to have inhabited the Yellowstone area for most of the 8,500 years since the last ice age, John Colter apparently was the first man of European descent to see the region, having left the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore it in 1807.

As fur traders for the Hudson's Bay Company and, later, gold miners followed, stories of Yellowstone's strange sights began to filter back to the more populated parts of what was then the United States, and soon visitors were coming not for commercial reasons but just to view this other-worldly landscape.

These early tourists inspired the U.S. Congress to set aside Yellowstone as the world's first national park on March 1, 1872. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site a little more than 100 years later, in 1978.

Today, Yellowstone National Park occupies 2.2 million acres, mostly in northwest Wyoming, but with one corner projecting into Idaho and a narrow L-shaped edge jutting into Montana.

Probably the best known of the park's features is Old Faithful, a geyser erupting about every 75 minutes, spouting scalding water as high as 180 feet. It is not necessarily the most impressive, though.

The park has more than 200 active geysers among its approximately 10,000 thermal features. The sum of all other geysers in the world is less than Yellowstone's total.

Among those sharing the Upper Geyser Basin with Old Faithful are: the Castle, probably oldest of all geysers in the park; the Beehive, a steam-spewing cone; and the Lion Group, four geysers connected underground that roar when they erupt.

However, Yellowstone's most active thermal region is the Norris Geyser Basin to the north. It includes Steamboat Geyser, the world's largest, and Porcelain Basin, the park's hottest exposed area.

Eastward, on the edge of Hayden Valley, is the Mud Volcano area. The so-called volcano is just a spring that oozes mud, but some more ominous features contribute to the fog of sulfurous fumes that permeates the area.

Sour Lake, for example, is a pool of mild acid produced by hydrogen sulfide reacting with oxygen in the ground water. The Dragon's Mouth spits superheated water and belches sulfurous gas. Sizzling Basin is a caldron of boiling water, with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen bubbling through it.

Quieter and less volatile are the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone's northern-most service center, site of the first settlement in the region and location of the park's headquarters.

Mineral rich ground water, heated by the magma that once fueled true volcanoes, emerges above a series of travertine terraces colored by living algae. It trickles over the tiers, depositing calcium carbonate and slowly but surely forming new basins. The water fills and overflows the basins, cascading onto tiers below.

This process results in continuous change. Prominent terraces of the 1930s, such as Blue Spring and Angel, are now lifeless ruins, while Jupiter and Minerva are still developing.

A network of boardwalks allows people to get as close as is safely possible to Yellowstone's main points of interest. Visitors are urged to stay on the walkways to protect both themselves and the features. The park's springs, geysers, fumaroles and mud pots are fragile, unstable and... well, hot!

While its thermal traits hold great fascination, the park could draw visitors solely on the strength of its conventional scenery: mountains, canyons, waterfalls and lakes.

Snow fed Yellowstone Lake is the largest high-altitude lake in the lower 48 states: 20 miles long, 13 miles wide, with a maximum depth of 328 feet. Its main outlet is the Yellowstone River, which has gouged its own Grand Canyon through the park's volcanic rock.

At one point in the canyon, the river suddenly drops over a combination of two dramatic waterfalls: Upper Falls, 108 feet; and Lower Falls, 308 feet. Farther north, it plunges again... over Tower Fall, 131 feet.

Because almost the entire park remains in its natural state, ranging from the hydrothermal caldera to expansive grasslands to dense evergreen forests, wildlife is abundant. With a little effort and common sense, visitors can be rewarded with the sighting of a moose or a bear.

Yellowstone has the last free roaming bison herd in North America, numbering about 4,300, and bison often graze on the lawn of the Old Faithful Inn. Rocky Mountain elk sometimes lounge on the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces.

The park also provides habitat for more than 225 species of birds, including the bald eagle, trumpeter swan and osprey.

Visitor services (restaurants, accommodations, shops, and information and interpretive centers) are clustered at six strategic points around Yellowstone.

Perhaps the most frequently photographed of the park's accommodations is the venerable Old Faithful Inn. Built during 1903 and 1904, it is a Western Stick style structure designed by Seattle architect R.C. Reamer. Its lobby has log rafters 88 feet overhead and a four-sided fireplace containing more than 443 tons of rock.

Although the park is open year-round, its facilities and roads have limited access in winter (generally mid-October through mid-May) due to snow. 

British Columbia-based Toni Dabbs is a frequent contributor to The Cultured Traveler.