Yellowstone: The First National Park

1. Coming into Focus

In the 1830s, mountain man Jim Bridger bragged that in the Rocky Mountain region trappers called Yellowstone Country, he could begin his bath by jumping into a hot, steaming river, extend it by wading downstream to soap up in warm water, and then move further down to rinse and finish his ablutions in a tepid pool.

Bridger was a notorious boaster, liar and tall-tale teller, so folks back east tended to dismiss his stories as so much hot air about hot water.

But rumors about Yellowstone lingered, reinforced by the often breathless accounts of other visitors to the high plateau in faraway Wyoming Territory. In 1871, the U.S. government mounted the legendary Hayden Expedition to the area. Its members, who included the great landscape artist Thomas Moran, came away convinced that the area was so exceptional it had to be set aside and preserved by the power of the federal government from exploitation of any sort – railroads, logging, mining, herding, hunting or settlement.

What they wanted to protect was a region almost glutted with superlative scenery and animal life. There were countless geysers, rattling the earth every time they belched, snorted and expectorated super-hot columns of water into the air. Some would go off at almost exact intervals, while others would surprise with their fickleness. At the upstream end of the region’s deeply carved yellow-tinted namesake canyon (thus, “Yellowstone”) a waterfall twice the height of Niagara flung water over its precipice with such force that when it hit bottom it would shoot out in huge flat sheets, drenching rocks far above the base of the fall with a perpetual driving spray.

There were thousands of square miles of climax lodgepole pine forests, rugged mountains guarding the perimeter of the great plateau, and seemingly innumerable elk and deer. Even remnants of America’s once gigantic buffalo herds had found refuge there.

In the center of the plateau was a pristine 136-square mile lake (354 square kilometers), rimmed by mountains and forests, filled with cold, clear, pure water. It glistened like the centerpiece of some magical table of delights, the kind of place children might dream of when asked to imagine Eden.

The esteemed photographer William Henry Jackson was on the expedition, and he dutifully exposed hundreds of plates that captured Yellowstone’s bounty of images. But in the end, his black-and-white shots couldn’t quite do justice to the land. If it had been his photos alone that the Hayden explorers had brought back with them to Washington, DC, matters might have turned out far differently.

But Moran’s presence was decisive. His color portraits of Yellowstone’s geysers, Grand Canyon, great lake and wildlife gave the expedition’s portrait of Yellowstone an irresistibly grand and romantic edge. When Congress saw Moran’s paintings, corroborated in all prosaic respects by Jackson’s work, there was no question that Yellowstone would be set aside as a national preserve.

This was a radical notion in an era when most people were poor. The Far West was a kind of national safety valve, a land of affluent tomorrows where hard-working yeoman and keen entrepreneurs could “open up” and exploit its treasures and become wealthy or independent in the process. To set aside a place that had the potential to produce massive quantities or ore, game, timber, water power (and even steam power) was a daring move.

On March 1, 1872, Congress created Yellowstone National Park, declaring that it was “hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale. . . and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Those simple words became the framework for a movement that would later become worldwide.

2. Some Yellowstone Thoughts

The Fire Last Time – Traveling with my wife and son, I am visiting Yellowstone in 1998, 10 years after wildfires consumed almost 40% of its total acreage – a 1,200-square-mile swath that by itself would be slightly larger than Yosemite National Park. I imagine the depressing vista of destruction I’ll see as I drive into the park’s western entrance.

There they are, the charred and rotting trunks of burned trees, still standing by the millions. But instead of being depressed, I’m becoming elated. Healthy seedlings, now four and five feet tall, have burst through at the bases of the ghost trees. In another generation, they’ll become a dense new forest. There are millions of wildflowers, too, abetted by the sunlight that washes over the burned areas now that the old trees’ dense canopy is gone.

The dead trees are too bare to hide the contours of the land. They had once been so thick that it was impossible to see through them to determine the height or length of the slopes they stood on. Now these slopes stand revealed. The western part of Yellowstone turns out to be a landscape of rolling hills, somewhat like New England’s. It has always seemed to me that with its mountains, plateaus, forests and big lake that the park has collected all of the archetypal U.S. landscapes in one place. Now, I can add New England to my imagination’s mix.

Sam’s Steak – At Lake Village we stop to eat dinner. The restaurant there, though nicely furnished and staffed by friendly college kids working summer jobs, isn’t one I expect much from. This is a place that serves 2,00 strangers a day, very few of them regulars. There’s no incentive to serve a memorable meal.

My son, Sam, 13 years old and ravenous, decides to order a New York strip steak. I bite my tongue and don’t deliver the warning about lousy steaks in industrial-strength restaurants that I’m tempted to.

The steak arrives and my son falls on it. I wait two minutes and ask casually, “How is it?” He tells me that it’s one of the best steaks he’s ever had – tender, tasty and cooked exactly as he wanted. Then he says, “This is far more than I expected.”

His statement makes my day. My son has reached that point where he not only can prepare for disappointment but is also open to surprise. It’s a wonderful state for a traveler to be in: a roll-with-the-punches disposition where we accept the awful when we must, but are also ready to be delighted and transported by simple pleasures.

The Endless Vista – At one point as it leads south from Tower Roosevelt toward Canyon Village, the road climbs to 8,859 feet. Cars slow down here on this icy, narrow section, which has no shoulders or turnouts. It’s possible to take a lingering look through the car window at the view from that height. I see a dark green forest, untouched by the 1988 fires, stretching at least 25 miles to the park’s eastern boundary. There’s not a road or habitation visible in the whole expanse.

It is the largest swath of virgin forest I have ever seen. This is the closest I’ll probably ever come to sharing the thrill that people who fly over the virgin expanses of the Amazon or the Russian taiga feel when they see such a limitless canopy.

A Place Still Wild – In the 1990s, three explorers set out to discover and map any unknown waterfalls in Yellowstone’s back country. After seven years, they find more than 300 previously unknown waterfalls, including 25 greater than 100 feet in height.

The men later say they are astonished at how untracked and unmapped so much of Yellowstone remains. Try as they might to find some, there are no previous references to or notations about any of the falls they have found. In the late 20^th century, long after all corners of the United States had supposedly been mapped and explored, here are 300 sweet surprises.   

3. Little Things; One Great Thing

Yellowstone is the Babe Didrikson Zaharias of U.S. national parks. Zaharias, whose salad days were in the 1930s, was probably the greatest all-around athlete who ever lived, a superlative golfer, tennis ace and baseball player whose contemporaries said was superb at any sport she chose to play. Her legacy is not that she was the greatest who ever lived at any of the sports she practiced, but that she was great at all of them.

Like Zaharias, Yellowstone (with the exception of its geysers) is not the greatest national park in any of its parts. It’s deepest canyon cannot compare to the Grand Canyon, its waterfalls are not as high as Yosemite’s, its forests cannot match Olympic or Redwood’s groves, its lake is rivaled by Tahoe and Flathead, and its mountains are no match for Sequoia and King Canyon’s.

Yet, Yellowstone is the quintessential American landscape, all of its elements combining to turn many small things into one great thing. No other national park has its variety, and only a handful, most of them remote Alaskan parks, can match its sense of spaciousness. Most visitors to Yellowstone stick to the 96-mile central loop that takes them to such high points as Old Faithful geyser, Yellowstone Lake and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Yet the area circumscribed by that road is only a tenth of the park’s 3,500-square mile expanse. As they look out across Yellowstone’s wide vistas, visitors experience the reassuring thought that the land rolls on, protected, far beyond the horizon.

– Patrick Totty