Y is for Yellowstone

9/27/2023

Back in February I asked you to give me topics to write about that would correspond to the alphabet. Sometimes several of you sent ideas for one letter and sometimes I wrote about all of them (I’s and S’s) Here we are at letter Y for which your suggestions are Yummy Food and Yawns. The word yawn absolutely makes me yawn; no way I could write about that - I would yawn for hours. I worked on Yummy Food but could only find a scolding voice about Americans eating too much sugar. Bah. True but not interesting.

So, I gave Y a go again. Y is for?

My brain immediately zipped to - Y is for Yellowstone National Park.

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First, why did it take our nation seventy years to officially notice this incredible place? The Lewis and Clark Voyage of Discovery was 1804-1806. When they were in what is now Idaho and Montana, native people said that if their goal was to explore they should really go south a hundred or so miles to see a place like no other.

Lewis and Clark said, “Nah, we’re good.”

Over the next seven decades a handful or mountain men, explorers, and military scouts contacted American officials to report a crazy gorgeous place. The officials all said “Yeah, sure. Boiling mud and fountains that shoot up out of the earth. Yep, nope. We’re busy right now.”

It wasn’t until 1870 that the Washburn Expedition explored the region that two years later became Yellowstone National Park. 

The Louisiana Purchase was completed in 1803. That was how the US obtained much of “the west” including Yellowstone. Native people talked about it to white explorers in 1804. We got around to officially checking it out in 1870.

This is nuts.

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My family went through Yellowstone in 1962 on our way to the Seattle World’s Fair. We camped one night in Yellowstone where I was too scared to sleep because of howling wolves. My dad, thinking I was asleep, whispered to my mom, “I don’t like this.” My dad had bivouacked for a year during WWII, following the front line up through Italy. And Yellowstone at night made him nervous.

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People have lived in the region for 11,000 years. Yellowstone National Park was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and also in the world.

Local settlers hated and ignored the park designation. Poaching was rampant, tens of thousands of animals continued to be hunted each year. People tried to build mines and exploit the land in all the ways European settlers do. In the 1880s and 90’s railroads began bringing some tourists. In 1894 Theodore Roosevelt and some other rich, powerful guys hiked and camped in Yellowstone. After they experienced its wild beauty, they lobbied for salaried rangers plus an army fort to provide more protection and infrastructure. During the Depression the Civil Conservation Corps built and rebuilt most of the camping grounds, roads, and buildings in the park.

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In 1974 Len drove himself in his 1966 Mustang to the University of Calgary. Being Len, he detoured several hundred miles out of his way to hike for three days by himself in Yellowstone’s backcountry. I did not know this until this morning. Yellowstone offers many surprises.

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The Yellowstone Caldera is the second largest volcanic system on earth. The only bigger caldera (the underground source of a volcano) is on Sumatra. The boiling magma under the park is estimated to be in a single chamber 37 miles long, 18 miles wide, and 3-7 miles deep. The current caldera was created by a cataclysm 640,000 years ago which was more than 1,000 times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Will it erupt again soon? Probably not. But if you don’t have enough to worry about today, feel free to think about it. https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano-eruption

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Len and I tried to take our kids on vacations every year. Not all those vacations worked out super well. I may have already mentioned the time we took them to southern Illinois. We got lost occasionally and may have slightly quarreled. Our station wagon broke and we lost a day getting it fixed. It was July in southern Illinois. When we finally made our way to a quaint old town along the Ohio River it was a morass of poverty where there wasn’t even a gas station to buy a candy bar. I could go on but you get the picture.

A few years later we took the kids to Yellowstone. We saw a lot of cool stuff along the way. We had a bit more money. After we finally made our way into Yellowstone we drove on the beautiful CCC highways that wend their way through the mountains and vistas of the park. We stopped at boiling mud pots. We saw Old Faithful. We saw cars pulled over along the Yellowstone River so we stopped, too, and got out to see what everyone was looking at.

A bear was swimming across the river.

One of our beloved but snarky kids commented, “Wow, this trip is working out for us!”

That night we stayed in a nice motel just outside the park. We left our windows open a crack. I was in bed reading when I heard wolves howling. I woke up Len because Yellowstone is just that wild and crazy and good.

Have you been to Yellowstone National Park? Did it work out for you?

https://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm

Kinda slow webcams from around the park: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm

This looks like a boring photo of boiling mud but it burbles so loudly that guys on the river a mile away heard it and came over to see what it was.