Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park Read Online Free

SOME INTERACTION BETWEEN wildlife and visitors along the Grand Loop, which will eventually sweep you past the entrance to Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin. Roger and Carol Anderson, in
A Ranger’s Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes,
say that “geologically speaking, the Upper Basin is one of the most extraordinary places on earth.” It contains over 25 percent of the world’s geysers.
    The basin is worth looking at through the eyes of Nathaniel Langford, a member of the 1870 Washburn expedition to the park: “We had within a distance of fifty miles seen what we believed to be the greatest wonders of the continent.” But they hadn’t yet seen Old Faithful. “Judge then,” Langford wrote, “our astonishment on entering this basin, to see, at no great distance before us, an immense body of sparkling water, projected suddenly and with terrific force into the air.” Langford and his colleagues found “a thousand hot springs of various sizes and character.”
    It was because of these features that the U. S. Congress established the world’s first national park in Yellowstone in 1872. This has been called “the best idea America ever had.” The quote is attributed to several different persons, as great quotes often are. The congressional act resolved that geysers and geothermal features “in the region of the headwaters of the Yellowstone River” should be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale” and “set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
    It is interesting to note that the delegate to Congress from what was then the Montana Territory felt it necessary to draw the bill up in a hurry. We tend to think that it must have been an easy decision to set aside some remote western land that few people even knew about, but, incredibly, even back then commercial pressures were building. The Honorable William H. Claggett, the Montana delegate, later wrote that in the fall of 1870 he knew of two men from the nearby town of Deer Lodge who’d gone into the Firehole Basin, near several of the most spectacular geyser basins, and “cut a large number of poles, intending to come back next summer and fence in the tract of land containing the principal geysers and hold possession for speculative purposes.”
    There wasn’t really any time to lose.
    The idea of Yellowstone National Park may have first been proposed in 1865 by acting territorial governor Thomas Meagher. But the most compelling story is one told by Nathaniel Langford. On September 19, 1870, Washburn’s exploratory party was camped where the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers join. Some expedition members proposed to take up plots of land at the prominent points of interest, whereupon another member, Cornelius Hedges, said there ought to be no private ownership and that the whole area ought to be set aside as a national park.
    Retired park historian Aubrey Haines found no mention of this momentous discussion—the best idea America ever had—in the diaries of any members of the expedition. Cornelius Hedges, for instance, wrote: “Mon. 19 . . . no fish in river. Grub getting very thin.”
    No, this was simply a good idea whose time had come. Yellowstone was the perfect location. While there were some hot springs in California, some bubbling mud pots in Italy, and a few geyser fields in Iceland and New Zealand, there was nothing on earth like Yellowstone. It contains ten thousand thermal features: more mud pots, fumaroles, and geysers than exist in all the rest of the earth combined. Sixty percent of the world’s geysers are concentrated in Yellowstone.
    But in the mid- to late 1800s, few educated people believed that such features existed anywhere.
    John Colter, who left the Lewis and Clark party (with permission), may have been the first Euro-American to set foot in what is now the park. That was in the winter of 1807–1808. His description of the thermal features was generally scoffed