Yellowstone is huge and attracts more than 3.5 million people, so it’s best to plan your visit carefully.
Of the five ways to enter Yellowstone National Park, the north-east gateway after the descent of Beartooth Mountain Pass surely must be the most exhilarating.
Yellowstone is huge; 8903 square kilometres, with most in Wyoming and 4 per cent in Montana and Idaho. As the oldest US national park and home to 1300 geysers, nine rivers, waterfalls, its own grand canyon and America’s greatest concentration of mammals in the “lower 48 states”, it’s understandably busy.The park, nature’s Disneyland, attracts more than 3.5 million people annually so I suggest a simple plan of attack: avoid the weekends and the high summer months.
My driver and long-time friend lives in Montana, so we plan to trip around her state and head back mid-week.Instantly I’m impressed with how humans and wildlife co-exist and how the thermal sites are so easy to visit, thanks to hundreds of kilometres of roads, excellent boardwalks and superb visitor centres.
Help was enlisted from the army, which set up Fort Yellowstone in 1886 and administered it until the National Park Service was established in 1918. Based at Mammoth Springs, the fort’s 36 remaining buildings comprise the park’s administrative headquarters and museum, and its lawns are home to a herd of wild elk.
We stop at Mammoth Hot Springs, one of the park’s highlights where a series of boardwalks wind past travertine terraces with names like Cleopatra and Minerva, formed when hot springs rise through calcium carbonate and deposit calcite. Not long afterwards, we spot a cinnamon bear, a subspecies of black bear, and two cubs gambolling in the long spring grasses; next we spy roan pronghorn sheep and sandhill cranes and their young, but no wolf.
From the canyon, we drive to Mud Volcano, another geothermal pocket with a wealth of sights, like Dragon’s Mouth Spring, where waves of hot water ebb and flow through a cavern producing a roaring sound. The path is flanked by Cooking Hillside where the trees have indeed been cooked by steam.
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