When you enter Yellowstone from the north, the first area you encounter is Mammoth Hot Springs. A century and more ago (not long after Yellowstone was designated our first National Park), an army encampment was established at Mammoth to protect the park from our more entrepreneurial (and less scrupulous) citizens. Now the soldiers are gone and the encampment has grown into a small village, with a lodge (one of four in the park), a ranger station and museum, and a restaurant, in addition to several park administration buildings. My knowledge of Yellowstone was limited to the twin images of geysers and grizzlies. So I stopped by the ranger station to take quick tour of the museum and collect some brochures.
Yellowstone covers 2.2 million acres of land, almost 3500 square miles, roughly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The park lies mostly in northwest Wyoming, but spills over into both Montana and Idaho.Yellowstone was our first national park, dedicated by President Ulysses S.Grant in 1872. Nearly three million people visit Yellowstone each year.
Bestriding the juncture of several fault lines, Yellowstone is the most active geothermal area in the world. Thousands of tiny earthquakes rattle the area each year, most imperceptible to humans. Major volcanic eruptions have occurred at Yellowstone in the past, a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens explosion.
These titanic Yellowstone eruptions emit pyroclastic flows,searing tsunamis of gas and rock surging at a hundred plus miles an hour with enough molten rock to cover the entire US. The last eruption created an enormous caldera (derived from the Spanish word for cauldron), a geologic feature that underlies much of the current park. Scientists have determined that these major eruptions occur roughly every 600,000 years and the next one is just about due.
Treading a touch more softly on the uncertain earth, I left the museum and immediately encountered two large animals grazing calmly on the lawn. They weren’t deer or antelope this time; they were elk, the most common large mammal in Yellowstone and regular residents of Mammoth Hot Springs. The celebrity pair munched the lawn, unconcerned by the human paparazzi circling them.
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