About six weeks ago, I was here:
The Tetons as a rainstorm rolled in, Grand Teton National Park
And also here, and here, and here:
Top to bottom: Castle Geyser, the Morning Glory Pool, a view of Yellowstone Lake
During the height of the pandemic, I turned into a bit of a national park nerd. I live at the nexus of so many parks and monuments that it became an easy outdoor alternative to… well, anything indoors and not socially distanced. The National Park Service even makes a passport you can get stamped at over 400 parks! (Nerrrrrrrrrd.) So I’d putter around to all the historic spots in the DC metro area, plus a few outside it, to collect my little stamps and go “ooh, aah” at the scenery.
When 2022 rolled around – the 150th anniversary of the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the U.S. – of course I had to go.
…Except Mother Nature had other ideas, and literally a week before I was set to head west for ten days, massive floods decimated the park. So when 2023 rolled around, I made a second attempt – throwing in a road trip from Denver to West Yellowstone so I could stop at a few other parks along the way – because BY GOD I WAS GONNA SEE SOME BISON.
It was exactly what I needed.
I got to see a lot of crows and elk, too! (And once, a moose, but I couldn’t pull over for a picture in time.)
I grew up with a literal state park in my backyard, so forests and wilderness have always been my happy place. I still think “forest bathing” is a ridiculous phrase, but there’s some truth to it, y’know? I breathe easier when I’m surrounded by trees and green things. And I’m fascinated by the interplay between humanity and nature when we try to impose ourselves on places like this.
Yellowstone is the national park everybody goes to; I saw literal busloads of tourists unload at the Grand Prismatic Spring, and the area around Old Faithful felt like being at Disney World for all the crowds and restaurants. Growing up where I did gave me a healthy understanding of, and respect for, how badly nature can fuck you up if given half a chance. You don’t touch the snakes with triangle-shaped heads, you don’t eat the berries if you can’t 100% identify them, and if you see a raccoon acting weird in the middle of the day, you go get Mom so she can call Animal Control about the rabid critter in the backyard. But that isn’t the case for a lot of folks. And while I didn’t see anything super-egregious that would’ve earned someone a spot on Tourons of Yellowstone, going to the biggest attractions made it very clear how many people viewed Yellowstone as a theme park, not a national park. How much they expected a semi-wild place to be 100% clean and orderly and sanitized, just because they didn’t have a lot of experience with nature as a whole – or because they don’t believe they need to give it the respect it deserves.
Also, you’re literally on top of a massive volcano, which can be easy to forget until you visit Mammoth Hot Springs and it’s like you stepped onto the surface of the moon.
(I could insert a whole paragraph here about how this exact topic is part of why last year’s Nope stuck with me for so long, but somebody on Tumblr already wrote up a bit of meta about it, so I don’t have to.)
Which is not to say I didn’t have my own dumbass moments! I know nature, but despite an eight-month stint in Denver fifteen years ago, I don’t know altitude too well, and altitude not-so-gently reminded me that a steep switchback at 8000 ft will fuck you up as much as those giant fluffy cows they keep telling you not to pet. It was worth it to see the waterfalls at the canyon, but whew.
Top: the Lower Falls at Yellowstone. Bottom: the view as your sea-level-living ass sits gasping for breath a quarter of the way up the switchback that takes you to the top of the Lower Falls.
Anyway, if you’re also interested in how nature and humans collide, I cannot recommend Mary Roach’s Fuzz enough; I’ve also added Death in Yellowstone to my TBR, because hearing about how those beautiful hot springs have literally dissolved people who fell in is exactly the kind of morbidly fascinating stuff I enjoy. I promise to report back once I’ve finished it, gruesome details and all.