Yellowstone National Park is so big and so rich in natural wonders that it would be too long to describe everything. The best, after having spent nearly seven days in the park, is to list the most memorable features, the ones that come to mind first when Yellowstone is pronounced.
Yellowstone is the home of the buffalo. They are everywhere, on the fields, on the trails, on the road and even in the forest. They cross the road, take their time and create traffic jams in the park. Many of them roam the fields of Hayden Valley, a few miles from the road and its tourists. In the valley the flat fields stretch for miles in every direction. The Mary Mountain trail goes on the edge of the fields, not far from the forest. I counted more than 300 buffaloes. In the far distance, a herd was galloping down the hill.
Yellowstone is a scarred forest land. Fir and pine trees make up most of the forests. A wildfire in 1988, triggered by lightning, burnt one third of the park. Today, the bare trunks still stand up while new young pines are growing up, giving a very strange landscape. In some places, downed trunks pile on one another as far as the eye can see. I felt like I was in the middle of a giant pick-up sticks game.
Yellowstone is a wildlife heaven. Animals are protected, so they are not afraid of people and usually don’t care for people. Buffaloes, elks, deer, coyotes can be approached as much as safety can permit. We saw two coyotes hunting in Hayden Valley, they were not bothered by us hiking close to them. Squirrels and chipmunks can be found in great numbers but they run away from the hiker. Osprey and bald eagles can be seen on top of some trees. One bald eagle was used to stand on the same tree day after day. It was easy to spot him and he got named “Jules” after a while.
Yellowstone is the home of the grizzly bear. However, after one week in the park, hiking up to 20 miles in the wild off the beaten path, we didn’t see any. We didn’t see any moose or any wolf either.
Yellowstone is one of the weirdest places on Earth with geysers, hot bubbling water steaming out from the ground, colored pools, boiling mud. The colors of the pools are just amazing and cover the complete rainbow. The biggest pool and most colorful is the Grand Prismatic Pool that needs to be admired from the air or from the top of nearby hills. To balance the beauty of colors, the sulfur mixed with the steam of boiling water makes the smell really nasty.
Yellowstone is the land of the yellow stone, found in the grand canyon of the Yellowstone River. The Firehole River, the Gibbon River, the Madison River, the Yellowstone River and many others flow over many waterfalls like Fairy Falls, Lower Falls, Mystic Falls, Tower Falls...
Yellowstone is magnificent because there are so many things to see, so many landscapes, so many animals, so many colored and bizarre geothermal features and you never know what you are going to discover behind the bend of the trail. The weather is also unpredictable, we had sunny skies, clouds, cold, hot, fog, rain, thunderstorms, hail in one single week of August.
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