This park is stunning! Stunning, I tell you! Highlights for me were amazing views of rivers and lakes, mountains, waterfalls, steaming and spurting pools and geysers all over the place, and the great variety of flora and fauna. I love the park’s policy of forbidding visitors to pick the wildflowers. I also appreciated the sustainable, earth-friendly policies of the parks, lodges, and local businesses. We even had a divided garbage receptacle in our lodge room, separating recyclables from compostables from landfill things.
Being this close to nature reminds us how fragile the ecology is. Signs posted near some of the sulphurous mud volcanoes told how they used to spurt out high streams like Old Faithful, but because of recent earthquakes, they only burble and boil. When we were in the Badlands of South Dakota, we were told that they didn’t exist 500,000 years ago and probably won’t exist in another 500,000–they are eroded at the rate of about one inch every year. In Yellowstone, we saw majestic forests of different sorts of pine trees, then whole fields that had been burnt, as well as combinations thereof, where new growth was regenerating among old and burnt trees.