Photo by L. Kalbers
I had the great pleasure of visiting Yellowstone National Park this past August as part of my daughter’s “wedding week.” My immediate, and wonderfully expanding family (Deborah and I, Marian and Lee, and Joe and Marlee) met up in Gardiner, Montana and did some day hikes in the park. We then took a long, touristy drive down through the park, past the Tetons and through Jackson Hole on our way to Victor, Idaho for the wedding. It was a wonderful week (and a wonderful wedding, too, by the way!).
I have been trying to write about Yellowstone ever since but have had trouble narrowing down my focus to some describable aspects of the place. I wanted enough detail so that I could be ecologically accurate on whatever subject I settled on, but I also wanted to connect the pieces of all of the geology and ecology that surrounded us. Yellowstone is not an easily narrowed space or topic!
When you drive into the park you feel that something has changed around you. There is something unusual about the shapes of the surrounding mountains and the dimensions of the valleys that they surround. Yellowstone is not Montana or Wyoming, it is a world unto itself. It looks different and it feels different, too. As my new son-in-law, Lee, pointed out, many of the mountains we were driving past and hiking through were actually rims of ancient, volcanic calderas, and many of the rock formations we were looking at were, in fact, relics of the eruptions that created these calderas. The size and scope of Yellowstone Lake in the center of the park is also startling: this is a region of mountains, dry grasslands and fast rushing rivers! Where did this huge mass of still water come from, and why is it bubbling around its edges?
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
So even without “book knowledge” of the fifty mile wide mantle plume of hot magma that rises up under the park, or a visualization of the melted ball of crust that the magma is generating and sustaining just three miles beneath the Earth’s surface, you can see that Yellowstone is topographically different from almost any other place on Earth. When you then add the geysers and mud pots and hot springs and the rainbow array of colors that all of the dissolved minerals and all of the ancient, thermophilic bacteria generate (2/3 of the world’s geysers and half of all of the world’s geothermal features are found in Yellowstone!) you know, to quote Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, that this “isn’t Kansas anymore!”
National Park Service
The Yellowstone system has had three, “supervolcano” eruptions over the years: 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, and 630,000 years ago. These eruptions deposited thick blankets of ash many hundreds of miles away, caused extensive species’ deaths and maybe even extinctions and probably altered the climate of the entire Earth. Each eruption was thousands of times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, and they left behind the distinctive topography of present day park. The North America tectonic plate, on which Yellowstone sits, is moving toward the southwest at a rate of about one half an inch a year. The plate, then, is slowly dragging itself across the stationary mantle plume and has generated a whole series of “ancient Yellowstones” off to the south and west of the park’s present day location.
USGS, Wikimedia Commons
The volcanic history of Yellowstone can also be tactilely experienced! On one of our hikes in the north-central part of the park, there were large boulders and scattered pieces of obsidian (volcanic glass). We picked up some of the smaller pieces and could feel their incredibly smooth textures and could rub our thumbs across their sharp edges. Lee showed us on several medium-sized pieces etchings made by Native Americans hundreds of years before as they flaked off sharp arrow and spear points. These obsidian deposits were an important resource for weapons and tools of these hunter-gatherer peoples.
Obsidian can also be used to make surgical scalpels that have cutting edges that are sharper and more smoothly configured that even the finest metal blades. Cutting edges of only three nanometers are possible in these obsidian scalpels. Research has shown that surgical incisions with an obsidian blade generates less of an inflammatory response and initial scar tissue formation than the finest, metal scalpel. Possibly, someone will return to these obsidian cliffs to gather and flake these unique volcanic rocks to make the surgical tools of the future.
Photo by L. Drake
We saw so much in Yellowstone! Elk and bison, mule deer and bald eagles, moose (some of us saw moose, anyway, not everybody was that lucky), big-horned sheep, grizzly bears and wolves! Our wolves were out in a big, wet field about a quarter of a mile off of the roadway. They attracted a large, roadside crowd but seemed unconcerned by the growing audience or all of the attention and clamor. The two wolves played in ways familiar to anyone who has dogs: forelegs down, hind quarters up, circling, lunging and sparring with each other, tongues lolling out of their mouths, joy on their faces.
Photo by D. Sillman
The whole roadside traffic jam phenomena was amazing to experience. We frequently stopped to see people staring at an old log a hundred yards or so off the road (”we thought it was bear”), or at marmots emerging from their burrows (“we thought they were badgers”). One of our really great sightings, though, went unappreciated by the traffic: an isolated wetland full of sandhill cranes! As I wrote a couple of years ago, I had hoped to see the migrating sandhills down in New Mexico the March week that Deborah and I went down to see our daughter. The cranes were reported pausing near Albuquerque along the Rio Grande up to a day before we got there! We went out right away, but they had flown on north toward their summer, breeding territories (maybe to Yellowstone!). We got a wonderfully long look at them in Yellowstone, though, and Deborah took a number of great pictures. While we were looking at them, a couple of people drove by and stopped to check on what we were looking at. After we told them they said, “oh, just birds,” and drove on. How sad. What birds they were, indeed!