10 Surprising Facts About Yellowstone

The world’s oldest national park changed the way people think about nature, leaving an enduring legacy.

Yellowstone, the world’s first—and still most famous—national park, was established in 1872, the year the Brooklyn Bridge opened and President Ulysses S. Grant completed his first term in the White House (then called the Executive Mansion). That same year Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days and Thomas Edison perfected the duplex telegraph. But nothing changed the world like Yellowstone.

The new park taught people the value of restraint; that we save wild places so they might one day save us.   

Here are ten surprising facts about Yellowstone and its enduring legacy, from the new National Geographic book The National Parks: An Illustrated History.

1. Three years before the establishment of the park, when explorer David E. Folsom first sighted Yellowstone Lake in 1869, he called it “a scene of transcendental beauty.” Other wondrous features abounded, including canyons, thermal basins, and rock formations that “bore a strong resemblance to an old castle.” 

2. Folsom and his fellow explorer Charles W. Cook wrote an account of their expedition but had trouble selling it because magazine editors believed it too far-fetched.

3. When members of the 1870 Washburn-Doane Expedition to Yellowstone returned home thin and haggard, a witness said all but one appeared unfit to be seen on the street. Yet all the men talked excitedly, as if they’d discovered a children’s fairy tale.

4. Painter Thomas Moran of the 1871 Hayden Expedition sold his 7’x12’ canvas painting Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for $10,000—to Congress. It was the first landscape painting ever featured in the U.S. Senate lobby.

5. When Yellowstone National Park was established, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana were not yet states. As such, the park proposal received little opposition from regional governments and business interests. According to one far-sighted congressman, the park would be “a breathing place for the American lungs.”

6. At first, Americans thought one national park was enough. But Yellowstone had power. It became a source of national pride, and it attracted people from all over, creating its own economy. And so the idea grew into what we have today: thousands of national parks around the world.

7. In the beginning, Yellowstone was administered by the U.S. Army. Not until 1916 was the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) established. For decades the park was managed to increase visitor satisfaction, which included stocking non-native species of fish and killing out the wolves to increase the numbers of elk and other grazing animals (which the public wanted to see at the time).

8. In the early 1950s professor A. Starker Leopold (eldest son of author/ecologist Aldo Leopold) told his graduate students that given the steady evolution of science-based management on public lands, one day the NPS will let forest fires burn. None of his students believed him. Some 35 years later, in the summer of 1988, the NPS let the Yellowstone fires burn.

9. During that fiery summer, businesses in the park complained that letting the fires burn would disfigure and blacken the park and ruin tourism. It did not.

Yellowstone received more visitors in 1989 than in any other year that decade. Burned pine bark proved nutritious for elk. Grizzlies prospered. Aspen seedlings appeared everywhere. And over the next eight years white bark pine seedlings appeared in all 275 study plots monitored by the NPS.

10. The 1995 re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone (after a 70-year absence) proved to be a miracle, of sorts. “An ocean of elk and bison awaited them,” wrote Montana writer Rick Bass.

In snapping the park’s ecology back into balance, the wolves gave countless other species greater vitality. Elk no longer behaved like feedlot cattle. They were elk again, agile and alert. Streamside vegetation rebounded. Bright little songbirds returned.

“There is color in the land again,” wrote Bass. “Or perhaps it was always there, like a pigment in the soil, but was simply rendered imperceptible for awhile.”

executive 行政上的；职员官员
duplex 复式的，公寓上下相连的
restraint 抑制，自制
transcendental 卓越的
wondrous 不可思议的
canyon 峡谷
thermal 热的，温泉的
resemblance 类似
bear bore born 持有
   bear some relation [resemblance] to… 与…有关[类似]
   bear no reference to… 与…无关
   bear a part in something 与谋事有关系
expedition 探险，远征
far-fetched 牵强的，不着边际的    fetch 引出，捕获人心
haggard 憔悴的，野生的
unfit 不健康的，不适合的
canvas 油画
far-sighted 有远见的
satisfaction 充足，满足
elk 麋鹿
grazing 放牧，牧草地
disfigure 损毁，使变丑
bark 树皮
grizzly 北美洲灰熊
prosper 繁荣，成功
aspen 杨树
seedlings 苗
miracle 奇迹
bison 野牛
vitality 活力，生机
feedlot 饲育场
agile 机敏的
render 给与，表达
imperceptible 难以察觉的