yellowstone

Hey, guess what? A story on Yellowstone and the 20th anniversary of the devastating 1988 wildfires just moved on the wire. Check it out.

This is a picture that I took of some of the many burnt-out trees in the park. I’ve uploaded the rest of my photos (including this close-up of the same tree as the one in the center of this photo) to a publicly-accessible album on my Facebook page, so check it out if you’d like. There’s also video including this one of one of my campgrounds.

A few impressions of Yellowstone: It’s really beautiful. But with steam and water boiling up from the ground and whole forests of sorta eerie dead trees, all it would take would be a flock of vulctures to make the landscape look a little like hell.

People worry about the park being crowded, but it certainly didn’t seem that way to this Manhattanite. I mean: This is a really, really humungous park. It is 3,468 square miles, about 157 times the size of Manhattan or seven times the size of L.A. I was there for several days and never got into the northern half of the park. The area around Old Faithful was a bit packed — think Central Park on a busy summer day — but other than that I didn’t see that many people, especially once I got off on the backcountry trails. Most visitors never get past the “frontcountry,” the area near the boardwalks and visitors centers. (True story: after seeing Old Faithful I set off to look at some of the other geysers in the area, and began walking up a trail to a lookout a half-mile away. As I started walking I heard this well-fed (but not fat) mother tell her daughter of about 11, “Well, we’re not walking up there!” Why not, the daughter asked. “It says elevation rise, 200 feet!” Eesh.)

The nice thing about the visitors center areas were that I could get cell service, though. (As well as shower). I guess they have some low-rise cell towers at some of the various “villages” scattered through the park, although my signal petered out pretty quickly once I left them.

The backcountry was really gorgeous, although there were a ton of mosquitoes around Lake Shoshone; I was practically bathing in my Off! Here’s a video of one of my backcountry camping sites in a different area (sorta near Firehole River, not too far from Old Faithful). The backcountry sites are free, you just have to reserve ’em. And you have to be sure to hang your pack from a bear pole like this one while you sleep, so not to attract grizzlies!