If he had sat much longer in the rocking chair on the porch of Roosevelt Lodge, Dan Wenk might have nodded off.
“I had a terrible night’s sleep,” he said. And it wasn’t because of a lumpy bed or too much caffeine.
“There was an elk outside of my house all night that was bugling,” he said of the noisy ritual during which a male elk tries to attract a female mate.
Instead of complaining about his lack of sleep, Wenk, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, appeared awestruck.
“You wake up, you listen, you turn over and you think, ‘God, it’s wonderful to be here,'” he said reverently.
Even after 10 years of living and working in the park, Wenk admits there’s plenty he still hasn’t seen. So it’s understandable when many visitors see only a snippet of the 3,500-square-mile park that covers parts of three states.
“A lot of people are on a schedule,” he said of those who witness an eruption of Old Faithful and the mighty plunge of the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and say they’ve “seen” the park. But there’s so much more to experience — so much more to astonish — for folks who make time to understand and appreciate this unique place.
Created by Congress on March 1, 1872, Yellowstone (www.nps.gov/yell), America’s first national park — the world’s, for that matter — is 144 years old. In contrast, the National Park Service, the government agency that now manages such lands, will turn 100 in August.
Whether hiking the boardwalks or driving the highways, the seething underworld escapes to the surface around every bend.
Two-thirds of Earth’s geysers are in Yellowstone. The tallest, Steamboat Geyser, vents with such force that it sends superheated water 300 feet into the air, more than 100 feet higher than Old Faithful’s record. But Steamboat’s show is unpredictable, while the other’s is, well, faithful. Therefore, it draws the crowds.
“We are expecting Old Faithful to erupt at 1:01, give or take 10 minutes,” ranger Tobin Bower informed visitors jockeying for space on the benches circling the geyser. He explained that the molten rock churning 3 miles beneath Yellowstone triggers as many as 3,000 earthquakes a year.
Although most of them aren’t strong enough to feel, the quakes relentlessly reshape the park’s hot springs, sulfur-laden streams and bubbling pots of mud. It’s no wonder that two centuries ago, people pooh-poohed the vivid descriptions shared by John Colter, Lewis and Clark’s scout, who stumbled across the otherworldly cauldrons in 1807. These days, many of those stunning sights are just a short walk from parking lots that overflow as frequently as some of the geysers.
“There’s no greater concentration of thermal features anywhere else,” Wenk said, “if you can take the time to sit and watch.”
Visitors who aren’t on a schedule don’t mind — in fact, they relish — what the park superintendent described as “buffalo jams,” those not-infrequent times when herds of buffalo decide to park themselves in the middle of the highway, creating long lines of stopped cars and RVs.
Yellowstone is teeming with wild critters, many of which aren’t shy about posing for photos. In addition to the buffalo and baying elk, there are large populations of grizzly bears, bighorn sheep and wolves.
“It’s probably the best wildlife display in the Lower 48,” Wenk said from his vantage point at Roosevelt Lodge, so named because Theodore Roosevelt once camped nearby.
“Whoa, we got a visitor down there,” a lodge worker interrupted as he pointed to a buffalo grazing a few yards away. “He’s a big guy.”
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Rangers regularly warn humans to keep their distance from the animals, which can charge without warning. Though uncommon, deadly encounters do occur.
Because of its concentration of wildlife, Lamar Valley, not far from Roosevelt Lodge, is the prime spot for viewing animals. It’s more than 50 miles north of the No. 1 attraction, Old Faithful, located in a much busier portion of the park.
From the picture-perfect geyser it’s another 40 miles, this time east, to the park’s oldest lodge. As the National Park Service observes its centennial, the Lake Yellowstone Hotel(www.yellowstonenationalparklodges.com) celebrates its 125th anniversary.
The historic hotel overlooking Yellowstone Lake was thoroughly renovated in 2014 at a price of $28 million. It cost a mere $46,000 to build in 1891.
Jay Jones is a freelancer.