National Geographic Magazine MAY 2016

The Yellowstone Issue One crisp June morning in Montana’s Big Sky country, I rode on horseback through the Centennial Valley with Bryan Ulring, manager of the J Bar L Ranch, a working cattle operation 45 miles west of Yellowstone National Park. The valley, which looks much as it did several hundred years ago when Native American hunters chased after herds of bison, is part of the migratory route for wildlife in the northern Rockies. As we rode, I asked Ulring to help me imagine the landscape as it might have looked on a day like this 200 years ago. There are bison—hundreds, perhaps thousands, moving in to graze on the tall, rough grass emerging from melting snow. Elk herds follow, eating the tender shoots. The hillsides are covered with mule…

nationalgeographic.com/3Q As soon as Caroline Byrd, 56, graduated from college, she drove her Volkswagen bus from California to Wyoming—and never looked back. From early days on a Forest Service trail crew to her current role as the Greater Yellowstone Coalition’s executive director, Byrd has held tight to one goal for the place she loves: keeping it wild. Why is the Yellowstone area so special? We have, in the heart of North America, this tremendous wild place that still works like nature can—and should. And while it is 20 million-plus acres, it’s still not big enough. We’ve got three hubs of protected wildlands in the northern Rockies—Greater Yellowstone, the Crown of the Continent, and the central Idaho wildlands—and the connective tissue between them is crucial. None of those, in the face…

natgeo.com/yellowstone DAVID QUAMMEN Contributing writer In a sense David Quammen had a 30-year head start on this reporting assignment: That’s how long he has lived in the Yellowstone area. A three-time National Magazine Award winner, Quammen is also the author of 15 books. He’ll add a 16th in August, when National Geographic Books publishes a volume featuring his writing in this issue. On this assignment Quammen traveled by ski, car, boat, small plane, helicopter, horse—and by foot, summiting Grand Teton peak (elevation 13,775 feet). He came away with concerns about “sprawl on private lands surrounding the parks—too many people wanting to own a piece of the wild rather than just visit it.” But he also feels hopeful because of the caliber of scientists charged with protecting Yellowstone and its wildlife,…

EDITOR’S NOTE ‘ Telling the story of a park as famous as Yellowstone means showing not just grand landscapes but also the daily life of the people and animals that live there.’ Jeanne Modderman, Your Shot photo editor Jess Danielle Roberts New York, New York Last August, close to midnight, Roberts positioned her tripod low and used a long exposure to capture the Milky Way reflected in Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring. “To me,” she says, “this photograph evokes a connection to our planet’s ancient past.”…

natgeo.com/yellowstone Before Yellowstone boasted more than a dozen restaurants, adventurous visitors had to hunt and fish for their dinners. But supply was limited: Nearly half the park’s lakes and streams lacked fish. To protect the scarce stock, park managers killed fish-eating wildlife, such as bears and pelicans. They also asked the U.S. Fish Commission to stock the waters “so that the pleasure seeker can enjoy fine fishing within a few rods of any hotel or camp.” Between 1881 and 1955, 310 million fish were planted in Yellowstone, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem’s equilibrium. Native fish—such as the Yellowstone cutthroat trout, a source of food for dozens of animals—were displaced, attacked, and bastardized by non-native species. Today the ethos of that early era has flipped: The priority is on protecting the…

Yellowstone is a great refuge not just for large, charismatic creatures but also for microscopic ones. Its 10,000 hydrothermal features—steamy vents, sulfurous mud pots, hot springs (like the one below)—support a broad diversity of microbes. Among them, unusual creatures that microbiologists call extremophiles, which have figured in significant scientific discoveries. In 1965 Thomas Brock noticed “pink gelatinous masses of material, obviously biological, at surprisingly high temperatures” in Octopus Spring. These stringy organisms were growing at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, an astonishing feat, at a time when bacterial life was thought impossible above 140. One year later Brock returned with a student named Hudson Freeze, and together they collected a different organism, a yellowish, heat-loving bug that Brock named Thermus aquaticus (enlarged view this page). Culturing T. aquaticus yielded a DNA-copying enzyme…