Innholdsfortegnelse for MAY 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

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…

ACCESSIBLE TRAILS One of the park’s top trails for people with limited mobility begins at the fully accessible Old Faithful Inn and visitor center. The 1.5-mile hike-bike path, accessible to wheelchairs, leads to Morning Glory Pool. BICYCLING For the brief period between mid-March and mid-April, as Yellowstone’s roads thaw, cyclists have exclusive access to portions of them. For example, the route from the park’s West Entrance to Mammoth Hot Springs—thronged with vehicles in season—is reserved for nonmotorized traffic those few weeks. Once cars return, there are still paved and gravel trails designated for cyclists’ undisturbed exploration. FIELD TRIPS The Yellowstone Association Institute offers park visitors a variety of educational experiences. Naturalists can learn about the park’s wolves, raptors, and bison; history buffs can learn about the horse-and-buggy days. The park’s…

‘ Nothing ever conceived by human art could equal the peculiar vividness and delicacy of coloring of these remarkable prismatic springs,’ wrote Ferdinand Hayden, leader of an early expedition to Yellowstone. It was the landscape and especially the hot springs, more than the wildlife, that moved Congress to set the land aside as a park. Yet the colored springs conceal their own extreme wildlife—microbes that hint at what might live on other, harsher planets. As one of the last relatively unspoiled temperate ecosystems on Earth, Yellowstone offers a unique opportunity for scientists. Organisms from microbes to wolves can be studied in their natural habitats, mostly free from human contact. Elevation Drawn from the map at left, the cross section below highlights a segment of Greater Yellowstone’s diverse topography. The 72-mile…

Capacity Crowds— Bigger Footprint In 2015 the number of visitors to Yellowstone—including repeats— exceeded four million for the first time. Though the top destination remains Old Faithful, a recent study suggests visitors would be willing to pay significantly more to enter the park if they could count on seeing not just a geyser but also a bear along the road. Traffic jams generated by bear sightings can sometimes stretch for miles. All those visitors, to Grand Teton National Park as well as Yellowstone, pump an estimated billion dollars into the local economy. Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk worries that the crowds, increasingly international, need to understand more about such matters as safe interaction with wildlife. And he worries about youth. “We have to meet them where they live,” he says. Millennials…

The Hoof Is the Heart In spring hoofbeats return to the mountains of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Pronghorn, North America’s land-speed champions, migrate more than a hundred miles from the Green River Valley into Grand Teton National Park. Mule deer mosey 150 miles north from the Red Desert Basin to the mountains around Hoback Basin, just south of the park. Herds of elk stream into Yellowstone Park along a web of migration routes; in October they fan back out again. Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain, with its thunderous migrations, comes to mind—except these are happening in the western United States, in an expanding modern economy. And that’s the challenge. The circulation of the ungulates is like a heartbeat that pumps life into the ecosystem and “gives animation to the spirit of this…

A Region in Transition You can still catch a rodeo in the region around Yellowstone. Ranchers still gather at saloons to two-step on Saturday night. And the sight of a pickup with a dog and a rifle in the back may never go away. But the economy and culture of the region are changing fast. “Greater Yellowstone’s growth is all about the ‘new economy,’ ” says Randy Carpenter of Future West, a conservation organization in Bozeman. “The Old West economies, defined by mining, forestry, and ranching, are stagnating, while Bozeman and Jackson are growing like weeds.” For the “lifestyle pilgrims” moving to those boomtowns, remoteness is no longer an obstacle; they can telecommute in the morning and fly-fish, hunt, or ski in the afternoon. “People want to live and recreate…

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…

Public awareness campaigns and low gas prices encouraged more than four million visits—a record number—to Yellowstone in 2015. “Last year’s visitation tested the capacity of Yellowstone National Park,” says Park Superintendent Dan Wenk. People were caught in miles-long traffic jams, and rangers had to contend with more crowding issues like human-wildlife encounters. But limiting visitors to Yellowstone would be controversial, in part because it and neighboring Grand Teton fuel the region’s economy. This year federal funding will increase to deal with the visitor influx.…

DIORAMA IN BLOOD On August 7, 2015, in Yellowstone National Park, a ranger found the chewed-upon body of a man near a hiking trail not far from one of the park’s largest hotels. The deceased was soon identified as Lance Crosby, 63 years old, from Billings, Montana. He had worked seasonally as a nurse at a medical clinic in the park and been reported missing by co-workers that morning. Investigation revealed that Crosby was hiking alone on the previous day, without bear spray, and ran afoul of a female grizzly with two cubs. The sow, after killing and partially eating him (not necessarily in that order), and allowing the cubs to eat too, cached his remains beneath dirt and pine duff, as grizzlies do when they intend to reclaim a…

LOOK AT THOSE EYES In 1995 and 1996, some 70 years after Yellowstone’s last wolf howled its last howl, 31 wolves from western Canada were released from acclimation pens across the park. They took hold of the landscape, they proliferated, they thrived in the park, and spread throughout the region. Another 35 wolves were released in central Idaho at about the same time. Twenty years later roughly 500 wolves inhabit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Thirteen hundred more live elsewhere in the northern Rockies, and the gray wolf—that’s the common name, although individuals vary in color from pale brindle to black—has been removed from endangered species listing in Idaho and Montana. Wolves can now be legally hunted and trapped there. (The Wyoming situation is more complicated.) Today about a hundred wolves,…

THE CREEPING CRISIS Dave Hallac stood in his office at the Yellowstone Center for Resources, the park body charged with science and resource management, in a rambling old clapboard building amid the formidable stone structures of Mammoth Hot Springs. A candid man with an oval face and thinning hair, Hallac was serving his last day as chief of the center—and head scientist at Yellowstone Park— before departing to a promotion elsewhere. His office had the look of farewell when I found him there, between final tasks, his shelves and desk already bare, his books and reports and photographs packed into boxes awaiting removal. He closed the door, which was a little unusual on that open-doored corridor, and as we sat amid the boxes, he repeated to me something he had…

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,…

“The Yellowstone is a wild-flower garden.” What American naturalist Enos Mills wrote in his 1917 book on national parks remains true a century later: From spring through autumn, Yellowstone’s meadows and hillsides host a rainbow of native wildflower species. The graphic above shows the spectrum and the blooming seasons of a hundred of the park’s most common and colorful flowers. All this beauty might tempt visitors, but picking blooms is illegal, says Yellowstone botanist Heidi Anderson. Protecting native flowers is a priority because the plants are an important nutrition source for wild animals, and some flower varieties are so rare that they’re not found anywhere else in the world. Want to help preserve them? Don’t drive or tread on any patches of green in the park, Anderson suggests. And before…

Before Thomas Moran arrived, Yellowstone in the popular imagination was a harsh, wild place pocked with hellish geysers. After the painter’s work was finished, Yellowstone was established as a national park and marketed as a wonderland. In 1871 Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson had joined the first U.S. government survey of the region. For two weeks Moran filled a sketchbook with the landscape’s most stunning sights. The survey results, Jackson’s photos, and Moran’s watercolors—the first color renderings of the area—were presented to Congress that fall. “The photographs were proof that what the artist was showing really existed,” says Eleanor Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In March 1872 lawmakers officially made Yellowstone a national park, the world’s first. By April, Moran had transformed some of his…

An Awesome Past, a Looming Presence If you were to look only at Yellowstone’s terraces of cool travertine (left) or at the geysers and hot springs that persuaded Congress to create the park, you’d get a misleadingly peaceful impression. It takes a geologist to reveal the hidden reality—to summon, for instance, the ghosts of the jagged, 12,000-foot, Teton-like peaks you would have seen if you’d stood in the park three million years ago. “They’re gone because an eruption 2.1 million years ago blew them to smithereens,” says Robert Smith of the University of Utah. Another massive eruption followed 640,000 years ago. It’s not over, Smith says: The Yellowstone supervolcano is “living, breathing, shaking, baking.” Seismometers in the park record 1,000 to 3,000 earthquakes a year. Most are too small to…

The Struggle Has Been Worth It In the early 20th century cougars and wolves were both eliminated from Yellowstone (and wolves were practically eradicated from the lower 48 states). Now both have returned: cougars on their own, wolves reintroduced from Canada by the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grizzlies never vanished, but there were times in the 1970s and ’80s when the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem held as few as perhaps 140 and the population seemed doomed, says Chris Servheen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official who coordinates grizzly recovery. Today 700 to 1,000 live there, including these two hulks tangling near the Firehole River. What saved the grizzlies, says Servheen, was the vigilance of believers—and the federal protection that came when they were listed as…

A Disease Becomes a Stigma Among the obstacles to allowing Yellowstone bison to migrate freely in and out of the park, as they would do naturally, is that some exhibit evidence of exposure to brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can cause pregnant cows to abort their calves. Cattle ranchers in Montana worry that their own herds, now disease free, could become infected if they mixed with Yellowstone bison on public grazing lands. The irony is that bison originally contracted brucellosis from domestic cattle—but in the past 30 years there have been no documented cases of Yellowstone bison directly transmitting the disease back to livestock. After decades of conflict over the issue, Governor Steve Bullock announced in December that Montana would allow about 600 bison to migrate out of the park…

Bathe With the Bears Get a rare glimpse—caught by hidden cameras— of grizzlies and black bears cooling off in a remote Yellowstone pool. Roam Free Experience the park from a different perspective, where animal migrations push through boundaries and fences don’t apply. Follow the Elk GPS information from radio-collared elk was used to map seasonal migrations of nine herds to and from the Yellowstone high country. Relive an Attack Rancher Nic Patrick shares the story of the grizzly attack he survived near his Cody, Wyoming, home. Explore the Supervolcano When glacial waters flowing under ancient rocks get close to reservoirs of magma, the heat powers geysers, including Old Faithful. Be the Bear Track hungry bears across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and see what video collars reveal about these omnivores’ diet.…