“Just when you think a scenic view cannot possibly get any better, you turn the next corner …”

Yellowstone has almost become a cliché. The name of a streaming series. A spin-off of a streaming series. A spin-off of a spin-off. A place notorious for bumper-to-bumper cars and crowds — people trying to take selfies with one-ton bison or a seven-foot moose.

Yet still, it stands. Undefeated. Visited every year by residents of all fifty states of countless countries. The crown jewel of this country.

In the Beginning

A long time coming

I recently visited Yellowstone for the first time at the age of sixty. Growing up in Texas, it was always a long drive I was never quite able to make — and all the stories about the crowds and the traffic made it easy to keep putting off.

After moving to Idaho, the calculus changed. Yellowstone became a reasonable drive: a little over four hundred miles. And having stepped away from the corporate world a couple of years ago, I could finally choose my own time to go. Maybe avoid the high season. Maybe sidestep the worst of the crowds.

I finally made that first visit recently. The drive itself, from Coeur d’Alene through the mountains and into the heart of Wyoming, was beautiful in its own right — a warm-up act for what was waiting.

Arrival

Nothing quite prepares you

Although I have now returned home, it will take some time to fully wrap my head around what I experienced. More than anything, I find myself more curious about Yellowstone — more eager to understand and study it — than I was before I went. Study not just the landscape or wildlife, but its history and how it became the national park it is today.

The park is immense in size, and it holds almost every type of terrain you can imagine — changing at every turn. Mountains. Valleys. Rivers. Lakes. Marshland. Steam rising out of the earth itself. It refuses to settle into one identity.