Yellowstone National Park turns 150 years old this month — a milestone truly worth celebrating.
When Westerners think of Yellowstone, probably what comes to mind are its grizzlies, exploding geysers, wolf packs and elk traffic jams, not to mention bubbling, iridescent hot pools that attract swarms of visitors from all over the world. The park is a jewel of the Northern Rockies, but to this journalist who has covered its stories for 35 years, the real miracle of Yellowstone is its intricate world of wildlife.
Yet any discussion of wildlife here comes wrapped in a paradox. Despite COVID-19 — or perhaps because of it — in 2021, Yellowstone smashed monthly, seasonal and annual visitation records, notching nearly 4.9 million visits. That is 860,000 more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic struck. This year, given social media and marketing aimed at the park’s 150th anniversary, it’s possible that Yellowstone could surpass the 5 million mark.
Even if it doesn’t hit that milestone, many locals who have visited the park for decades say its roads and its capacity for serving visitors are already overwhelmed, as are many public facilities in gateway towns in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Although the crushing visitation happens on a tiny percent of parkland, all these curious tourists create waves of troubling ripple effects.
Yellowstone is neither a standalone island nor a drive-through zoo. It is unique, the last ecosystem in the “Lower 48” to contain all of the original mammal species that were on the landscape before Europeans arrived on the continent.
Now, based on the diversity and health of its wildlife populations, Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1872, when poachers, bounty hunters and market hunters nearly wiped out all wildlife in the country.