Yellowstone National Park has announced a dedication ceremony for the Yellowstone forever stamp.
The ceremony will take place Thursday, June 2 at 9 a.m. in the Map Room at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. The program includes Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Dan Wenk, Yellowstone National Park Assistant Superintendent Steve Iobst, Yellowstone National Park Postmaster Jamie Dalin, and USPS Colorado/Wyoming District Manager Selwyn Epperson.
The dedication ceremony will coincide with the stamp’s availability for purchase at post offices around the nation.
Yellowstone was picked as one of 16 national parks to be commemorated with a “forever” stamp.
We previously reported that the U.S. Postal Service had chosen Yellowstone as its sixteenth and final stamp. We also reported that the image chosen to represent the Park (a pair of bison in wintertime, silhouetted against mist and the rising sun) was from a Seattle, WA photographer named Art Wolfe, who shared his story of the shot with Park officials:
“Rising at dawn and braving the -30 F temperature I was able to catch the first rays of the morning sun,” he explained. “The bitter cold of a long winter’s night had left the animals encased in a mantle of thick frost. I had scouted the area the day before and had seen the herd of bison. They had bedded down there all night and now were standing and trying to shake off the cold as the sun came over the horizon. These are the serendipitous moments I wait for as a photographer. I shot this in the days of film, so I didn’t know until I got back to Seattle and had the film processed if I had been successful or not.”
Wolfe got the February 2000 shot using a Canon EOS-3, EF70-200mm lens set at f/16 for 1/250 sec. using Fujichrome Velvia film.
The stamps, of course, were announced in honor of the National Park Service centennial. Among the programs listed for Yellowstone include an August 25 concert headlined by Emmylou Harris and John Prine.