Tag Archives: Yellowstone

One of the joys of wandering through Yellowstone National Park is stumbling across one of its many unique gems. True, pools, basins, mud volcanoes, and geysers are everywhere in the park. They are what helped make Yellowstone America’s first National Park. In the next few weeks we’ll be taking inside looks at gems found not that far off the beaten path. Today we’ll look at one basin that is often overlooked when stacked against all the bigger, seemingly more active basins: West Thumb Basin.

[Wednesday, March 18, 2008] As of Monday, March 16, 1,098 bison have been shot or sent to slaughter as they attempted to leave Yellowstone Park, topping the old record from 1996-1997 of 1,084. The number may exceed 1,200 in the coming days, which will be approximately one quarter of the park bison population (estimated: 4,700 bison, 2007). For details click on the …

If you told your friends or family that you were going to spend some of your vacation in an active volcano, they might think you were crazy. Yet every year more than three million people do exactly that. Yellowstone National Park is a volcano. Almost everything that is special in Yellowstone is the result of being one of the world’s largest active volcanoes, in fact, a super-volcano. Fortunately, Yellowstone’s current volcanic activity is limited to hot water and earthquakes -- no eruptions, flowing magma, or cataclysmic explosions. Yellowstone did the cataclysmic explosion thing about 640,000 years ago and is resting for a possible encore in some more tens of thousands of years. Yellowstone the volcano is not going to erupt anytime soon.