Yellowstone: Miracle of water and wildlife

The desert is yellow, the woods are green, the sea is blue and the mesas at the Monument Valley are all red as blood. What colour could the Yellowstone National Park have been you will ask you when you on your way to this oldest of all north american National Parks and you see a lot of dying trees along the road. Is it this yellow like his name? Grey? Brown? Or something else?

Continuation of part 1:
Yellowstone - Where god paints his masterpiece

All these colors come from chemistry. For millions of years minerals have been deposited here, which have formed beautiful colorful terraces to this day. As the first Natives settled here over 11,000 years ago they must be think it was god himself who has take this landscape as his canvas.

Along millions of years the area wasn't spotted by white men. Around 1807 the trapper John Colter was probably the first european imigrant to see the area of today's national park. As he arrived the tribe of the Northern Shoshone could be found there and Blackfoot, Absarokee and Bannock occasionally roamed the Yellowstone area for hunting and fishing. At the Obsidian Cliff they found abundant obsidian rock from which they made cutting tools and weapons because they doesn’t have iron or steel.

The land of the fur hunters

John Colter returned to civilization in 1810, but his stories about a nature wonder around the Yellowstone River were irgnored. And the area was inaccessible, so it was not quickly settled by whites, but some fur hunters and prospectors ventured there, such as Warren Ferris in 1834 and Jim Bridger in 1857.

Their reports were also largely ignored, but in 1859 the geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden put together an expedition to get into the Yellowstone area. But he fails. For the first time ever the Folsom expedition of 1869 reach the target. And one year later the Washburn-Langford-Doane-expedition comes to look around the scene and gave the geyser Old Faithful its name.

It took not much time after the discovery and the park was founded in 1872. Today he is officially the oldest national park in the world and the home to bisons, bears, wolves and many other animals. YNP is the destination of more than 4 million visitors every year who are looking for the wild animals, the geysers, the colored hills and short or extensive hikes. they're coming in cars and busses, with hats and cameras and they are amazed at every step.

It's a real wonder: To see the wild animals that live here you don't have to go deep into the woods and creep up on quit soles. You only have to drive around the park and you will definitely spot bears, elks and bisons. Sometimes you come around a curve and infront of your car are a buffalo herd or at the embankment roars a bear. Be alert: at every point where other visitors park their cars has something worth seeing!

Hole spits into the sky

The lakes, waterfalls and geothermal springs are of course also worthwhile. The park is home to 62 percent of the world's hot springs, so you haven`t a chance to see them all.

But of the more than 300 geysers, the "Old Faithful" is particularly popular, as it spits out its water with unusual regularity at intervals of currently about 60 to 90 minutes. You have to wait at most für one oder 1,5 hour to see how the dark hole spits into the sky. Since its official discovery in 1870 it has erupted more than a million times. With the Steamboat Geyser, 30 miles away, the park is also home to the largest active geyser in the world.

Here one natural spectacle really chases the next ant everywhere a bunch of tourists is waiting for something to happen. Steam breaks out, a buffalo comes along, an elk crosses the street and a ranger regulates the traffic around him.

Here are a few more stories about travelling the United States: Crater Lake: Ol' blue eyes of mother earth

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