The History of Yellowstone National Park

Podcast Transcript

Located in the state of Wyoming and a little bit of Montana and Idaho lies one of the greatest national parks on Earth: Yellowstone.

In the 19th century, Yellowstone was declared the first national park in the world. However, what makes Yellowstone special actually dates back millions of years.

The geologic circumstances that led to the creation of Yellowstone today make it one of the most visited parks in the world.

Learn more about Yellowstone, its history, and its possible future on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to visit Yellowstone, you know just how special of a place it is. If you haven’t yet been to Yellowstone, you still probably know enough about it to realize its significance.

To understand why Yellowstone is so special, you have to understand the geology behind its creation.

The thing that makes Yellowstone is what is known as a mantle plume or a hotspot.

The Earth is largely made up of three parts: the crust, the mantle, and the core. The crust is very thin and cool, whereas the mantle is very thick and hot.

For the most part, the mantle and the crust are separate. However, there are a few places on the planet where a hot mantle plume will come up and poke through the crust. This is known as a hot spot.

You are probably with other hot spots. When they occur in the ocean, they create a chain of islands as the oceanic tectonic plate passes over the hot spot. The two most famous ones are the Hawaiian Islands and the Canary Islands.

However, when it occurs over a continental tectonic plate, you obviously don’t get a chain of islands.

The mantle plume will melt the continental crust, and instead of a chain of volcanic islands, you just get a chain of volcanoes.

In the case of Yellowstone, this movement created a track of volcanic activity that stretches across southern Idaho, which is marked by the Snake River Plain.

The mantle plume has been roughly located under what is today Yellowstone for about 2 million years.

The Yellowstone volcano has erupted several times in the past and has done so catastrophically. The past Yellowstone eruptions have been so great that they have been classified on the volcanic explosivity index as an 8, the highest value possible. This classifies it as a supervolcano.

To give you an idea of how powerful an eruption that is, I’ve previously done episodes on the eruptions of Krakatoa and Mount Tambora in Indonesia. These were two of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded human history.

Krakatoa only registered a six, and Tambora registered a seven. The VEI is measured based on the matter that was ejected by the volcano, and each rank on the index is ten times larger than the number before it.

The most recent Yellowstone eruption was known as the Lava Creek Tuff, which took place 640,000 years ago. The Lava Creek Tuff was an enormous eruption. An estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers or 240 cubic miles of ejecta was expelled from the volcano.

This eruption created the Yellowstone caldera, which forms the heart of the park today.

Prior, similar eruptions took place 1.3 million years ago and 2.1 million years ago.

Since the last supervolcano eruption 640,000 years ago, there have been numerous smaller volcanic events. These include rhyolitic lava flows, which have filled parts of the caldera, and basaltic lava flows outside the caldera.

The heat of the mantle plume has been shaping the park and is responsible for creating the most well-known feature of the park today: geysers.

Geysers are geothermal features that periodically eject a column of hot water and steam into the air due to the underground buildup of pressure from superheated water. This occurs when water deep within the Earth is heated by magma, causing it to become pressurized and forcefully expelled through surface vents.

There are several places in the world where you can find geysers, including Iceland, Chile, New Zealand, and Russia. However, over half of the world’s geysers are located in Yellowstone National Park.

The best-known geyser in Yellowstone is Old Faithful. Old Faithful is known for its predictable eruptions, which occur approximately every 90 minutes and shoot water up to 180 feet into the air.

In addition to geysers, there are several other geothermal features in the park, including hot springs. The largest and best-known hot spring in the park is Grand Prismatic Spring. It is the third-largest hot spring in the world after Frying Pan Lake in New Zealand and Boiling Lake in Dominica.

It gets its name from the bright colors around the edges of the spring, which are the result of microbial mats.

The geologic wonders of Yellowstone don’t stop with the geothermal features. Within the park is also the Yellowstone River, on which is the very picturesque Yellowstone Falls.

Yellowstone Falls is the largest waterfall in the Rocky Mountains by volume, and at 308 feet, or 94 meters, it is twice the height of Niagara Falls.

Immediately downstream from the falls is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It is 24 miles or 39 kilometers long, about 1000 feet or 300 meters deep, and about a half mile or 800 meters wide.

It should come as no surprise that such a unique environment would have attracted humans.

The first evidence of a human presence in Yellowstone goes back about 11,000 years. Archaeological evidence, such as stone tools and other artifacts, indicates that Native American tribes used the area for hunting, fishing, and gathering.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, several tribes, including the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce, lived in or traveled through the Yellowstone region. The area was known for its thermal features, and many tribes had myths and legends about the geysers and hot springs.

The first recorded European to enter the Yellowstone area was John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who explored the region in 1807-1808. His descriptions of the geothermal features were initially met with skepticism and jokingly called “Colter’s Hell.”

The name Yellowstone is believed to have come from the Minnetaree Tribe. When French fur traders came to the region in the early 19th century, they asked the local people the name of the river, and they replied, “Mi tse a-da-zi.” This translates literally as “Rock Yellow River.”

The French translated it to “Roche Jaune,” which eventually became Yellowstone in English.

Subsequent explorers, including Jim Bridger and Osborne Russell, provided more accounts of Yellowstone’s wonders. These reports slowly gained credibility and sparked interest in further exploration.

One of the most significant expeditions was led by geologist Ferdinand Hayden. His expedition, which included photographer William Henry Jackson and artist Thomas Moran, documented the area’s geothermal features, wildlife, and landscapes. Their findings, images, and paintings were crucial in convincing Congress to preserve Yellowstone as a national park.

Based on the compelling reports from the Hayden Expedition, Congress passed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, and President Ulysses S Grant signed it into law on March 1, 1872, creating the world’s first national park.

When Yellowstone was established as a park, nothing like this had ever been done before in history. There was no other park they could use as a template.

So, the decision was made to put one of the only organizations they had to manage the park: the US Army.

The Army took control of the park’s management in 1886, and initially, given how few people lived or visited, there was little to do. Their primary concerns were poaching and vandalism.

Poaching was a serious problem. The naturalist George Bird Grinnell noted that during the winter of 1874–1875, no fewer than 3,000 bison, mule deer, and elk were killed in the park.

The Army eventually built Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth Hot Springs to house the soldiers.

One of the things the army did do was block access to Yellowstone to all the Native American tribes that had hunted and transited through the era since time immemorial.

The first train station to the park was built in 1883 in Livingston, Montana by the Northern Pacific Railroad. That year, a record 5,000 people visited the park.

By the early 20th century, Yellowstone was becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination.

In 1904, the Old Faithful Lodge opened within sight of the Old Faithful geyser. It was one of the first park hotels built in the National Park Service Rustic style. Its lobby is made entirely out of logs, and it has an 85-foot or 26-meter stone fireplace.

One of the challenges park administrators have always had was balancing the park’s needs. In 1914, Congress passed legislation ordering the eradication of wolves in the park to protect elk and bison.

Within a few decades, wolves were almost extinct in the park. While it did protect the large animals that people came to see, it also removed the apex predator from the park and imbalanced the ecosystem. This allowed more sick and weak animals to flourish, which otherwise would have been hunted down.

This move was also supported by ranchers neighboring the park who had their cattle killed by wolves.

Wolves weren’t reintroduced to Yellowstone until 1995.

Automobiles were first allowed in the area in 1915, but the area was not suited for them at the time. All of the roads were still dirt, and getting around in the park was difficult, but 1000 cars did enter the park that year.

In 1916, the park fell under the management of the newly created National Park Service.

The depression saw a drop in visitors and an explosion in construction. Much of the park’s infrastructure was initially built by the Civilian Conservation Corp during the period.

One of the biggest events to have happened in the park was the wildfires that took place in 1988.

The summer of 1988 saw the worst drought in the park’s history. Hundreds of fires broke out in the park, several of which merged to create massive fires.

For decades, the policy of the park service was to suppress all forest fires. This resulted in extremely thick underbrush to develop, which normally would have been burned away. Because there was so much fuel, the fires burned far hotter than they otherwise would have.

Western pine forests are designed to burn on a regular basis. However, when they burn as hot as the Yellowstone fires did, they can basically sterilize everything, making it difficult for life to return.

During my first visit to Yellowstone in 2005, we could still see the evidence of the fires that took place 17 years earlier. Almost nothing had grown back and it still looked like the fires had just taken place the year before.

Almost 150 years after it was established as a national park, Yellowstone has kept its claim of being the premier national park in the United States. Today, the park will get over 4 million visitors per year.

In 1978, when the very first UNESCO World Heritage sites were created, Yellowstone was in the inaugural group of sites along with the Galapagos Islands.

One issue that many fret about because there have been so many TV documentaries on the subject is whether Yellowstone could erupt as a supervolcano in the near future.

The odds of this happening are very, very low. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) calculated the annual probability of a large caldera-forming eruption at Yellowstone, which is estimated to be about 1 in 730,000, which is less than 0.00014%.

If there were volcanic activity in Yellowstone, it wouldn’t happen overnight. It would take years, most probably centuries, for the volcano to form, and much of the volcanic activity would be lower-level activity, not a supervolcano eruption.

So, a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption is something you can take off your list of things to worry about.

I’ve been to a lot of national parks all around the world. I’ve been to Kakadu, Kruger, Nahanni, and the Galapagos, and Yellowstone is right up there amongst the greatest national parks in the world. Not only is it one of the top locations in the world for geological features, but it is arguably the best place in North America to see megafauna.

All of these things make Yellowstone deserving of the title of the world’s first national park.