93 Fun Facts About Yellowstone

Which California park, given to the state in 1864, was Congress's model for Yellowstone?

Yosemite went to California as a state park in 1864; Yellowstone lay in territories, with no state to take it, which may be why it became the first national park instead.

Which U.S. President signed the act that established Yellowstone as a national park?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the act on March 1, 1872, closing the land to settlement and sale, a break from the usual policy of passing public land into private hands.

Approximately 96 percent of Yellowstone National Park's land area lies within which US state?

Wyoming holds about 96 percent of the park, yet the park is older than the state: Wyoming was a territory in 1872 and joined the Union only in 1890.

Which cartoon bear raids picnic baskets in Jellystone Park, a spoof of Yellowstone?

Yogi Bear arrived on television in 1958, when real Yellowstone bears still begged for food along the roads; the park later stamped out feeding, and roadside bears became rare.

What kind of volcanic system underlies Yellowstone National Park?

Yellowstone sits on a supervolcano whose three giant eruptions shaped the region, yet its most recent eruption of any kind was a lava flow about 70,000 years ago.

Which Yellowstone feature is the world's third-largest of its kind, behind Frying Pan Lake and Boiling Lake?

Grand Prismatic Spring was named in 1871 for its rainbow rings; its centre looks deep blue because sunlight entering deep, clear water has its blue light scattered back the most.

Yellowstone holds over half the world's geysers, a word taken from Geysir in which country?

Iceland's Geysir, whose name comes from an Old Norse word for 'to gush', named every geyser on Earth; it now erupts only rarely, while Yellowstone has more than 500 active ones.

Harry Yount, hired in 1880 to stop poaching in Yellowstone, is remembered as the first what?

National park ranger is the title history gave him, though Yount quit after 14 months, reporting that one gamekeeper was not enough and urging a small police force instead.

The return of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 is often cited as an example of which ecological effect?

Trophic cascade is the term: with wolves back, elk numbers fell and willows and aspen regrew in places, though scientists still argue over how much of that the wolves caused.

What is the highest point in Yellowstone National Park?

Eagle Peak, on the park's remote southeastern boundary, tops 11,350 feet; it stands in roadless backcountry, so the park's highest summit is one that few visitors ever reach.

Which Yellowstone feature is a broad terraced hillside of travertine next to Fort Yellowstone?

Mammoth Hot Springs is built of travertine: hot water rising through limestone dissolves it, then lays the mineral down again at the surface, adding to the terraces as it cools.

Which organization ran Yellowstone for about 30 years from 1886, before the National Park Service took over?

The U.S. Army was called in after Congress refused to fund the park's civilian managers in 1886; cavalry troopers then patrolled against poachers and vandals for three decades.

Which island group joined Yellowstone among the first twelve World Heritage Sites in 1978?

The Galápagos and Yellowstone both made UNESCO's first list of twelve in 1978, and both later spent years on its 'in danger' register before being cleared.

Why does water boil at about 199°F rather than 212°F in Yellowstone's geyser basins?

Lower air pressure is the reason: most of the park sits on a plateau around 8,000 feet up, where thinner air lets water boil about 13 degrees sooner than at sea level.

What finally halted the 1988 fires that burned about a third of Yellowstone?

Snowfall, a quarter of an inch on September 11, did what thousands of firefighters and $120 million could not, arriving with rain and colder weather to stop the fires' advance.

Which tree, the most common in Yellowstone, bears some cones that stay sealed until the heat of a fire opens them?

Lodgepole pine makes up about 80 percent of the park's forest; resin seals some of its cones for years, until a fire's heat melts it and frees the seeds.

What did the land above Yellowstone's magma chamber do once a giant eruption emptied it?

It collapsed inward more than 600,000 years ago, forming the Yellowstone Caldera; lava flows have since filled much of it in, burying parts of the rim.

What gives Yellowstone's largest hot spring its rainbow rings of red, orange, yellow and green?

Heat-loving microbes grow in mats around the pool, and different kinds thrive at different temperatures, so each ring of colour marks a band of cooler water farther from the centre.

Which of these mountain ranges forms the eastern boundary of Yellowstone National Park?

The Absaroka Range walls in the park's east side, so the road from the East Entrance has to climb over a high mountain pass, which snow closes to cars for about half the year.

At nearly 3,500 square miles, Yellowstone is larger than either of which two US states?

Rhode Island and Delaware are the only states smaller than the park; by land area, the two of them together would still fit inside its borders.

Which fish-eating raptor builds stick nests on the rock pinnacles of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone?

Ospreys build their stick nests on the canyon's pinnacles and live almost entirely on fish; their numbers crashed in the DDT era and rebounded once the pesticide was banned.

Nathaniel Langford ran Yellowstone as its first superintendent for five years without ever being given what?

A salary was never voted by Congress, so Langford had to earn his living elsewhere and entered the park only twice in his five years in charge.

Roughly how many waterfalls at least 15 feet high does Yellowstone contain?

About 290 waterfalls of 15 feet or more are counted in the park; the best known stand where the Yellowstone River runs off hard lava onto softer rock, which wears away faster and leaves a drop.

Which Yellowstone feature is the world’s tallest active geyser, throwing water 300 to 400 feet?

Steamboat can throw water more than 300 feet, but nobody can say when: gaps between its major eruptions have run from three days to 50 years, and it burst back into frequent action in 2018.

Which biome is the most widespread in Yellowstone National Park?

Subalpine forest is the most abundant biome because so much of the park lies on a high plateau, around 8,000 feet above sea level, where cold-hardy conifers do best.

Yellowstone's largest eruption dwarfed which volcano's 1980 blast thousands of times over?

Mount St. Helens is the usual yardstick: the first of Yellowstone's three giant eruptions, about 2.1 million years ago, threw out thousands of times as much material, and its ash fell far across the central United States.

Yellowstone has over 10,000 hydrothermal features; where does the water that feeds them come from?

Rain and snowmelt seep deep into the rock, are superheated by the magma system below, and rise again as the hot springs, geysers and steam vents of the park.

Which president signed the Lacey Act of 1894, protecting Yellowstone's wildlife?

Grover Cleveland signed the act in May 1894, early in his second term, weeks after a poaching scandal inside the park had been written up in the national press.

Which tectonic plate has been drifting southwest over the stationary Yellowstone hotspot?

The North American Plate drifts southwest over the fixed plume, so a trail of older, extinct calderas runs back across the Snake River Plain toward Nevada and Oregon.

Which Yellowstone valley, along the river of the same name, is the best-known place to see grizzlies and wolves?

Lamar Valley is often called America's Serengeti for its herds and predators; the wolves brought back in 1995 were first held in pens at three sites along the valley.

Water leaving Yellowstone Lake travels hundreds of miles down the Yellowstone River before joining which river?

The Missouri River receives it in North Dakota, and at that meeting the Yellowstone is actually the larger of the two rivers.

The 308-foot Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River stand taller than which famous waterfall?

Niagara Falls is far wider and carries far more water, but the Lower Falls stand well over 100 feet taller and are far less steady, their flow swelling more than tenfold between autumn and the spring snowmelt.

Which 1871 expedition's report and pictures convinced Congress to create Yellowstone?

The Hayden Geological Survey's leader told Congress that 'vandals who are now waiting' would 'in a single season despoil, beyond recovery' these curiosities unless the land was set aside at once.

What gives the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone its yellow and red walls?

Rusting iron is the cause: hot water once 'cooked' the canyon's lava and changed its iron compounds, which now oxidize in the open air, so the canyon is in effect rusting.

Which invasive fish now devours the native cutthroat of Yellowstone's largest body of water?

Lake trout eat the smaller native cutthroat, so park rules require anglers to kill every one they catch in Yellowstone Lake, the reverse of the usual catch-and-release.

Roughly how often does Old Faithful erupt?

Every 90 minutes is the round figure, though the Park Service put the typical gap at about 102 minutes in 2025; before a 1959 earthquake it averaged little more than an hour.

Yellowstone has one of the world's largest petrified forests, formed when trees were buried by what?

Ash and soil buried the trees about 50 million years ago, swept over them by volcanic mudflows, and minerals carried in by groundwater slowly replaced the wood with stone.

Which body of water gives its name to the 1959 earthquake just outside Yellowstone?

Hebgen Lake sloshed over its dam for hours as the ground beneath it dropped, and inside the park Old Faithful's eruptions have come at longer intervals since.

After forest and grassland, what covers Yellowstone's last 5 percent?

Lakes and rivers cover about 5 percent of the park, against 80 for forest and 15 for grassland, yet swimming is not recommended because the water stays dangerously cold.

Which livestock disease, carried by some Yellowstone bison, is why animals that leave the park may be hazed back or culled?

Brucellosis can make cattle miscarry, so ranchers fear its spread; the bison and elk of the Yellowstone area are the last wild reservoir of the disease in the United States.

Which thermal area near Hayden Valley contains Dragon's Mouth Spring?

Mud Volcano announces itself by smell: hydrogen sulfide gas rising from deep underground gives the area around Dragon's Mouth Spring its rotten-egg stink.

Roughly how big is the Yellowstone Caldera?

About 30 by 45 miles, the caldera is too big to take in from the ground; road travellers cross what is left of its rim at Gibbon Falls and Lewis Falls without noticing.

Which corner of Yellowstone is its wettest, receiving up to 80 inches of precipitation a year?

The southwest corner catches Pacific moisture channelled up the Snake River Plain, while the park's dry northern edge gets as little as 10 to 15 inches a year.

What structure greets visitors at Yellowstone's north entrance in Gardiner?

The Roosevelt Arch took its name by chance: Theodore Roosevelt happened to be visiting the park in 1903 while it was going up, and was asked to lay the cornerstone.

An enzyme from a bacterium found in a Yellowstone hot spring in the 1960s underpins which laboratory technique?

PCR testing relies on Taq polymerase, an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium first isolated from Yellowstone's Mushroom Spring; it survives the near-boiling heat each copying cycle needs.

Yellowstone's lowest point, Reese Creek, sits about as high as which US city?

Denver, the Mile High City, stands at 5,280 feet, two feet lower; the park rides on a high volcanic plateau, so most of it lies about half a mile higher still.

Whose photographs from the 1871 government survey helped persuade Congress to make Yellowstone a national park?

William Henry Jackson's crew carried his heavy glass plates and a portable darkroom through the wilderness on mules, and his pictures gave Congress proof that the tall tales were true.

In which state is West Yellowstone, the gateway town at the park's west entrance?

Montana's West Yellowstone was born in June 1908, when a railway line built to carry tourists reached the park boundary; it tried several names before settling on this one in 1920.

Which gateway town east of Yellowstone was founded by and named for Buffalo Bill?

Cody, the nearest town to the East Entrance, was laid out in 1896 with William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody's backing; he also built its Irma Hotel and named it for his daughter.

What shape does Yellowstone's Grand Loop Road trace through the park?

A figure eight is the shape: a cross-road joins an upper and a lower loop, so one road system reaches the geyser basins, the canyon, the big lake and the northern terraces.

Which Catskills nature essayist toured Yellowstone with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903?

John Burroughs wrote the trip up in Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt; John Muir's more famous camping trip with the president came weeks later, in California.

Which bird nests in colonies on the Molly Islands in Yellowstone Lake?

American white pelicans crowd onto the two tiny Molly Islands, barely an acre between them, so a fast spring melt that raises the lake can flood their nests.

What distinction does Yellowstone Lake hold in North America?

Largest freshwater body above 7,000 ft in North America, it freezes over completely every winter and usually stays locked in ice until late May or early June.

What turns the bases of Yellowstone's 'bobby socks' trees white?

Silica from thermal water is the cause: trees standing in hot-spring runoff soak up the mineral-laden water, and as it dries it whitens their lower trunks like a pair of bobby socks.

The first wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone in January 1995 were captured in which country?

Canada supplied the first wolves: animals captured in Alberta arrived in January 1995 and were held for weeks in acclimation pens inside the park before being set free.

Which pass between Tower and Canyon is the highest point on Yellowstone's Grand Loop Road?

Dunraven Pass, about 8,860 feet up, honours an Anglo-Irish earl who toured the park in 1874 and then praised it across some 150 pages of a London travel book, early publicity abroad.

By 1902, poaching had cut Yellowstone's wild bison herd to about how many animals?

About 23 were left, so that year the government brought in 21 bison from private ranch herds, and the thousands in the park today descend from both groups.

Which tribe crossed Yellowstone in 1877 while fleeing American troops, capturing several tourists on the way?

The Nez Perce were weeks into a long fighting retreat when they crossed the park in August 1877; their chiefs let the captured tourists go, though stragglers shot and wounded some.

Which large white bird, North America's heaviest native waterfowl, breeds in Yellowstone?

Trumpeter swans were down to about 70 known birds in the lower 48 states by the early 1930s, a remnant living around Yellowstone that later seeded the species' recovery.

Which highway, called 'the most beautiful drive in America' by Charles Kuralt, reaches Yellowstone's Northeast Entrance?

The Beartooth Highway crests at nearly 11,000 feet, so heavy snow keeps it shut for about seven months of the year; it usually opens only from late May to mid-October.

Which painter on the 1871 government survey produced images that helped persuade Congress to create Yellowstone National Park?

Thomas Moran's watercolours travelled to Washington with the survey report, and his huge canvas of the park's canyon so impressed the government that it bought the painting in 1872 for $10,000.

What did Yellowstone shut down in 1970 to wean grizzly bears off human food?

Open garbage dumps had fed the park's bears for decades; closing them in 1970 forced grizzlies back onto natural foods, and the area's population sank to about 136 by 1975 before recovering.

The first American known to enter what is now Yellowstone, in 1807-08, was a veteran of which expedition?

John Colter left the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806 to trap furs; a trader then sent him out alone to drum up business with the Crow, the errand that took him across the region in the winter of 1807–08.

Before English speakers called it Yellowstone, trappers knew the river as Roche Jaune, a name in which language?

French-Canadian trappers are said to have asked a local tribe the river's name and turned the answer, 'Rock Yellow River', into French; English speakers then translated it again.

Which animal is Yellowstone's most abundant large mammal?

Elk are the park's most abundant large mammal, with 10,000 to 20,000 summering there, and they make up about 85 percent of what the wolves kill in winter.

What phrase is carved above Yellowstone's original entrance gateway?

'For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People' quotes the 1872 act; the stone gateway went up in 1903 because the park's engineer thought the approach too drab for arriving rail passengers.

The Old Faithful Inn, opened in 1904, holds what record?

Largest log hotel in the world by most reckonings, it came close to burning in 1988, when a firestorm hit the Old Faithful area and crews soaked its roof to save it.

Which geyser basin holds Yellowstone's largest hot spring?

Midway Geyser Basin has far fewer geysers than the basins on either side of it, yet it holds the park's largest hot spring and the vast steaming crater of Excelsior.

Sheepeater Cliff, named for the Tukudika people, is made of columns of which rock?

Basalt forms the cliff's neat six-sided columns, which took shape as a lava flow cooled and cracked; the name honours the Tukudika, or Sheep Eaters, a Shoshone band who lived in these mountains.

Which federal agency leads the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory that monitors the park's volcano?

The U.S. Geological Survey leads the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, founded in 2001 with the National Park Service and the University of Utah to track quakes, ground uplift and gas emissions.

How did an earthquake just outside Yellowstone create a new lake in 1959?

A landslide that dammed a river did it: a mountainside fell into the Madison River canyon and backed the water up into what is now Earthquake Lake; 28 people died.

Fishing Cone geyser on Yellowstone Lake is named for an 1870 story about a trout accidentally being what?

Boiled in the spring by accident, that 1870 trout started a craze: tourists cooked their catch on the hook at Fishing Cone until the park banned boiling live fish in 1912.

Which river flows past Old Faithful?

The Firehole takes in so much hot runoff from the geyser basins that it runs several degrees warmer than the streams above them, and its steam is said to have given it its name.

Excelsior Geyser, mostly a boiling pool, discharges roughly how much water per minute?

4,000 gallons a minute or more pours from the crater; in the 1880s it was a true geyser hurling water 300 feet, and those blasts are thought to have wrecked its own plumbing.

Which hydrothermal feature forms where acid rots rock into clay and too little water flows to wash it away?

A mudpot gets its colours from its minerals, iron oxides tinting the clay pink and grey, which is why some of Yellowstone's are known as paint pots.

Roughly how large is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that surrounds the park?

About 20 million acres is the usual figure, with estimates from 18 to 22 million; either way the park at its heart makes up only about a tenth of the ecosystem.

Which rock, quarried at a Yellowstone cliff, reached Ohio's Hopewell mounds as ceremonial goods?

Obsidian from the park's Obsidian Cliff was carried east along the great rivers around 2,000 years ago, by the thousands of pounds, to be buried as ceremonial goods in Hopewell mounds.

Which national park lies 10 miles south of Yellowstone, linked by the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway?

Grand Teton owes much of its valley floor to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who from the late 1920s quietly bought up Jackson Hole ranchland through a front company so that it could be handed to the Park Service.

Which animal, North America's fastest land mammal, lives on Yellowstone's northern range?

Pronghorn can sprint at around 50 mph, far faster than any predator now living here; the speed is thought to be a leftover from outrunning a cheetah that died out long ago.

What did record flooding force Yellowstone to do in June 2022?

Close every entrance it did, all five, sending about 10,000 visitors out of the park; the washed-out North Entrance road then stayed shut for months while a replacement route was built.

Morning Glory Pool's famous blue has faded mainly because visitors did what?

Threw coins and debris into it: the rubbish clogged the vents that feed the pool, cutting its supply of hot water, and efforts to flush the junk back out have had mixed results.

Which Yellowstone animal lost federal protection in 2007 and 2017, only for courts to restore it?

Grizzly bear numbers around the park rose from 136 in 1975 to about 700 by 2017, but lawsuits overturned both delistings, the first after a judge cited the decline of a pine whose nuts the bears eat.

Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone is thought to be the largest lake in the lower 48 states that cannot be reached how?

By road is the one way in that does not exist: federal biologists believe Shoshone Lake is the largest lower-48 lake no road reaches, and it held no fish at all until stocking began in 1890.

Which US Mint program put Yellowstone on a coin in 2010?

America the Beautiful Quarters came out in the order the sites were first protected, so Yellowstone's was only second: Hot Springs in Arkansas had been set aside 40 years before the park.

When poacher Ed Howell was caught killing Yellowstone's animals in 1894, what was the harshest penalty the law allowed?

Expulsion from the park was all the law allowed, so Howell was simply escorted out; the outcry that followed pushed Congress to pass real penalties within weeks.

Which Upper Geyser Basin geyser is the world's tallest predictable geyser, reaching about 200 feet?

Grand Geyser erupts from a pool, not a cone, in bursts that can reach 200 feet, well above Old Faithful's average of about 130, though it performs only a few times a day.

Built in 1891, which is the oldest of Yellowstone's hotels?

The Lake Hotel opened in 1891 on Yellowstone Lake's northern shore; Robert Reamer, architect of the Old Faithful Inn, added its Colonial Revival columns from 1903.

Mountain man Jim Bridger's tall tale about Yellowstone's petrified forest featured petrified what?

Birds singing petrified songs were Bridger's own embroidery, but the stone trees were real, and so were his geyser stories, which listeners had written off as yarns too.

Which geyser basin, sitting where three major faults meet, is the hottest in Yellowstone?

Norris is the hottest and the most restless: in 2003 new steam vents opened and the ground grew so hot that part of its trail system had to be closed.

Yellowstone's 'Zone of Death' legal loophole lies in which state's sliver of the park?

The 50-square-mile Idaho strip of the park has no residents, yet the Sixth Amendment requires jurors from both the state and the federal district of a crime, so law professor Brian Kalt argued no jury could be seated.

Castle Geyser's cone is built of which deposit, left by its own splashing water?

Sinter, also called geyserite, starts as mineral that superheated water dissolves out of rock deep underground and then drops as it cools, so every splash adds a little more to the cone.

Which of these is one of only two mountain ranges lying entirely inside Yellowstone?

The Washburn Range and the small Red Mountains are the only two wholly inside the park; Mount Washburn, visible from much of it, was climbed in 1870 by explorers who named it for their leader.

What rare mountain event flattened some 15,000 acres of forest on Yellowstone's southern edge in July 1987?

A tornado rated F4, the strongest on record for its state, tore through wilderness south of the park and across its boundary; nobody was hurt, because it struck roadless backcountry.