Yellowstone National Park Trivia
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49 free Yellowstone National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Yellowstone National Park trivia questions with answers. Yellowstone National Park trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Yellowstone trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which US president signed the 1872 act creating Yellowstone, the world's first national park?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant signed the act on March 1, 1872, but Congress attached no money: the park's first superintendent drew no salary and had to earn his living elsewhere.
Q 02Yellowstone lies mostly in which US state?
Wyoming
Wyoming holds 96% of Yellowstone, yet the park is older than the state: it was created in 1872, when Wyoming was still a territory 18 years away from statehood.
Q 03What do Yellowstone's geysers have that its quiet hot springs lack, making them erupt?
Constricted plumbing
Constricted plumbing traps superheated water until the pressure blasts it skyward, while a hot spring's open channels let the heat escape. Yellowstone holds more than half of the world's geysers.
Q 04Old Faithful got its name from an 1870 expedition that noticed the geyser did what?
Erupted at regular intervals
Erupted at regular intervals: the 1870 party named it on the spot for exactly that. The gap between eruptions has lengthened since, partly after earthquakes, yet park staff can predict the next one.
Q 05Which feature in Yellowstone's Norris Basin is the world's tallest active geyser?
Steamboat
Steamboat can hurl water more than 300 feet, but nobody can predict it: it lay dormant for 50 years until 1961, then erupted a record 48 times in both 2019 and 2020.
Q 06What gives Grand Prismatic Spring its bands of red, orange, yellow and green?
Mats of heat-loving microbes
Mats of heat-loving microbes ring the spring, turning orange and red in summer and darker green in winter. The centre is too hot for most life, so it stays clear, deep blue.
Q 07Grand Prismatic is the world's third-largest hot spring; the largest, Frying Pan Lake, lies in which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand's Frying Pan Lake sits in the Waimangu valley near Rotorua, where a geyser once shot higher than any in Yellowstone before dying out over a century ago. Dominica's Boiling Lake ranks second.
Q 08What distinction does Yellowstone Lake hold in North America?
Largest freshwater body above 7,000 ft
Largest freshwater body above 7,000 ft, it freezes over completely every winter and thaws only in late May or June, even though hot springs and geysers vent from its floor.
Q 09Yellowstone's 308-foot Lower Falls plunges into which canyon?
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone: hot water and gases 'cooked' its lava rock soft, so the river carved it about 1,000 feet deep, and its yellow walls are quite literally rusting.
Q 10Wolves vanished from Yellowstone in the 1920s and returned in 1995; which animal makes up most of their winter kills?
Elk
Elk make up about 85% of winter wolf kills. While the packs were gone, park crews trapped and shot elk for more than 30 years to hold the herds down, until the culls ended in the 1960s.
Q 11The first wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone in January 1995 were captured in which country?
Canada
Canada supplied 14 wolves that January, and because wolves have a homing instinct, each family group was penned for weeks first so it would not simply head back north.
Q 12Which Yellowstone valley, nicknamed 'America's Serengeti', was the release site for the 1995 wolves?
Lamar
Lamar Valley's wide, open floor makes its big animals easy to spot, which earned it the Serengeti nickname and still draws wolf-watchers with spotting scopes most days.
Q 13Which Yellowstone animal, cut to about two dozen survivors by 1902, now numbers in the thousands?
Bison
Bison were down to about two dozen by 1902; animals brought in from private herds helped rebuild what is now the nation's largest bison population on public land.
Q 21Which president laid the cornerstone of the stone arch at Yellowstone's north entrance in 1903?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt happened to be in the park on a two-week holiday while the arch was going up, so he was asked to lay the stone and the arch took his name.
Q 22Which phrase from Yellowstone's founding act crowns its north entrance arch?
For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People
For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People crowns an arch built partly because officials felt the new rail stop at Gardiner gave so famous a park too plain a front door.
Q 23The Old Faithful Inn, built over the winter of 1903-04, is one of the world's largest buildings made of what?
Q 14What finally tamed the 1988 fires that burned about a third of Yellowstone?
A September snowfall
A September snowfall, arriving with rain on the 11th, did what $120 million of firefighting could not: crews saved lives and buildings but had little effect on the fires themselves.
Q 15Which organisation ran Yellowstone for three decades from 1886, before the National Park Service existed?
The US Army
The US Army rode in after civilian superintendents, short of money and men, failed to stop poachers and souvenir hunters; its cavalry built Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth and stayed 32 years.
Q 16Harry Yount, appointed gamekeeper in 1880 to fight poaching, is remembered as the first what?
National park ranger
National park ranger in spirit: after a winter patrolling alone, Yount reported that no one man could protect the park, urged a ranger force and quit after 14 months.
Q 17Which painter on the 1871 Hayden Survey produced images that helped persuade Congress to create Yellowstone?
Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran was so changed by the trip that he began signing his work T-Y-M, for Thomas 'Yellowstone' Moran.
Q 18Who took the large-format photographs of Yellowstone on the 1871 Hayden expedition?
William Henry Jackson
William Henry Jackson hauled fragile glass plates through the wilderness on mules; his prints proved that the old tall tales of geysers were true, and Congress created the park within months.
Q 19John Colter, credited as the first American to explore Yellowstone in 1807-08, was a veteran of which expedition?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark discharged Colter two months early in 1806 so he could turn back west with fur trappers; his exact route is still debated, but his tales of 'fire and brimstone' stuck.
Q 20Fur trappers once knew the Yellowstone River as 'Yellow Rock' in which language?
French
French trappers called it Roche Jaune, a name widely believed to translate a Hidatsa one. The Hidatsa lived far downstream on the plains, so it was probably never about the park's yellow canyon.
Logs
Logs and local stone went up over a single winter. When a firestorm swept the Old Faithful area in 1988, crews kept the giant timber roof wet with hoses and pumps and saved it.
Q 24At Mammoth Hot Springs, hot water dissolves limestone and lays it down again as terraces of which mineral?
Calcium carbonate
Calcium carbonate is dissolved from limestone on the way up and dropped at the surface as travertine; the springs shift so often that the terraces can look different within a day.
Q 25The latest Yellowstone supereruption, which formed the present caldera, was roughly how long ago?
640,000 years
640,000 years is the long-quoted figure, though newer dating says about 631,000. When the emptied magma chamber's roof fell in, it left a caldera some 30 by 45 miles across.
Q 26What kind of geological feature beneath Yellowstone left a 500-mile trail of old calderas across the Snake River Plain?
A mantle hotspot
A mantle hotspot stays put while the North American plate creeps southwest across it, so the oldest calderas in the trail, some 16 million years old, now lie hundreds of miles from the park.
Q 27Which federal agency leads the observatory that monitors the volcano beneath Yellowstone?
The US Geological Survey
The US Geological Survey set up the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in 2001 with the Park Service and the University of Utah; its scientists watch the ground rise and fall but do not consider an eruption imminent.
Q 28How did the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake near Yellowstone create a new lake?
A landslide that dammed a river
A landslide that dammed a river: a mountainside fell across the Madison, burying a campground where most of the 28 victims died, and the water behind it rose into Quake Lake within weeks.
Q 29Isa Lake drains backwards across Yellowstone's Continental Divide: its west side flows where?
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean, though the lake may now spill both ways only at the height of the spring melt; road engineer Hiram Chittenden came upon it in 1891 while scouting a route from Old Faithful to West Thumb.
Q 30Yellowstone Lake's Fishing Cone became famous after an 1870 mishap in which a hooked trout was accidentally what?
Boiled in the spring
Boiled in the spring: the trout slipped the hook, fell in and floated up dead moments later. Tourists then made 'cooking on the hook' a must-do stunt, until the park banned it.