Yellowstone Best Quotes

What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If we restore the ecosystem function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system. It gives me the shivers just to write about it. Because so much of this park will be created at our homes, I suggest we call it Homegrown National Park.

It might seem preposterous to equate a walk in your yard with a trip to Yellowstone. Your yard surely will not provide breathtaking views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Bridal Falls, or the Teton Range, but there is much that Homegrown National Park can provide without the expense, crowds, reservations, or traffic jams of a monumental road trip. And it can provide these

For the more adventurous fisherman, Yellowstone offers waters far from well-traveled roads. It takes more time to reach these waters, and the best fishing is later in the day due to higher elevations. But the extra effort pays off with bigger rewards. Fall River Basin boasts some of the best fly-fishing waters anywhere, let alone the Park. It’s only 75 miles from Idaho Falls, yet fly-fishers bypass it to take part in crowd-forming events on the Henry’s Fork and Madison River to the north and the South Fork to the south. Yes, a four-mile walk is required to access Bechler River and Boundary Creek in the meadows. A 2 to 3 mile walk reaches Fall River, Mountain Ash Creek and Beula and Hering Lakes. Each stream hosts large cutthroat-rainbow hybrid trout, which can rival those of the Henry’s Fork and the Madison River in size and pickiness.

In a paper evaluating the case for trophic cascades in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Peterson, Vucetich, and Douglas Smith, who trained on Isle Royale and now is a project leader for the Wolf Restoration Project at Yellowstone, argue that ecosystems are too complex to trace neat relationships, particularly in Yellowstone where grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, and wolves eat bison, deer, and elk. They also point out that, when you follow the threads of prey fluctuations, you often find at the source not wild-animal predators but human beings.