Yellowstone National Park Quotes

For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

On my first trip to Yellowstone National Park, I threw a rock at a dragon. It wasn't my smartest idea.

Yellowstone, a place so special and awe-inspiring that after exploring it in 1871, the Hayden Expedition conceived of the original concept of the world’s first national park—a set-aside of 2. 2 million acres containing more than ten thousand thermal features, canyons, waterfalls, and wildlife—so no man or corporation could ever own it.

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.

Wilderness is impersonal. It does not care whether you live or die. It does not care how much you love it.

It won't snow on us," I told my hiking companions, "because I lead a good and virtuous life." "We're dead," Dave Long said.

It won't snow on us," I told my hiking companions, "because I lead a good and virtuous life." "We're dead," Dave Long said.

Yellowstone was established as the first national park in the world in 1872 by an act of Congress. The boundaries were drawn before Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana were granted statehood,

You may be a little cold some nights on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed. or at least in your grave. Keep awake while you may in mountain mansions so rare.

Yellowstone, of all the national parks, is the wildest and most universal in its appeal... Daily new, always strange, ever full of change, it is Nature's wonder park. It is the most human and the most popular of all parks. -Yellowstone Park for Your Vacation (circa 1920s)

It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park. We

It looks hard," said Michael. "Not squishy like poop.

Dangers and wilderness go hand in hand. That is part of the attraction of wilderness, and danger is part of the allure

country without wolves isn't really good country. It's incomplete. It doesn't have its full spirit.

Elk were mating now - The males were fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. "It would be better for the elk," Dave said as we prepared dinner, "if the females just gave it up." All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, "Or I could be wrong.

In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The

established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

After wolf number 10, the father of the first group of pups born in the park, was killed by a local hunter after wandering south of park boundaries, program officials rounded up the mother and the helpless pups, put them back into the acclimation pen, and provided them with food for several months. Even when the pups got a bit older, program managers feared that the mother would have a hard time taking care of them by herself when they were released. Then, on the day they were to be released, in an event that no biologist has yet been able to explain, a bachelor wolf living miles away in another part of the park showed up outside the pen, just in time to form a new family unit.

Here is a cutting from the Ladies’ Home Journal of Philadelphia: Uncle Sam set apart a royal pleasure ground in North Western Wyoming and called it Yellowstone National Park. To give an idea of what its size—3,312 square miles—really means, let us clear the floor of the park and tenderly place some of the great cities of the world there, close together as children do their blocks. First put in London, then Greater New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Paris, Boston, Berlin, St. Louis, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Washington. The floor of the park should be about half covered, then lift up Rhode Island. Carefully, so as not to spill any of its people, set it down and press in the West Indies. And even then there are 200 square miles left.

NPS and FWS officials took some precautions, such as fixing radio collars on the original wolves in 1996. But the wolves' survival was up to them. Indeed, when I visited the park in 1996, the NPS was beset by a range of issues that demanded attention, from a proposed gold mine on the northeastern border to nearly continuous public criticism of the park's fire control policies. The agency could devote only limited resources to monitoring and tracking the wolves. That was not that much of a problem because the animals took to their new surroundings as if they had always been there and knew exactly what to do.

It all starts with the wolves. Wolves disappeared from Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, in the 1920s. When they left, the entire ecosystem changed. Elk herds in the park increased their numbers and began to make quite a meal of the aspens, willows, and cottonwoods that lined the streams. Vegetation declined and animals that depended on the trees left. The wolves were absent for seventy years. When they returned, the elks’ languorous browsing days were over. As the wolf packs kept the herds on the move, browsing diminished, and the trees sprang back. The roots of cottonwoods and willows once again stabilized stream banks and slowed the flow of water. This, in turn, created space for animals such as beavers to return. These industrious builders could now find the materials they needed to construct their lodges and raise their families. The animals that depended on the riparian meadows came back, as well. The wolves turned out to be better stewards of the land than people, creating conditions that allowed the trees to grow and exert their influence on the landscape. My

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,

Without hesitating, he said, “Can you tell me something? These animals that are just running around out here . . . they couldn’t be wild, could they, or you wouldn’t just have them running around loose?

Correct in his later assessment of war in general, Sherman was decidedly incorrect in this statement. The Nez Perce had both just cause and provocation for going to war. The whites were in the process of stealing their ancestral lands and had cheated, robbed, and killed some of them.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

Back then the Appalachian Trail was barely a trail at all—it consisted of over 2,000 miles of mostly unmarked wilderness from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. A man named Benton MacKaye had proposed its creation in the early 1920s. He had utopian visions about a place that could “transcend the economic scramble” and be a balm on the American psyche after World War I. He thought the trail could lift people out of the drudgery of modern life. Government workers needed a relaxing place to recuperate, he wrote in his proposal. Housewives, he said, could use the trail’s rejuvenating powers too. They could come during their leisure time. It could even be a cure for mental illness, whose sufferers “need acres not medicine.” Civilization was weakening, he said. Americans needed a path forward. The Appalachian Trail was the solution. There was still so much undeveloped land in the United States. The West had Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many more national parks, but the East Coast was the most populous part of the country, and the people who lived there should have something to rival the western parks. National parks already dotted the East Coast’s landscape, but what if they could be united? MacKaye imagined what Americans would see as they strode the length of the trail: the “Northwoods” pointed firs on Mount Washington, the placid, pine-rimmed lakes of the Adirondacks. They would cross the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac, and Harpers Ferry. They could follow Daniel Boone’s footsteps through southern Appalachia to the hardwood forests of North Carolina and end at Springer Mountain in Georgia. They would know their country. Barbara was swept up by

The worst possible situation is a person hiking alone who surprises a bear that is feeding (as on a carcass) and also has cubs. If this last situation happens to you, we will not expect to see you back at the trailhead.

it is impossible to “safety proof” a national park, and those parks are often more akin to Jurassic Park than to Disneyland.

Before I can ask Nancy where we should go next, she lifts her head and engages me with eyes blue as Rainbow Pool. She pulls off her left shoe and slips off her sock like she did in January over five years ago. Extending her leg beyond the ground-level boardwalk, she ever so lightly touches her big toe to a lonely clump of grass that somehow has managed to survive even though it is completely surrounded by the black sands only a few feet away from the blistering pool. Nancy puts an index finger to her lips cautioning me not to speak. No worries, my love, I reflect silently. You made it through, you survived, and you are well. Together we have made it back home.

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.

Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colorado,

It is a mystery why anyone would dive headfirst into a Yellowstone hot spring merely to save a dog, but that is precisely what happened on July 20, 1981.

Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .

the Yellowstone caldera had been rising several inches a year and earthquakes above 4.0 on the Richter scale happened frequently. Yellowstone National Parks’ trees and animals died in increasing numbers as poisonous gas, boiling water, and the heat increased throughout the park from the rising magma. While geologists knew the super volcano would explode eventually, probably thousands of years from now, they never once considered asking the United States government to close or cordon off parts of Yellowstone Park as a result of the imminent threat.

Frank Welch was literally sleeping on a slab of bacon at the time of the event.

Don’t do that!” said Welch, and Kirwan responded very tiredly, “It doesn’t matter.” Near the spring, rangers found two large pieces of skin shaped like human hands.

Oils from its body later made the hot spring have small eruptions.

Manifest Destiny, industrialization, and a twentyfold growth in population since 1830 have converted the United States into a land of megalopolises and superhighways, a nation in which “sprawl” figures in political debates, a country where, outside of Alaska, it is impossible to place oneself more than twenty miles from a road. (The most remote spot in the lower forty-eight states, by the distance-from-a-road standard, is in the southeastern part of Yellowstone National Park.)

Adirondack Park, a 6-million-acre wilderness area and parkland in the Adirondack Mountains, is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Olympic national parks combined.

People who live in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are used to cold temperatures, but even those of us who live here can become complacent. Many of us sometimes walk out the door at night without a coat in order to retrieve something that we have left in our car or to run a quick errand while thinking, “I’ll only be out for a moment.” It is easy for a door to accidentally slam shut, thus locking us in the cold without proper protection. When one lives “out in the country” and no one else is around to help, that hasty decision can be a lethal one, especially at night.

And no matter what, I still bashed James Barrasso’s head in with a Yellowstone National Park souvenir.

THE ADIRONDACK PARK, a vast wilderness area sprawling over six million acres in northeastern New York, is the largest public land preserve in the contiguous United States. Roughly the size of Vermont, it is larger than seven other American states—so large, in fact, the national parks of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, the Grand Canyon, and the Great Smoky Mountains could all fit neatly within its boundaries.

I only know one place in the United States where 'natural' wolf death is the norm: Yellowstone National Park.

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

Of course, collaring and tracking all bears is illogical, unreasonable, and unnatural from the point of view of park managers, regardless of one judge’s opinion. It can traumatize the bears, make the bears look artificial instead of natural, cost a lot of money in radios and monitoring personnel, and give the public the perception that a national park is like the movie Westworld (all mechanical) rather than a natural preserve.

any killing by a bear, particularly a grizzly, that’s not about meat or protecting cubs. From what I’ve read, they’re fairly common.

The problem of habituated, food-conditioned grizzly bears is not superficial. In the worst cases these circumstances have been associated with grizzly bear–inflicted deaths. Between 1967 and 1980, nine deaths occurred in Glacier, Yellowstone, and Banff National Parks. Eight of these deaths were caused by seven different grizzly bears, all of which were habituated and food-conditioned. The ninth incident was caused by a habituated grizzly bear that didn’t have a known history of feeding on people’s food or garbage (see page 63). These tragedies were probably avoidable.

The sensation increased, becoming a subtle vibration wherever his body touched the earth.

Then you know there’s lots of room for debate about what happened.

the way it mixes huge numbers of people with predatory animals. That’s something we deal with every single day. Yellowstone is like the Serengeti: predators prowl here. They hunt, they kill, they eat. It’s the real deal.

we’re seeing mounting evidence that some of Yellowstone’s animals are changing their behavior based on the growing number of human visitors to the park.

the grizzly went on the attack not because it was surprised, but just the opposite: because it recognized the members of the Territory Team as easy takings?

Some of these organisms were photosynthesizing bacteria and cyanobacteria. Others were Archaea, an ancient lineage of single-celled organisms without nuclei long believed to be bacteria but recently put in a kingdom all their own.

In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be officially protected. It took more than 2,000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States.

To develop a national park is to not have one.

Some folks require the park’s wildness and yet deny its right to exercise its wildness upon them.

Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned honor by the locks. —William Shakespeare, King Henry IV

A U.S. senator from Wyoming had a sprawling ranch and a lot of cattle. The ranch backed up to an area of Yellowstone National Park that had wolves in it. Shot wolves began showing up on his property and then across the fence into the park. The senator had no problem with dead wolves personally but didn’t like the idea of a criminal action that would have every environmentalist in the nation on his back, along with CBS and, worse, CNN.

Cody got a voice mail. An erudite man’s voice with a touch of country twang: “You’ve reached the voice mail of Jed McCarthy’s Wilderness Adventures, the home of the only licensed multinight outfitter in Yellowstone National Park. We’re on a pack trip right now so we’re unable to take your call. And because of the nature of the trip, I won’t be able to check messages for a week. Please go to our Web site and—” He hung up and called Larry back. “No one is there,” Cody said.

He was completely wrong. There had been plenty of signs throughout Yellowstone warning visitors that the wildlife was dangerous. By the roadside, the driver of the RV was now arguing with Morton’s children, most likely about who was at fault in the accident. Just as Morton’s daughter leaned in to let the driver have it, the family car burst into flames. Morton screamed again. So did his wife. She seemed to forget that her husband was wounded and raced toward the flaming car. “Our clothes!” she shouted to her children. “Get our clothes!” Mom sighed heavily. “I think we’re going to have to take this guy to the hospital.” I wasn’t happy about that. And I could see that Dad and Summer were disappointed too. But we couldn’t leave Morton wounded in the middle of the wilderness. “Darn right I need to go to the hospital,” Morton said. “Lousy, no-good deer! This is the last time I ever go on vacation in a national park!” “I’m sure the park service will be happy to hear that,” Summer informed him. Morton ignored her and kept on ranting. “We should have gone on a cruise. They don’t have any homicidal deer on cruise ships.” Dad looked to me and rolled his eyes. “Welcome to Yellowstone,” he said. I laughed, figuring this was the strangest thing that would happen to me that day. It wasn’t even close.

If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over, then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession. On many days it looks as if the possessors have won. Over the past century and a half, it has been the same crew, whether shod in snakeskin boots or tasseled loafers, chipping away at the West. They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it. They use a false view of history to disguise most of what they are up to. They seem to be afraid of the native West—the big, cloud-crushing, prickly place. They cannot stand it that green-eyed wolves are once again staring out from behind aspen groves in Yellowstone National Park. They cannot live with the idea that at least one of the seventeen rivers that dance out of the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada remains undammed. They are disgusted that George Armstrong Custer’s name has been removed from the name of the battlefield memorial, the range of the Sioux and Crow and Arapaho, replaced by a name that gives no special favor to either side: the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Worse, the person now in charge of the memorial is an Indian.

My first visit to grizzly bear country was a hike through Yellowstone National Park, and my nerves were frayed by rumors and warnings about a mauling that had occurred that same week on a trail just south of the park. Dan and I made so much noise--banging our walking sticks, talking loudly, stomping our feet--that we nervously joked that we would be the first people in history to cross the park without seeing any wild animals at all.

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and our of season, the question comes up, "What are rattlesnakes good for?" As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were Gods' ways.... Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

The effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilisation.

The Deccan Traps volcanoes spilled as much as a half million cubic miles of basalt over an area equal to half of present-day India. In places, the basalt lies more than a mile deep.

It proved a wet, ungenial summer,” the future Mary Shelley wrote, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” To entertain themselves, they wrote ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s would become Frankenstein.

Elk were mating now—the males were fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. “It would be better for the elk,” Dave said as we prepared dinner, “if the females just gave it up.” All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, “Or I could be wrong.

She lifts her finger to point at me. “Not a chance. You listen to me, Theo Dale Silva. And you listen carefully. You are going to go to whatever shitty little town you need to go to⁠—” “It’s Billings, Montana, Tink.” “The only thing I know about Montana is Yellowstone.” “The National Park?” She scoffs. “No, the show. So you’re going to go to Dutton Ranch or wherever the hell it is, and you are going to kick all their hillbilly asses.