Yellowstone National Park is the home of a wide variety of wild animals. Photo / Getty Images
Yellowstone National Park is the home of a wide variety of wild animals. Photo / Getty Images
The vast catchment area that is Yellowstone National Park has remained largely unchanged in millions of years and continues to provide the perfect breeding and feeding grounds for its vast array of wildlife. A must-do destination for animal lovers, write Simon & Susan Veness
Sitting on the porch of the rustic Lake Village Lodge on the edge of Yellowstone Lake, we were struck first by the looming, far-distant bulk of the Bighorn Mountains, a seeming blue-grey wall of rock reaching almost 4000 metres into the Wyoming sky. But then a shaggy male bison wandered across our field of view, followed quickly by another, and then another.
Utterly heedless of our presence and, indeed, that of the Lodge, these huge animals continued on their summer stroll in timeless testament to Yellowstone National Park’s 153-history as the greatest large mammal repository in the Americas. The Serengeti of the western hemisphere, Yellowstone offers a window on to a Pleistocene past that has largely remained unchanged since the last Ice Age.
Except that the bison was almost wiped off the face of the earth by the pioneer hunters of the 19th century, a near-victim of mankind’s reckless disregard for the planet’s resources. Reduced to a few dozen, the bison was saved from extinction by the creation of Yellowstone and its 9000sq km animal sanctuary in 1872. Now, the park is the world’s greatest wildlife comeback story, and a genuine panorama of nature’s finest construction.
And it’s not just the bison, as formidable and eye-catching as the present-day herds of around 5000 are. This is an animal adventure on a massive scale, one that dwarfs the human population, and then some. With 67 species of mammals and nearly 300 bird species, Yellowstone comes as an astounding lesson in wildlife wonders that rivals its reputation for geothermal marvels. Come for the world-renowned volcanic geology if you like, but stay for the bison, and elk, and pronghorns, and bighorn sheep, and bears, and wolves. And marmots – lots of marmots.
Pronghorn and bison in Yellowstone. Photo / Simon & Susan Veness
In fact, you can hardly go anywhere in the park without coming across the most varied collection of animals in North or South America. On our most recent visit – and our third in all – we spent a day in the Lamar Valley area, reputedly the richest of all the wildlife-watching sectors thanks to its broad, flat plain and excellent grazing territory.
Admittedly, from our base inside the park at Fishing Bridge RV Park that meant navigating the formidable Dunraven Pass – Yellowstone’s highest road pass at 2700m – and its slew of switchbacks with no guardrails (not so good for passengers on the right-hand side of the car, with its sheer drop-offs), but, once we had survived that ordeal, Lamar more than lived up to its renown.
We hit our first “bison jam” about two minutes after reaching the valley, with a herd of 40 or so adults sauntering casually across the roadway. Given free right-of-way, these 1000kg leviathans of the prairie take full advantage by travelling in large groups and seemingly revel in their ability to bring traffic to a standstill. Not that we minded. We were there for close encounters of the wild kind and there’s nothing quite like a bison eyeballing you with a look that suggests it could roll right over you if it chose to.
A bison traffic jam. Photo / Simon & Susan Veness
Thankfully, this group was more interested in the grassland on the other side of the road and their daily routine of grazing up to 11 hours a day in the short summer season from mid-June to the end of August. The first snow usually falls on Yellowstone by late September, hence the park’s mammals need to take full advantage of the rich pickings while they can and the Lamar Valley represents the world’s premier bison buffet.
This being the Masai Mara of the West, however, the animal-watching didn’t end with the largest inhabitants. A few miles further along, there was the sight of a grey wolf feeding on a bison carcass, a black bear enjoying the fruits of a flowery meadow and a herd of majestic elk drifting in and out of the tree-line adjacent to the Lamar River. The wolf was only visible thanks to our spotting scope (a US$400 investment in long-distance wildlife-watching that quickly paid dividends during our week-long visit), while the bear was barely 100 metres off the road and the elk even closer. As the days progressed, we spotted a grizzly bear with two cubs, a red fox on the prowl, a coyote stalking a colony of marmots, bighorn sheep in Gardiner Canyon and a bald eagle with two chicks in a treetop nest.
The elk and bison were practically ever-present, along with our favourite animal, the pronghorn. Despite looking like a deer, the graceful pronghorn is a relative of the antelope and can reach speeds of 95km/h if threatened, which keeps it safe from most predators. Here, in July, they were more intent on following the bison example of constant nibbling and fattening up for the winter months when much of the park is inaccessible.
A magnificent bull elk. Photo / Simon and Susan Veness
The other key facet of Yellowstone’s appeal is the fact its geothermal features are liberally sprinkled throughout its full extent and it’s hard to drive for half an hour without coming across another geyser, thermal pool, mud pot or fumarole, all variations on volcanic vents that emit, variously, super-heated steam, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride.
Lamar gave us the travertine terrace of Soda Butte Cone and, from a distance, the dangerously sulfurous Calcite Springs, as well as the beauty of Tower Fall, one of more than 300 waterfalls in the park; Norris Geyser Basin offered a lunar landscape of geysers and mud pots; Dragon’s Mouth Spring featured the fascinating sight of malodorous Mud Volcano with its hyper-bubbling wet clay and smell of rotten eggs; and Midway Geyser Basin served up the stunning multi-coloured Grand Prismatic Spring and Opal Pool, iridescent circles of orange, yellow and blue that look benign but exist at temperatures around 87C – enough to boil a bison alive!
Dragon's Mouth Spring. Photo / Simon & Susan Veness
But, as much as we marvelled at the geological signposts of what remains, in effect, a gigantic volcano, it was still the animals that won our hearts. And, sitting on that porch watching the bison stroll across the open range it occurred to us that this is, truly, where the wild things are.
Checklist
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, USA
GETTING THERE
The nearest airports to Yellowstone are Bozeman, Montana, Jackson, Wyoming, and Cody - also in Wyoming.
