Outside: Ultimate Yellowstone National Park Travel Guide

Above, Old Faithful Inn is a short walk from Old Faithful Geyser. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

It there is one national park in the United States that should be on everyone's "bucket list", that would have to be Yellowstone National Park. I have been to Yellowstone three times and it never fails to captivate.

Although things are now winding down at the park in preparation for the winter season, it is not too early to begin planning a visit to Yellowstone next year. Because, if you don't, lodges and campgrounds get booked up pretty fast.

Above, Old Faithful Geyser during eruption last July. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

I visited Yellowstone last summer and, as I expected, it was jamb-packed with people.

Thankfully, Outside magazine's website has posted their "Ultimate Yellowstone National Park Travel Guide" to help in the planning.

They (with tongue firmly in cheek) begin with:

Yellowstone is a trippy place. Its 2.2 million acres are dotted with bubbling mud pots, steaming hot pools of concentric rainbow hues, and some 500 geysers that spew water—and, occasionally, cinderblocks and decades-old pacifiers. Among it all are elk, bighorn sheep, and 1,000-pound bison that would just as soon toss you 10 feet in the air as look at you. 

The people are just as strange. More than 4 million pour in from around the globe every year, causing mile-long bear jams on the park’s two-lane roads, in addition to petting bison, challenging bison to fights, loading them into their cars, and peeing directly into Old Faithful. (Luckily, the park has its own jail.) Yellowstone visitors have been boiled to death in thermal pools, drowned while searching for hidden treasure, and, of course, eaten by grizzlies.  

Personally, I find the mayhem fascinating (apart from people throwing garbage into geysers—honestly, what the hell?) and indicative of just how wild the landscape is. When president Ulysses S. Grant designated the area the country’s first park in 1872, Yellowstone took hold in the modern imagination as the quintessential portrait of the American West and, despite its recent news coverage, has largely remained that way. Spanning the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into parts of Montana and Idaho, the park’s sheer magnitude means that, with the right planning, you can have the unspoiled experience that made our forefathers awestruck enough to preserve it. 

To read more, go here.