Today we took a drive up Dunraven Pass beyond the summit, and then up the Chittenden Road to the parking lot for the Mt. Washburn trail. The Chittenden Road is narrow, washboarded, unpaved and without guard rails over most of its length. That parking lot is very likely the highest point to which one can drive in the park, and the views are breathtaking.
You stand there in awe and as far as you can see in every direction there is nothing, except the road you drove up on, that reflects the hand of man. These vistas look as they did when the first Europeans hiked into this wilderness during the Jefferson administration 200 years ago.
We broke out the binoculars and scanned a vast space, larger than many nations, which the founders of the National Park System decided needed to be kept wild. As we noted the other day, they have succeeded.
Yellowstone was the world's first national park, and remains today one of the largest and most spectacular. It has the world's largest collection of thermal features, serves as an enormous outdoor zoo-without-fences where the animals do as they choose and the people need to protect themselves, and the scenery is amazing enough to warrant a park all by itself.
An interesting cultural aside: we shared a tour with a British couple who pronounced the thermal features that shoot steam and water into the air, geysers, as "gee.zers," whereas in the U.S. we pronounce them "guy.sers."
We told them that Fishing Bridge (a bridge over the Yellowstone River near its exit from Yellowstone Lake) used to be called "Fanny Bridge" because of all the tourists bent over looking in the water. They replied that the term "fanny" is quite off-color in the U.K. and we shouldn't use it there in polite society. I Googled it and found it refers to female genitalia. I guess that means the U.K. is no place to market fanny packs, that bag-on-a-belt, unless you rename them.
