Last night we watched a documentary on Yellowstone National Park on Prime TV. It concerned the greater Yellowstone ecosystem which includes two national parks, several National Forests and includes parts of three states: WY, MT, and ID.
The other DrC says the documentary wasn’t slickly produced (true) and I say it spent too much time on the thermal features (also true). My main gripe was it totally didn’t mention Lake Yellowstone, the second largest high altitude lake in the world, and the largest in North America at 136 square miles of surface area.
My nephew put his inboard power boat on the lake but stayed fairly close to shore as he said “it felt like an ocean.” It is the most easily recognized feature attributable to the area being a caldera, an area where a large volcano erupted, after which the area collapsed and filled with water.
Enough about the documentary, let me give you my thumbnail sketch of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Yellowstone is outstanding for three things: thermal features (geysers, mud pots, thermal pools), wildlife (grizzly and black bears, deer, elk, and moose, big horn sheep, wolves, pronghorn, bison, beaver, marmots, and eagles), and a really big fresh water lake. The Tetons are the most photogenic mountains in North America, and the headwaters of the Snake River. The region is varied and beautiful.
The documentary said one thing I want to quote with approval. Yellowstone is to North America what the Serengeti is to Africa, a place where large animals live natural lives as they did before the first humans arrived. We can go see them in situ, them roaming free and us cooped up in our cars.
