YELLOWSTONE, THE WORLD'S FIRST NATIONAL PARK

Today, The Grandma has been watching some photos about her visit to Yellowstone National Park some years ago with the great companion of her closest friend, Joseph de Ca'th Lon.

Yellowstone National Park was established as the world's first national park on a day like today in 1872 and The Grandma wants to remember this important event.

Yellowstone National Park is an American national park located in the western United States, largely in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho.

It was established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.

Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world.

The park is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features, especially the Old Faithful geyser, one of its most popular. While it represents many types of biomes, the subalpine forest is the most abundant. It is part of the South Central Rockies forests ecoregion.

Although Native Americans have lived in the Yellowstone region for at least 11,000 years, aside from visits by mountain men during the early-to-mid-19th century, organized exploration did not begin until the late 1860s.

Management and control of the park originally fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of the Interior, the first Secretary of the Interior to supervise the park being Columbus Delano. However, the U.S. Army was eventually commissioned to oversee management of Yellowstone for a 30-year period between 1886 and 1916.

In 1917, administration of the park was transferred to the National Park Service, which had been created the previous year. Hundreds of structures have been built and are protected for their architectural and historical significance, and researchers have examined more than a thousand archaeological sites.

More information: National Park Service-Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park spans an area of 8,983 km2, comprising lakes, canyons, rivers, and mountain ranges.

Yellowstone Lake is one of the largest high-elevation lakes in North America and is centred over the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano on the continent. The caldera is considered a dormant volcano. It has erupted with tremendous force several times in the last two million years. Half of the world's geysers and hydrothermal features are in Yellowstone, fuelled by this ongoing volcanism. Lava flows and rocks from volcanic eruptions cover most of the land area of Yellowstone. The park is the centrepiece of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the largest remaining nearly-intact ecosystem in the Earth's northern temperate zone.

In 1978, Yellowstone was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Hundreds of species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have been documented, including several that are either endangered or threatened.

 

The vast forests and grasslands also include unique species of plants.

Yellowstone Park is the largest and most famous megafauna location in the contiguous United States. Grizzly bears, wolves, and free-ranging herds of bison and elk live in this park.

The Yellowstone Park bison herd is the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States. Forest fires occur in the park each year; in the large forest fires of 1988, nearly one third of the park was burnt.

Yellowstone has numerous recreational opportunities, including hiking, camping, boating, fishing, and sightseeing. Paved roads provide close access to the major geothermal areas as well as some lakes and waterfalls. During the winter, visitors often access the park by way of guided tours that use either snow coaches or snowmobiles.

The park contains the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, from which it takes its historical name. Near the end of the 18th century, French trappers named the river Roche Jaune, which is probably a translation of the Hidatsa name Mi tsi a-da-zi, Yellow Rock River. Later, American trappers rendered the French name in English as Yellow Stone. Although it is commonly believed that the river was named for the yellow rocks seen in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Native American name source is unclear.

More information: History

The human history of the park began at least 11,000 years ago when Indians began to hunt and fish in the region.

During the construction of the post office in Gardiner, Montana, in the 1950s, an obsidian point of Clovis origin was found that dated from approximately 11,000 years ago. These Paleo-Indians, of the Clovis culture, used the significant amounts of obsidian found in the park to make cutting tools and weapons.

Arrowheads made of Yellowstone obsidian have been found as far away as the Mississippi Valley, indicating that a regular obsidian trade existed between local tribes and tribes farther east. By the time white explorers first entered the region during the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805, they encountered the Nez Perce, Crow, and Shoshone tribes. While passing through present day Montana, the expedition members heard of the Yellowstone region to the south, but they did not investigate it.

In 1806, John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, left to join a group of fur trappers. After splitting up with the other trappers in 1807, Colter passed through a portion of what later became the park, during the winter of 1807–1808. He observed at least one geothermal area in the northeastern section of the park, near Tower Fall.

After surviving wounds he suffered in a battle with members of the Crow and Blackfoot tribes in 1809, Colter described a place of fire and brimstone that most people dismissed as delirium; the supposedly mystical place was nicknamed Colter's Hell.

Over the next 40 years, numerous reports from mountain men and trappers told of boiling mud, steaming rivers, and petrified trees, yet most of these reports were believed at the time to be myth.

After an 1856 exploration, mountain man Jim Bridger, also believed to be the first or second European American to have seen the Great Salt Lake, reported observing boiling springs, spouting water, and a mountain of glass and yellow rock. These reports were largely ignored because Bridger was a known spinner of yarns.

In 1859, a U.S. Army Surveyor named Captain William F. Raynolds embarked on a two-year survey of the northern Rockies. After wintering in Wyoming, in May 1860, Raynolds and his party-which included naturalist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden and guide Jim Bridger-attempted to cross the Continental Divide over Two Ocean Plateau from the Wind River drainage in northwest Wyoming.

Heavy spring snows prevented their passage, but had they been able to traverse the divide, the party would have been the first organized survey to enter the Yellowstone region. The American Civil War hampered further organized explorations until the late 1860s.

More information: Sunset

The first detailed expedition to the Yellowstone area was the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition of 1869, which consisted of three privately funded explorers. The Folsom party followed the Yellowstone River to Yellowstone Lake. The members of the Folsom party kept a journal- based on the information it reported, a party of Montana residents organized the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition in 1870.

It was headed by the surveyor-general of Montana Henry Washburn, and included Nathaniel P. Langford, who later became known as National Park Langford, and a U.S. Army detachment commanded by Lt. Gustavus Doane. The expedition spent about a month exploring the region, collecting specimens and naming sites of interest.

More information: Get Inspired Everyday

A Montana writer and lawyer named Cornelius Hedges, who had been a member of the Washburn expedition, proposed that the region should be set aside and protected as a national park; he wrote detailed articles about his observations for the Helena Herald newspaper between 1870 and 1871. Hedges essentially restated comments made in October 1865 by acting Montana Territorial Governor Thomas Francis Meagher, who had previously commented that the region should be protected. Others made similar suggestions.

In an 1871 letter from Jay Cooke to Ferdinand V. Hayden, Cooke wrote that his friend, Congressman William D. Kelley had also suggested Congress pass a bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever.

In 1871, eleven years after his failed first effort, Ferdinand V. Hayden was finally able to explore the region. With government sponsorship, he returned to the region with a second, larger expedition, the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. 

He compiled a comprehensive report, including large-format photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran. The report helped to convince the U.S. Congress to withdraw this region from public auction.

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication law that created Yellowstone National Park.

More information: Smithsonian Magazine

 Yellowstone wildlife is treasured.
We understand that.
We'll manage them in a way that addresses that sensitivity.

Steve Bullock

THE GREAT FIRE IN 1910 & YELLOWSTONE FIRES IN 1988

Memorial to lives lost in the Great Fire of 1910

Today, The Grandma is travelling from Cadaqués to Vielha e Mijaran, the capital of Aran. She is going to visit Víctor, her friend who is spending his holidays in this beautiful Occitan valley.

The trip is a fantastic way to discover and contemplate the wonderful landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees and it has been impossible to think in the fires that are destroying Amazonias in Brazil and Gran Canaria one of the islands of the Canary Islands, a natural disaster that can affect two amazing natural sites, Tamadaba and Inagua.

The Grandma remembers when she was visiting these wonderful islands with her closer friends some months ago and she has also remembered two important fires that affected British Columbia in Canada and Yellowstone National Park in the USA just on a day like today, August 20, on 1910 and 1988.

Protecting nature is a hard and necessary work that must be done. Environmental policies must take care of our natural treasures because they are essential to our planet development. We must think that we are a part of the planet not the owners, not its destroyers.

Before remembering these fires, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 13. Images, diagrams and titles (II) (Spanish Version)

The Great Fire of 1910, also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil's Broom fire, was a wildfire in the western United States that burned 12,100 km2 in North Idaho and Western Montana, with extensions into Eastern Washington and Southeast British Columbia, in the summer of 1910. 

The area burned included large parts of the Bitterroot, Cabinet, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Kaniksu, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark, Lolo, and St. Joe National Forests.

More information: Forest History Society

A great number of problems contributed to the destruction caused by the Great Fire of 1910. The wildfire season started early that year because the winter of 1909-1910 and the spring and summer of 1910 were extremely dry, and the summer sufficiently hot to have been described as like no others.

The drought resulted in forests that were teeming with dry fuel, which had previously grown up on abundant autumn and winter moisture.

The 1910 Fires

Hundreds of fires were ignited by hot cinders flung from locomotives, sparks, lightning, and backfiring crews. By mid-August, there were 1,000 to 3,000 fires burning in Idaho, Montana, and Washington.

August 20 (Saturday) brought hurricane-force winds to the interior Northwest, whipping the hundreds of small fires into one or two much larger blazing infernos. Such a conflagration was impossible to fight; there were too few men and supplies. The United States Forest Service, then called the National Forest Service, was only five years old at the time and unprepared for the possibilities of the dry summer or a fire of this magnitude, though all summer it had been urgently recruiting as many men as possible to fight the hundreds of fires already burning, many with little forestry or firefighting experience.

More information: Spokesman

Smoke from the fire was said to have been seen as far east as Watertown, New York, and as far south as Denver, Colorado. It was reported that at night, five hundred miles (800 km) out into the Pacific Ocean, ships could not navigate by the stars because the sky was cloudy with smoke.

The extreme scorching heat of the sudden blowup can be attributed to the expansive Western white pine forests that covered much of northern Idaho at the time. Hydrocarbons in the trees' resinous sap boiled out and created a cloud of highly flammable gas that blanketed hundreds of square miles, which then spontaneously detonated dozens of times, each time sending tongues of flame thousands of feet into the sky and creating a rolling wave of fire that destroyed anything and everything in its path.

The fire burned over two days on the weekend of August 20–21, after strong winds caused numerous smaller fires to combine into a firestorm of unprecedented size.

More information: Popular Mechanics

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 collectively formed the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Starting as many smaller individual fires, the flames quickly spread out of control due to drought conditions and increasing winds, combining into one large conflagration which burned for several months.

The fires almost destroyed two major visitor destinations and, on September 8, 1988, the entire park closed to all non-emergency personnel for the first time in its history. Only the arrival of cool and moist weather in the late autumn brought the fires to an end. A total of 3,213 km2, or 36 percent of the park was affected by the wildfires.

Thousands of firefighters fought the fires, assisted by dozens of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft which were used for water and fire retardant drops. At the peak of the effort, more than 9,000 firefighters were assigned to the park.

Yellowstone National Park Fire, 1988

Before the late 1960s, fires were generally believed to be detrimental for parks and forests, and management policies were aimed at suppressing fires as quickly as possible.

However, as the beneficial ecological role of fire became better understood in the decades before 1988, a policy was adopted of allowing natural fires to burn under controlled conditions, which proved highly successful in reducing the area lost annually to wildfires.

In contrast, in 1988, Yellowstone was overdue for a large fire, and, in the exceptionally dry summer, the many smaller controlled fires combined. The fires burned discontinuously, leaping from one patch to another, leaving intervening areas untouched. Intense fires swept through some regions, burning everything in their paths.

Tens of millions of trees and countless plants were killed by the wildfires, and some regions were left looking blackened and dead. However, more than half of the affected areas were burned by ground fires, which did less damage to hardier tree species. Not long after the fires ended, plant and tree species quickly reestablished themselves, and natural plant regeneration has been highly successful.

More information: National Park Service

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 were unprecedented in the history of the National Park Service, and many questioned existing fire management policies.

Almost 250 different fires started in Yellowstone and the surrounding National Forests between June and August. Seven of them were responsible for 95% of the total burned area.

On August 20, the single worst day of the fires and later dubbed Black Saturday, more than 610 km2 were consumed during one of many intense fires.

The Red fire started near Lewis Lake on July 1, and like the Shoshone fire, advanced little for several weeks. The fire then moved northeast on July 19, and combined with the Shoshone fire in August. As these two fires advanced towards the Grant Village area, evacuations were ordered so fire fighting crews could concentrate on structure protection. In the midst of a large lodgepole pine forest, the Grant Village complex was the first major tourist area impacted that season. A number of small structures and some of the campground complex were destroyed. After the Red and Shoshone fires combined, they were referred to as the Shoshone fire, since it was much larger.

The third largest fire was the Huck fire, which started after a tree fell on a power line on August 20 near Flagg Ranch. This fire burned primarily in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway, crossing Yellowstone's southern border on August 30.

More information: My Yellowstone

Yellowstone wildlife is treasured. We understand that.

We'll manage them in a way that addresses that sensitivity.

Steve Bullock