The Travelling Celts

Denise and the three bears

by Michael Cameron

Yellowstone National Park is an American national park located in the western United States, with parts in Wyoming, 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 Old Faithful geyser, one of its most popular. While it represents many types of biomes, the subalpine forest is the most abundant.

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.

We visited not long after a forest fire, so parts were pretty desolate. We also experienced movement, a car park we had used the day before had an almighty crack down the middle and was not unexpectedly cordened off.

The Ranger's talks each day were interesting, although the jokes began to wear rhin, as each repeated the same lines. One mentioned that bears had been spotted in the north end, a two hour drive from where we were. Denise was keen, so up early the next morning to the place where they had been seen. Yup there they were Mother Grizzly and two cubs - at least a mile away, but other tourists were happy to let Denise view them through their monoculars and telescopes. She was ecstatic, I went back to bed!

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