The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsHappy 150th birthday to the nation's (and the world's) first National Park, Yellowstone!
from The Good News Network... This national park was created March 1,1872
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/events070301/
>Known by many names over the years, from Mi tsi a-da-zi, to Colters Hell to Wonderland, its collection of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud pools, nestled among pine forests, river gullies, and wide plains, is totally unique in the world. Spilling over the northern border of Wyoming into Idaho and Montana, and reaching down across Jackson Hole, the Grand Tetons, and the surrounding foothills, Yellowstone lies at the heart of the GYE or Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the largest remaining nearly-intact ecosystem in the Earths northern Temperate Zone.
During expeditions across the west during the early 1800s, reports occasionally came back of a place where rivers boiled, the ground shifted and melted away, and trees turned to white rocks. They were dismissed as fairy tales as John Colters Hell based on the mans stories. Eventually mountain man Jim Bridger reported the same, but it wasnt until Nathaniel P. Langfords expedition following the Civil War that people began to consider it reality. His accounts, published as The Wonders of Yellowstone, paired with the corresponding account of Truman C. Everts, who got completely lost for 37 days in what would become the park, and who fell into hot mud pools, was chased by wolves, and had to hide up a tree from a mountain lion, convinced the legislative branch a set aside an enormous chunk of that region as a nations park.
27 Native American Tribes have historic and modern connections to the land and its resources. For over 10,000 years before Yellowstone became a national park, it was a place where Native Americans lived, hunted, fished, gathered plants, quarried obsidian, and used thermal waters for religious and medicinal purposes. Today its one of the only places in North America one can find both wolves, and grizzly bears.<
There's a bit more text, access to a video and artwork/photos at the link. I've
enjoyed many trips to Yellowstone as boy and man and recommend it as a
destination for anyone who enjoys nature.
SergeStorms
(18,903 posts)A beautiful place, a wonder of the world (in my opinion, anyway).
7wo7rees
(5,128 posts)And, oh yeah, thank you for posting this event!!
EYESORE 9001
(25,812 posts)A one-day trip through Yellowstone nearly 45 years ago wasnt nearly enough for me.
Magoo48
(4,659 posts)yellowdogintexas
(22,119 posts)I am a National Park Junkie, and Yellowstone is my favorite park of the ones I have been able to visit. I seriously doubt any can top it, although Mammoth Cave comes very close.
I have a great and lifelong love affair with Mammoth Cave National Park, being from Kentucky. It's also where I met my husband and spent many wonderful hours with a fabulous group of intrepid explorers, some of whom became lifelong friends
The US is fortunate to have the largest thermal area, the largest river canyon and the longest cave system in the world (425 mapped miles with no end in sight). It's possible that Everglades NP is the largest of its kind but I am not sure.