Special Edition: Yellowstone - Thin Crust
Yellowstone national park // Beyond the turnouts
Nights out: 0 Miles driven: Too Many Soundtrack: Bleachers - A stranger desired
Lots of time fishing, sitting, and appreciating.
Yellowstone visit: 13
I make a habit of going to Yellowstone National Park damn near every fall. I love everything that the park stands for: the first and finest national park. It feels big, wild, vast, and all at once incredibly safe, overregulated, overcrowded, and commercialized.
Tour buses pull up to the same half-dozen turnouts to harass the bison, bears, and park rangers. But can you blame them? It’s an incredible sight if you haven’t seen it, and it takes buses to get that many enthusiastic people into the park. Clown cars just can’t hold enough.
Despite the crowds, it’s usually pretty easy to get away from people and find something closer to the Yellowstone the Hayden Expedition encountered 150 years ago. The place is huge. Go somewhere other than Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic Spring, and you’ll likely find some solitude.
I’m lucky enough to have seen Old Faithful be pretty damn faithful at least two dozen times, so I can afford the opportunity to find a calm, quiet place and just sit. And that’s exactly what this trip turned into.
This trip was about looking beyond the surface. It was earlier than I normally visit and much warmer than usual. The animals must have been just as annoyed with the buses as I was and found their own peace and quiet. I don’t remember ever seeing fewer animals than I did on this trip.
But Yellowstone isn’t all about apex predators and large, hooved mammals. There’s so much texture, mood, grandeur, and feeling hidden just beneath the crust. It’s just easy to overlook all that stuff when shit is literally exploding out of the ground all around you.
So here’s to the lesser seen. Here’s to looking beyond the turnouts and seeing the park.
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Skip the biggest attractions during peak hours and spend more time away from the main boardwalks and roadside wildlife jams. Yellowstone is enormous, and solitude gets much easier to find once you move beyond the handful of famous stops.
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Some of the park’s best details are easy to miss: geothermal textures, burned forests, mineral-stained ground, quiet river corridors, small thermal features, changing weather, and lesser-used trails and pullouts.
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Absolutely. The headline attractions are only a tiny part of the park. Repeat visits are often more rewarding because you can slow down, explore quieter areas, and notice the textures, moods, wildlife, and landscapes that get overshadowed on a first trip.
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Late spring and early fall are generally quieter than peak summer, although weather and wildlife activity can vary dramatically. Early mornings and evenings are also the best times to experience popular areas with fewer people.
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Yellowstone combines huge wildlife habitat with one of the most active geothermal landscapes on Earth. Geysers and hot springs get most of the attention, but the park’s forests, rivers, volcanic geology, weather, and scale are just as much a part of its character.
Keep Wandering
For more quiet landscapes and small details, wander through Wild Witness: Uintas, Perfectly Level, or Eagle Canyon, where the good stuff tends to show up after the obvious view is already behind you.
