Yellowstone Park Birthday Party Dimmed byThreats

The Old Faithful geyser is the enduring and iconic image associated with Yellowstone National Park in images like this classic Art Deco style National Park Service poster.

Today is a milestone in conservation/preservation history, one with deep personal connections for me.  On March 1, 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the act creating Yellowstone National Park.  It was the first National Park not only in the U.S. but in the world. It became a model for conservation and habitat protection as well as an example of the huge economic impact on local economies such parks could provide.

The future of the Park, and other public lands especially in the West are in jeopardy as a radical movement to return Federal land to the states or be put up for sale for grazing, lumbering, and mineral exploitation gains steam.  That once fringe idea promoted by Randist Libertarians and Western militia groups was endorsed by the Republican Party in its 2016 platform and has substantial support in the GOP-led House of Representatives and the Trump administration which has repudiated the long Republican tradition of conservationism and ecological concern that stretched from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.

Trump's Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on a winter photo-op visit to Yellowstone Park.  The Secretary claims a third of his employees are disloyal and has gutted senior conservation management and science staff, including the once politically off limits Park Service.

Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, is a former Montana Congressman who once opposed the movement to cede or sell Federal lands.  But he was always an advocate for opening up those lands to private exploitation.  Once in office he gutted senior levels of conservation management and environmental scientists, resulting in chaos and mass resignations especially after he told a Petroleum industry convention that, “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag.”  Others fled after gag orders were issued on discussing scientific findings.  Among Zinke’s notable accomplishments were massive reductions to National Monuments expanded or created by the Obama administration including Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Cascade–Siskiyou.

Although Zinke is not ready to challenge the boundary integrity of wildly popular iconic National Parks like, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon, he has signaled support for mining and timbering right up to Park boundaries, as well as expanded grazing and selective culling logging within the parks, expanded roads, and development of new private resorts and accommodations.  An avid big game trophy hunter, he has also suggested opening sports hunting, rather than cull killings, in some parks. 

Movement environmentalists and more traditional conservationists consider Zinke, the Trump administration, and the rape-the-land-before-the-apocalypse crowd that backs them as significant threats to the long-term health of the Parks.

The Yellowstone Park occupies the northwest corner of Wyoming and strips of Montana and Idaho.  It contains the most active area of geothermal vents—hot springs, geysers, mud pots—in North America. 

The region was a center of trade from Clovis Culture era for fine arrowheads made from local obsidian which have been found at archeological sites along Mississippi River in Missouri and Illinois.  Much later it was a hunting ground for Native American tribes, notably the Nez Perce, Shoshone, Crow and Blackfoot. 

A painting of trapper/explorer John Coulter being captured by the Blackfoot in what is now the Park.  The tribe gave him a sporting chance of sorts--they stripped him naked and gave him a head start running barefoot then pursued him with their own best runners.  By grit and ruse Coulter eluded them over hundreds of miles of mountains and prairie finally stumbling into St. Louis with raving tales of what would become known as Coulter's Hell. 

In the winter of 1807-08 John Coulter, a young trapper who left the Lewis and Clark Expedition in search of furs, encountered some of the geothermal sites.  After he was injured in a fight with the Blackfoot and made an epic naked run over hundreds of miles to escape, he stumbled into Saint Louis.  His tales of boiling mud and water shooting out of the ground were widely dismissed as the ravings of a mad man and derided as Coulter’s Hell.

The legendary Jim Bridger himself confirmed the reports after an 1856 expedition causing the government to decide on an official survey.  In 1860 Bridger guided a small party led by Captain William F. Reynolds and including geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden which tried to enter the area from the Wind River Range but was turned back by heavy snow. 

The Civil War prevented further exploration until the privately funded Cook, Folsom, and Peterson party followed the Yellowstone River to Lake Yellowstone.  Their notes guided another expedition by Montana Surveyor General Henry Washburn, Army Lt. Gustavus Doan, and Nathaniel P. Langford.  Reports from that trip generated support in Montana for somehow protecting the unusual area.  

The Heyden Expedition in camp.  Photo by William Henry Jackson, 1842.

In 1871, eleven years after his first failed attempt, F. V. Hayden was finally able to get into the area as the head of the Hayden Geological Survey.  His party included pioneering landscape photographer William Henry Jackson and landscape painter Thomas Moran.  Hayden’s official report and the striking images of Jackson and Morn convinced Congress to withdraw the area from sale as public land and to create the new National Park.  

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by Hayden expedition painter Thomas Moran.

Langford was appointed the first Superintendent of the Park but Congress did not vote him any funding or staff.  In fact they didn’t even pay his salary.  Langford was helpless as poachers roamed the Park threatening the large herds of elk, mule deer, antelope, and bison. Langford was reduced to pleading for funds and trying to arouse public support. 

In 1875 an Army expedition under Colonel William Ludlow reported the wide-spread decimation of wild life by hide hunters.  His report caused the removal of the hapless Langford.  His replacement, Philetus Norris was granted a salary and a small budget with which he built crude roads into the Park and some permanent facilities.  Despite the addition of Harry Yount, sometimes called the first Park Ranger, as official game keeper in 1880, there was still not enough staff to prevent poaching.  

The second Superintendent of the Park Philetus Norris looking every inch the daring Mountain Man.

Native Americans, including a small band of Shoshone who lived within the park boundaries and others who used it as traditional hunting ground were excluded from the Park.  Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce was pursued across the Park in their attempt to reach Canada. 

In 1886, with the Indian Wars largely behind them, the U.S. Army was charged with policing the Park and preventing poaching.  They built their first post at Mammoth Hot Springs and later established Fort Yellowstone.  They slowly made progress against poachers while creating policies enabling other visitors.  

Company D, 6th Cavalry at Liberty Cap, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, 1893.

Tourism to the Park grew, especially after the Northern Pacific created access on a spur from Livingston, Montana in the 1880s and the Union Pacific connected via West Yellowstone, Montana 1908.  Visitors traveled the park by stage coach or horseback and could stay at crude campgrounds and rustic lodges or beginning in 1908, the historic Old Faithful Inn.  By 1915 1000 automobiles a year were making the trip. 

Rustic Old Faithful Inn with stage coaches or Talley Hos which carried tourists on tours of the Park in an early hand tinted post card.

The newly created National Park Service assumed control of the Park from the Army in 1918. 

During the Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built the current road system, visitor centers, and improved campgrounds. 

Touring the Park by motor car in 1925 was promoted in the brochure.

In August of 1959 the Park was the epicenter of an earthquake measured between 7.3 and 7.8 on the Richter scale. The quake caused a huge landslide resulting in over 28 fatalities, blocked the flow of the Madison River resulting in the creation of Quake Lake, and left $11 million in damage.   German scientists studying the quake have recently concluded that the event was one that was likely caused by human activity.

The Hebgen Lake area in the northwest corner of the Park has also experienced earthquakes again in 1964, 1974, 1977 and 1985. The Park remains a seismic hot spot.  A swarm of moderate quakes hit the park in October 2012. 

The whole area essentially sits on top of an enormous super volcano whose pressure dome is growing.  When it eventually bursts, the eruption could be one of the greatest and most devastating of all time.

Today the Park boasts of having saved the bison from extinction—the largest surviving herd found refuge and protection within the park and has been used to repopulate the species elsewhere.  In a controversial move, wolves were re-introduced and have successfully rebounded. 

Local ranchers have pushed back on both preservation efforts, shooting bison and wolves that wander out of the Park.  The state of Wyoming has even asked the Park Service to allow hunting of wolves in the park and bounties on ears.

The Park draws over three million visitors a year.  Despite this more than a decade of deep cuts to the National Park Service has left facilities in deteriorating conditions.  Damage to the ecosystem by the exhaust of nearly a million vehicles a year has caused the Park Service to limit the total number admitted each year and implemented steep visitor fees. But with the formerly excellent rail and motor coach services to the Park gone, that limits its accessibility to many families

On a personal note, my father W.M. Murfin was licensed as a hunter to thin the elk herds—their natural predators having all been eradicated—and ran a guide service to the Park out of his West Yellowstone sporting goods store 1946-48.  We traveled frequently in the Park with him in the 1950’s when he was Secretary of the Wyoming Travel Commission.  Somewhere there are black and white snap shots of Old Faithful erupting that I captured on my Kodak Brownie.