It runs 115 miles across Yellowstone Park. This is the ridge line of the North American continent, the mountainous point where the rivers on the west side drain into the Pacific Ocean and those on the East into the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. The historic photo below comes from the National Park Service.Īs we travelled along Highway 191 towards Old Faithful Inn, we soon came upon a sign for the Continental Divide.

They would then cut the slim tops to use, assembling a number of poles into a conical shape which would be covered traditionally with buffalo skin, later with cotton canvas. The tribes in the Yellowstone region – the Nez Perce, Shoshones and others – would fell the lodgepole pine trees, remove the branches and immediately de-bark the trunk. Their tall, slender, straight trunks hint at the use evoked in their common name, as traditional supports for tipis or Indian lodges. Lodgepole pines form dense stands that monoculture habit (along with increasingly hot summers) has also contributed to the devastation of millions of acres of forest caused by infestation of mountain pine beetle over the past decade. Twenty-eight years later, the next generation of lodgepole pines ( Pinus contorta) had grown almost tall enough to hide the snags left over from the fire. Having left the skeletal trees of the ongoing Berry Fire behind (as I wrote in my Teton post, the fire’s resurgence would close this route into Yellowstone within days of our being there), the view through the bus window was nonetheless a powerful reminder of the massive 1988 forest fire that saw 794,000 acres of the park burn, almost one-third of the park. Grant (long before the 1916 formation of the National Park Service itself). It’s also the oldest, signed into law in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Here is the second part of my travel journal, after my first blog on the Tetons.Īs we drove into Yellowstone from Grand Teton National Park in early September 2016, we were excited to be visiting the most iconic of all American national parks. And yes, it was simply amazing.īut perhaps I should back up to the beginning. But it is the perfect word for Yellowstone National Park which, in our few days there, gave us an “experience for the senses” that surpassed anything I’d seen before.

It’s only in the past few hundred years that we used it to describe something extraordinary or spookily metaphysical. The word’s roots could not be more down to earth: from the Greek phainomenon, which means simply “that which is seen” or “that which is experienced with the senses”. I never use the word “phenomenal” in everyday parlance, the way kids use it to mean cool or amazing, or the way sportscasters turn it into the noun “phenom”, to mean a prodigious athlete who outperforms his or her peers.

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