After a couple of days hiking around Yellowstone National Park, the sounds of mud pools bubbling away and geysers spouting water into the sky become strangely familiar. The rotten egg smells are around almost every corner. The sights of prismatic pools, coloured rocks and geysers are found nowhere else on Earth in this concentration. And travelling off-season, even the sightings of bison outnumber the other hikers you might see along the way.
Truly one of the world’s natural wonders, Yellowstone is itself part of a giant volcanic caldera and one day, sometime in the next 100,000 years according to predictions, it will erupt and take a large part of the western US with it.
One warning about visiting Yellowstone too early in life.. any other geothermal area just doesn’t live up to expectations once you’ve seen this one.
(May 2000)
Tipping: when and how much is right?