A collection of entertaining accounts of travel through Yellowstone from 1871, before it was a tourist destination, until 1916, when autos were allowed into the park. The adventurers include an intrepid mother who posted the sign "Park or Bust" on her family's covered wagon, a strong cyclist and hikers who traversed the whole park for fun, and an expert guide on skis. These travelers experience the geysers without boardwalks, bushwhack trails before maps, handle horses, and encounter bears. Featuring a color gallery of 26 watercolor paintings from 1884 by Thomas Henry Thomas, shown for the first time outside Wales.

After its establishment in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was sufficiently famous that numerous people risked bear maulings, Indian attacks, and geyser burns just to glimpse its wonders. A surprising number of those who survived wrote about their adventures. The best of these stories are collected in Adventures in Yellowstone. Presenting a dozen narratives—journal entries, letters, and diaries—with an introduction to each, and with historic photographs, postcards, and woodcuts, this book is the essential compilation of the most gripping first-person accounts of the early years of America’s most cherished national park.

The first and oldest national park in the world can be enjoyed mile by mile with this complete travel guide. Along with fascinating facts and anecdotes, readers will learn of Yellowstone's geyser basins and the frequency of the geysers, out-of-the-way hikes, and flora and fauna. Easy-to-understand scientific explanations and diagrams complement an array of short walks, the right season for camping, and the park's campgrounds and facilities. Updated road logs highlight more than 100 historical points of interest, including the often misidentified locale from which artist Thomas Moran painted his "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" masterpiece and where five stagecoach robberies occurred along the Grand Loop Road. New text examines areas that have changed in recent years, including the reconstructed Canyon-to-Dunraven Pass and the newly completed North Rim Drive at the Grand Canyon. Additionally, numerous new photographs feature historical and contemporary images.

In the summer of 1883 Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq spent ten days on horseback in Yellowstone, the world's first national park, exploring myriad natural wonders: astonishing geysers, majestic waterfalls, the vast lake, and the breathtaking canyon. He also recorded the considerable human activity, including the rampant vandalism. Leclercq's account of his travels is itself a small marvel blending natural history, firsthand impressions, scientific lore, and anecdote. Along with his observations on the park's long-rumored fountains of boiling water and mountains of glass, Leclercq describes camping near geysers, washing clothes in a bubbling hot spring, and meeting such diverse characters as local guides and tourists from the United States and Europe. Notables including former president Ulysses S. Grant and then-president Chester A. Arthur were also in the park that summer to inaugurate the newly completed leg of the Northern Pacific Railroad. A sensation in Europe, the book was never published in English. This deft translation at long last makes available to English-speaking readers a masterpiece of western American travel writing that is a fascinating historical document in its own right.

The chilling tome that launched an entire genre of books about the often gruesome but always tragic ways people have died in our national parks, this updated edition of the classic includes calamities in Yellowstone from the past sixteen years, including the infamous grizzly bear attacks in the summer of 2011 as well as a fatal hot springs accident in 2000. In these accounts, written with sensitivity as cautionary tales about what to do and what not to do in one of our wildest national parks, Whittlesey recounts deaths ranging from tragedy to folly—from being caught in a freak avalanche to the goring of a photographer who just got a little too close to a bison. Armchair travelers and park visitors alike will be fascinated by this important book detailing the dangers awaiting in our first national park.

Since 1872, visitors have flocked to Yellowstone National Park to gaze in awe at its dramatic geysers, stunning mountains, and impressive wildlife. Yet more than a century of archaeological research shows that the wild landscape has a long history of human presence. In fact, Native American people have hunted bison and bighorn sheep, fished for cutthroat trout, and gathered bitterroot and camas bulbs here for at least 11,000 years, and twenty-six tribes claim cultural association with Yellowstone today. In Before Yellowstone, Douglas MacDonald tells the story of these early people as revealed by archaeological research into nearly 2,000 sites—many of which he helped survey and excavate. He describes and explains the significance of archaeological areas such as the easy-to-visit Obsidian Cliff, where hunters obtained volcanic rock to make tools and for trade, and Yellowstone Lake, a traditional place for gathering edible plants. MacDonald helps readers understand the archaeological methods used and the limits of archaeological knowledge. From Clovis points associated with mammoth hunting to stone circles marking the sites of tipi lodges, Before Yellowstone brings to life a fascinating story of human engagement with this stunning landscape.