On August 18 my husband and I (editor Beth Chapple) entered Yellowstone via the West Entrance after flying our Evektor Harmony light sport airplane into West Yellowstone airport for our first time. We had completed the flying all in one day from our home in Grant County, eastern Washington, because weather forecasts were predicting we would not be able to cross the Rocky Mountain passes if we waited too long. Since it was a day before our first in-park lodging reservation at Grant Village, we had the evening to spend in town. After dinner at the Yellowstone Beer Company we walked to the edge of town across Boundary Street behind the Wild West Pizzeria and walked to the bank of the Madison River on Riverside Trail. We weren’t the only ones enjoying the pleasant temperature, and it isn’t a good place to see wildlife. But the river was pretty and so were the flowers. We later learned that this flower at least is an invasive one, Dalmation toadflax, introduced from Europe.

The trip began in earnest the next day, when my mother, author Janet Chapple, got a ride through the West Entrance with our friend Mike and geologist Jo-Ann Sherwin.

Planting the seed

“Hidden” Crystal Falls on Cascade Creek. Photo: Kathleen O’Brien, October 2023.

My husband and I live in Plainfield, Connecticut. We made two quick trips to Yellowstone before retiring; the first was in 1973 as newlyweds and the second in 1987 with our three sons. We saw little during those trips, but the seed was planted.

Start of an addiction

Thank you to both

Received April 25, 2024, from Kathleen O’Brien.

IN THE GUIDEBOOK

The place to spot Crystal Falls is described on page 175, the hike to see it much closer up, on page 178, Yellowstone Treasures 6th edition.

Editor Beth Chapple at Artist Point, one of the best views of Lower Falls, August 10, 2022.

News about YellowstoneTreasures.com

Sprucing up the website provokes wonderful memories. As I was working today to update the nuggets of content and the informative blog posts on YellowstoneTreasures.com for this year’s visitors, I discovered that the “Six Hikes Near Yellowstone Lake” nugget was written exactly ten years ago to the day. That’s almost half the time since the first edition of the guidebook came out in 2002!

Trip Report

Allow me to take a trip down memory lane. Ten years ago this month my husband Niklas and I got to take a trip to Yellowstone because I was attending the annual conference of the Ninety-Nines (international women pilots), held in Bozeman, MT. A highlight of the trip was flying over Yellowstone Park for the bird’s-eye view! We did an early morning pre-brief at friendly Summit Aviation at the Bozeman International Airport in Belgrade. And then Niklas and I got to ride as passengers on Lewie Wiese’s airplane. It’s the best way to see Grand Prismatic Spring. But the flight was over all too soon.

At Country Bookshelf in Bozeman I snapped a photo of their staff pick: Yellowstone Treasures! And here I am at Artist Point on August 10, 2013. The conference only included a one-day bus trip but that was still fun. By chance our guide was Orville Bach, Jr., former ranger extraordinaire and author of Exploring the Yellowstone Backcountry, among other books.

Book Review

Since I’m sure it’s too small for you to read, here is the text on the Staff Pick card.

“Yellowstone Treasures” by Janet Chapple. Absolutely the best guide to Yellowstone available today. Excellent maps of each road section. Good descriptions of sights and things to see. Lots of background information on history and national history. I live here and I carry it whenever I go to the Park. Excellent!!
Nick

ON THIS WEBSITE: Our website is really chock full of hike ideas and geyser descriptions. If you haven’t been here before, you might want to start by sifting through the Nuggets, short articles about park features, animals, geysers, and plants.

Copyright Beth Chapple. Photos by Beth Chapple and Niklas Dellby.

This fox was spotted tracking a snowshoe hare from atop the Roosevelt Arch at the North Entrance.

Despite best efforts to fix up a wastewater situation stemming from the June 2022 floods, the park concessionaire Xanterra announced that Mammoth Hotel lodging and dining will not open this winter, though they have a ski shop, tours, take-out food, and hot drinks for the winter. Perhaps you can arrange accommodations in the town of Gardiner outside the North Entrance instead. Within the park, Old Faithful Snow Lodge is the best place to stay from December 15, when roads open to oversnow travel by snowmobile and snowcoach, to early March, when the roads close for preparing for the spring opening of the park. Always be sure to check the Park Roads page before you go.

Opening up for summer

The first roads are due to open to wheeled traffic on April 21, weather permitting, which is a bit later than some recent years. The first hotel rooms and cabins to open will be at Mammoth on April 28, Old Faithful Inn on May 5, and then Lake Hotel and Canyon Lodges on May 12. These dates are quite a bit earlier than last year, but of course they are subject to change due to weather. Most of the restaurants and cafeterias in the park open for either take-out or dining in once the lodging opens. See the Stay and Dine tabs on Xanterra’s YellowstoneNationalParkLodges.com website for more.

Where to camp

Remember it’s not allowed to camp in your car or by the road in this national park. Fishing Bridge RV Park’s extensive renovation is complete, with new and larger sites, more showers and laundry facilities, and other improvements. Here are the opening dates or first available dates for the campgrounds you can reserve through Xanterra:

Madison Campground – May 5
Fishing Bridge RV Park – May 12
Canyon Campground – sold out through the end of May
Bridge Bay Campground – May 26
Grant Village Campground – sold out through June 8

Campgrounds run by the National Park Service, such as Tower Fall Campground, are reservable, but reservations for summer 2023 are not yet open on Recreation.gov. The flooding in June 2022 caused infrastructure damage to the following campgrounds, which will remain closed until further notice: Indian Creek, Mammoth, Pebble Creek, and Slough Creek.

So you can see that planning for your trip is both necessary and more complicated than it used to be. Time to get started!

Photo credit: Yellowstone Forever, January 22, 2017

Beth (left) and Janet Chapple posing with Lower Falls at Artist Point

On our first full day in the park we had the good fortune to witness Great Fountain Geyser. We realized from the prediction on the signboard we would need to drive around Firehole Lake Drive a second time, and then it worked out perfectly. The benches were full for Great Fountain’s thrilling show, and nearby White Dome erupted as well for us shortly afterward.

We went to several of Canyon’s beautifully expanded overlooks. Janet could use her walker on the nicely graded path to Lookout Point. Other members of our party took advantage of the half-mile walk from our cabin to Grand View as many as three times during our two-night stay! We found that early and late daylight hours were best for avoiding crowds.

On July 2, Niklas and I hiked from a Grand Loop Road turnout to see Black Sand Pool, Punch Bowl Spring, and Daisy Geyser, predicted for 4:30 pm plus or minus 20 minutes. It was breezy with nearby thunderstorms that happily did not come near. We were still approaching when Daisy started to erupt in its famous diagonal way at 4:09 pm. Only three other people witnessed the eruption with us. On the way back we sought out Demon’s Cave with its dangerous overhanging ledge, but it looks like people have thrown sticks in over the years.

We admired all the easily accessible waterfalls on our route. Besides Lower and Upper Falls of the Yellowstone at Canyon, that means Gibbon Falls, Kepler Cascades, Virginia Cascade, and Lewis Falls. At Lewis we walked along the bridge and also admired the downstream meadow and view of the mountains across the road to the south.

The morning we were moving from Old Faithful Inn to the Canyon Lodge cabins was our best chance to see Mammoth Hot Springs, we decided. The road closure this season between Tower and Canyon made us have to repeat a road segment instead of going around the upper loop road, but we stopped at different points, such as Gibbon Falls on the way north and Apollonaris Spring on the way south (more about that cold spring in a future blog post). At Mammoth the fun parts were walking the boardwalk stairs down from our parking at the Upper Terrace Drive to see Cupid and Canary Springs from various angles and then picnicking on the grass outside the chapel.

Micah sporting his new Junior Ranger patch in the lobby of Old Faithful Inn

Welcome to National Park Week! Every day during April 17-25, 2021, has a special theme related to US national parks. This Saturday features junior rangers, a program focused on school-age kids but open to people of any age. See the NPS site for National Junior Ranger Day for information about a concert and loads of activities throughout the country and virtually from home on April 24. Since this is the shoulder season in Yellowstone between when roads were open for oversnow travel and plowed for regular vehicles, no special activities are happening there this week. Perhaps you have planned a cycling trip before the roads are crowded with cars: bike in the park! At the moment there’s a mix of rain and snow in the park, with temperatures up to 50°F (10°C).

In honor of National Park Week, Granite Peak Publications is making a donation to the National Park Foundation, the official nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. As publisher of the Yellowstone Treasures guidebook, we also donate regularly to Yellowstone Forever. These two partners of Yellowstone National Park raise money for education, maintenance, new Canyon viewpoints, and the Yellowstone Wolf Impact Study, among other programs. We also donated two books to the Conservation Northwest auction this week.

The junior ranger patch for Yellowstone

Photo credits: Suzanne Cane took these photos in 2015. They are featured on pages 16 and 43 of Yellowstone Treasures, updated sixth edition.

Old Faithful Inn interior, showing the great fireplace and balconies

Various lodges and cabins will open during May, but Old Faithful Inn rooms do not open until June 4, Grant Village lodge rooms not until June 18. Most of the restaurants and cafeterias in the park will still be limited to take-out rather than dining in. The gift shops will open on the same schedule as the lodging. See Xanterra’s update page on YellowstoneNationalParkLodges.com for more.

Camping

Due to construction, three campgrounds will remain closed for all of 2021: Norris, Tower Fall, and Fishing Bridge RV Park. Here are the opening dates for the four campgrounds you can reserve through Xanterra:

• Madison Campground – May 14
• Canyon Campground – May 21
• Bridge Bay Campground – June 11
• Grant Village Campground – June 18

Bighorn rams at Slough Creek (click to enlarge)

Photo credits: Old Faithful Inn fireplace from Bat’s Alley, NPS photo; Bighorn rams at Slough Creek, NPS photo taken by Peggy Olliff in February 2015, which you can find on page 204 of Yellowstone Treasures, updated sixth edition.

Lower third of the “Yellowstone National Park Trails Map,” prepared by Alice Parmelee Morris in 1917, one of five wonderful maps reproduced in Through Early Yellowstone

To celebrate Women’s History Month, here’s an excerpt about a remarkable woman, Alice Parmelee Morris. This story was originally published in the New York Times in 1918, two years after she made the trip.

Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman

Mrs. Robert C. Morris Has Laid Out Complete System of New Paths for the Government, Opening the Park’s Wild Beauty to Horseback Riders

It is almost two years since, in the words of official statement, “the Yellowstone National Park was opened to automobiles,” and the fear has been general that the coming of the motor cars and the passing of the ancient stage coaches would rob that wild and magnificent mountain land of much of its charm, and, indeed, of its enjoyment. But the fear that “the Yellowstone would be spoiled,” that opportunities for pack trains and horseback riding would be less, turns out to be just the opposite. They will be more.

The National Park Service of the Department of the Interior has recently accepted a complete mapping of projected trails through the vast extent of the Yellowstone National Park. Work is to begin on the actual cutting of the trails as soon as possible. Back of its neat lines and dots and tracings lies a great amount of rugged, courageous, brilliant work. It is the sort of work which any one would think must be done by a forester or a professional mountaineer or surveyor.

But it was not. It was done by Mrs. Robert C. Morris, a New York woman who has a ranch on the borders of the park and spends her Summers in the Yellowstone because she loves it and who gave the whole of last Summer, and rode fifteen hundred miles on horseback, to plan the Yellowstone trails.

. . .

What Mrs. Morris has done is to map out an elaborate system of trails through the park which will make it possible for visitors to ride through the most beautiful and picturesque portions of the great “reservation,” journeying in an unhurried and enjoyable fashion, seeing much that cannot be seen from the motor roads alone, and never once traveling on the motor highways. What is more, the trails are arranged so that trips can be made in a day, a week, a month, or more. . . .

Mrs. Robert C. Morris, born Alice Parmelee in New Haven, Connecticut, about 1865, was descended from a Revolutionary War soldier in the Connecticut militia. In 1890 she married Robert Clark Morris, a New York City lawyer interested in international law, and in 1897 she published Dragons and Cherry Blossoms about her trip to Japan. Mrs. Morris was an avid horsewoman who became enamored with the scenery of Yellowstone Park and spent many summers at the Silver Tip Ranch just north of the park. In 1917 she conceived, financed, and carried out her remarkable plan to explore and map an interconnected loop of trails throughout the park and environs.

Excerpted from pages 231, 233-34, and 235 of Through Early Yellowstone: Adventuring by Bicycle, Covered Wagon, Foot, Horseback, and Skis.

Geological Setting of Yellowstone National Park (click for larger version)

Did you know that geologist Jo-Ann Sherwin and I spent a lot of time updating the geology in the latest edition of Yellowstone Treasures? This map we revised is the most technical one, not intended for navigation like most of the 38 maps in the guidebook! Besides the types of rock in the different mountains, the map shows calderas. (A caldera is a large circular or elliptical crater or depression formed by the collapse of a large land area after the emptying of a magma chamber in a massive volcanic explosion.) Notice how the most recent—and famous—Yellowstone Caldera is marked with a solid line because much of its edge is visible at the surface. Meanwhile, the Henrys Fork and Huckleberry Ridge Calderas have a dashed outline to show that the caldera edge is buried under more recent volcanics. East of the park, the dotted outlines of the Heart Mountain detachment and its remnants show their general size, shape, and location. These are large chunks of Paleozoic sedimentary rock that became detached from the underlying rock and slid to the southeast over the Bighorn Basin. There’s lots more to explain calderas and other geological formations in the guidebook’s Geological History chapter.

We welcome your feedback on either our books or this website. Contact us!
—Editor Beth Chapple

Map credit: Jo-Ann Sherwin adapted this map with permission from Mountain Press’s Roadside Geology of Wyoming, 2nd ed., 1991, by David R. Lageson and Darwin R. Spearing.

Elsewhere on this website you can read about “The Yellowstone Caldera” and the Heart Mountain Interpretive center: https://www.yellowstonetreasures.com/2013/07/14/trip-report-heart-mountain/.