Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park is a natural wonder only to be found in North America. The park is located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It is the oldest national park in the world, and also the first.

Yellowstone remains one of the last vestiges of the wild and untamed in the U.S. It's the oldest park in the country and each year draws 3 million visitors to the region. Some estimates claim that at least one-third of the U.S. population will visit Yellowstone in their lifetime. Visitors flock here to view the park's ever-changing geology, to see grizzly bears up close, watch gray wolves, buffalo herds, and to fish for trout in the Yellowstone River. Most people come to connect with a part of America that has largely been lost, made up of a massive landscape before railroads, highways, telephones, and other technology.

Yellowstone National Park forms the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem - one of the largest intact temperate zone ecosystems still on the planet.

Yellowstone was formed when a huge volcanic eruption shot a large amount of ash that covered the entire western U.S., most of the Midwest, northern Mexico and some regions of the eastern Pacific. This eruption was infinitely larger than that which erupted from Mt. St. Helens in 1980, leaving a caldera 30 miles wide by 45 miles long.

This event happened 640,000 years ago, and was one of the key processes that formed Yellowstone National Park.

Old Faithful is a popular geothermal destination in the park, and it provides evidence of one of the world's largest active volcanoes. The first visitors to Yellowstone were rather confused by these features, but the natural beauty and wonder of the area is probably what led to it being named the world's first national park.

Yellowstone National Park was named after the yellow rocks you can see in the Grand Canyon portion of the park. The Grand Canyon is essentially a deep cut in the Yellowstone Plateau that was formed by floods during historic ice ages, and by erosion from the Yellowstone River.