Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River

Lower Yellowstone Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Video: Cross-Country Skiing in Yellowstone

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By Michael Lanza

Consider these statistics: Yellowstone National Park receives about four million visitors a year. Ninety percent of them see the park between May and September. Less than four percent of visitors come between December and March. And yet, in many respects, winter is the best time of year to see Yellowstone: Wildlife congregate at lower elevations, making them easier to see (except bears, of course), waterfalls form towering columns of ice (like 308-foot Lower Yellowstone Falls, in the lead photo, above), and the geysers and other thermal features take on a different character when the landscape grows hushed under a thick blanket of snow.

Plus, you can see the park’s major features, like the Upper Geyser Basin—home to Old Faithful and one-fourth of the active geysers in the world (and the greatest concentration of them)—on skis. Cross-country skiing groomed trails in Yellowstone, many of which are beginner- and family-friendly, is one of the coolest experiences in the National Park System.

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Lower Yellowstone Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Giving Thanks For ‘The Best Idea We Ever Had’

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By Michael Lanza

From Lookout Point, along the North Rim Trail in Yellowstone National Park, you gaze down hundreds of feet into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its crumbling walls of golden, gray, and cream-colored rock and patches of evergreens framing the roaring river. Just upstream, 308-foot-tall Lower Yellowstone Falls explodes through a notch in the cliffs, sending a plume of water and mist shooting into the canyon. Every time I see it, as I did again earlier this fall, I feel the same sense of awe that I felt the first time I saw this view.

Big more than that, I think about the foresight behind the creation of America’s national parks—what the writer Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had”—including the first one, Yellowstone. That’s one of the many things I’m thankful for on this Thanksgiving day.

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Lower Yellowstone Falls in winter, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Cross-Country Skiing Yellowstone

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By Michael Lanza

The snowcoach rumbles away, leaving us in a wintry silence disturbed only by a slight breeze and the gastrointestinal emissions of a supervolcano that last let out a really big one 640,000 years ago. Back then, it ejected about 240 cubic miles of rock and dust into the sky. Today, as seems always the case with these things, it just sounds a little rude and smells badly.

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