Yellowstone A Place of Wild Wonders

Yellowstone A Place of Wild Wonders

Introduction Imagine a place where streams of hot water shoot out of the ground and into the air, lmagine a place with strange green pools and gurgling pots of mud that smell like rotten eggs. lmagine a place where you can see grizzly bears, bison, and wolves in a single day.

Such a place is real, and it's called Yellowstone National Park. National parks are areas of special, protected land. Yellowstone is located where Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho meet. It became the world's first national park in 1872. Every year, millions of people visit to see its wild wonders.

A Hot Spot Most everyone who goes to Yellowstone wants to see Old Faithful geyser. A geyser is a hole in the ground that shoots steam and hot water into the air. Old Faithful was given its name because visitors can depend on it to spray about every ninety minutes. It shoots water 100 feet (30 m) high!

Yellowstone is on top of something rare called a hot spot. Heat from Earth's core makes rocks under the ground super-hot. Rain seeps into the ground with the rocks and heats up. The hot water and steam travel up through cracks in the ground. Finally, water and steam erupt at the surface. Old Faithful is one of about three hundred geysers in Yellowstone. The hot spot has also created hot pools of gurgling mud and thousands of colorful hot springs.

Wildlife When people go to Yellowstone, they also see animals of all shapes and sizes. The biggest animals in Yellowstone are bison, which can weigh up to 2, 000 pounds (907 kg). Bison are giant animals with shaggy, brown fur, a big head, and a hump on their back. In the summer, you might see them rolling in the dust to fight off flies and shed their old fur.