Why Is Yellowstone National Park Such a Crowded Mess?

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I played the good tourist and watched the most famous geyser in the world blow while I ate a bag of Cheetos on the viewing platform. A crowd of thousands joined me in watching the waterworks from a proper distance, holding up their phones to capture Old Faithful at its angriest. None of them would get hurt in the eruption.

However, no other geyser in the basin was as well policed. Yellowstone is one giant volcanic field. The landscape is visibly cooking all around you; patches of Venus on Earthen soil. Seemingly firm ground can potentially cave under your feet without warning and drop you into the kill zone. Or, as happened at Biscuit Basin earlier this summer, the ground can just blow the fuck up if it wants to. That’s why the NPS has visitors tour the hot springs along a series of designated walkways and trails. But these paths are easy to step off of, and I watched many people do just that: Americans, visitors from abroad, old folks, children…everyone. They all strayed. And, as with the bison viewing, I took cues from their rule-breaking and stepped off the path myself. None of us were wearing fireproof boots. One dude off-roading next to me was wearing Crocs.

The more I lingered off the path, the farther from safety I wanted to venture. This was one of the hottest days of summer at the park, and I had already sweat through my clothes. I passed by Blue Star Spring, which looked cool and inviting but was only one of those things. I desperately wanted to ignore the danger, because it’s a special kind of torture to gaze upon a seemingly pristine lagoon on a 90-degree day and not be able to touch it. I wasn’t alone. When I walked toward the edge of a solitary geyser, rimmed with crystallized sulfur and dotted with bear droppings the size of a human head, I was in a crowd. Any of us could have jumped into the gurgling spring if we’d wanted to. The NPS can plant as many warning signs as it likes, but those signs are powerless in the face of visitors who are bad influences on one another. We came here to see nature. We weren’t going to settle for seeing it from a road, a path, or a patio. We wanted to get closer, and getting closer is the one thing you really shouldn’t do here.

To that end, I was climbing a small hill in the upper basin when I ventured off the path in hopes of making the route a little shorter. I was not wearing hiking shoes. I was in Skechers. I stepped through the bushes, assuming I’d find the path again higher up the mountain. I’d spot other tourists and know I was safe. But the path, and the tourists, never rematerialized. Despite the crowds, you can find yourself alone in this park very quickly. It covers 2.2 million acres, after all. I remembered that only after I’d gotten lost.

Once I was lost, I heard a sound. Not a reassuring one. Maybe it was a rumbling geyser, but that’s not what my brain thought. My brain thought: BEAR. BEAR, MOTHERFUCKER. BEAR BEAR BEAR BEAR BEAR. I did want to see bears here, but not like this. I wanted a safer bear experience (no bear experience is safe), so I doubled back to the trail and found other humans again. When I went to throw away my bag of Cheetos, the garbage can was full. Every garbage can at the visitor center was. I stuffed the bag into the slit as best I could and then walked away, hoping it would stick. That Cheetos bag may be residing on the head of a bear cub as we speak.

Not content to be eaten alive, or burned to death in a vat of natural acid, I decided to check out the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a 20-mile-long, 4,000-foot-wide chasm punctuated by a 308-foot waterfall. I stayed on the canyon path the whole time but, like every other tourist I saw, I happily leaned over the railing on every viewing platform (perched 1,000 feet above the valley floor) to get the perfect selfie. Another traveler I met, a man named Aaron, had driven here with his wife, Natalie, all the way from Michigan. Before arriving at the canyon, Aaron and Natalie had seen wolves roaming the park. Wolves. Holy shit.

“We stopped a little bit at Slough Creek because there was a wolf den over there,” Aaron told me. “There was a whole bunch of people set up, and we could see the wolves off in the distance. They said the day before there was a bison carcass there, and they were able to witness a grizzly bear, a black bear, and the wolves fighting over the carcass, which would have been absolutely incredible.”

Was I jealous that Aaron got to see wolves and I didn’t? Yes. Was I jealous other tourists got to see grizzly bears and wolves house a dead buffalo? Yes. Would I have gotten too close to that orgy of death because my phone camera’s zoom abilities are total shit? Yes. Am I good at controlling my impulses? No. Because the grade-schooler in me was crushed that he was surrounded by so much natural beauty but couldn’t touch any of it. I couldn’t touch the bison. I couldn’t ride a geyser. I couldn’t even BASE-jump into a fucking canyon. And Big Government had the gall to charge me $35 to get in? I pay taxes, man. I should be able to do what I want!