Yellowstone Amusement Park

My overcrowded national park bucket list disappointment

Yellowstone National Park has long been on my bucket list. Drawn by breathtaking photos of wild, rugged scenery, wild wolves, elk, and grizzlies, it has been a dream destination for as long as I can remember.

The Park has the highest population of free-roaming wildlife in the contiguous 48 states.

With more than 4 million visitors to the Park each year, it also has one of the highest tourist populations in the US.

What all those internet images of untamed landscapes and free-roaming apex predators don’t show are the crowds of people. They’ve been conveniently cropped out of most photos, but they are there in droves.

My visit to Yellowstone involved more traffic than I’ve encountered during rush-hour traffic. Sure, some of those traffic jams are caused by casually strolling bison herds, who give zero fucks about traffic patterns or right of way. But more are caused by gawking crowds hellbent on snapping Instagram-worthy photos.

On my checklist of breathtaking sights was the Great Prismatic Spring. This vibrantly-colored thermal feature is the largest hot spring in the US and the third largest in the world. The spring's multicolored layers are created by different species of bacteria living in the cooler water around it. The colors come from carotenoids produced by the bacteria to protect themselves from the sun.

It is stunning.

However, the boardwalk view of the spring was clogged by hundreds of people all trying to get the perfect selfie. Other crowds were trying to take up the whole walkway to frame their friends and family in a shot that included the brilliant stripes of color in the background.

I watched a 20-something Asian girl stagger backward off the platform. At the same time, a middle-aged man held a camera. He shouted directions to his group in what sounded like Mandarin, carelessly crushing the delicate bacterial ecosystem of the spring under the sole of her Vanns.

I was elbowed and shouldered multiple times, and while the view was worth it, I felt more like I was fighting the crowds at an amusement park than I was communing with Nature. However, I did snap my own Instagram-worthy shot of the spring (miraculously without any people in it).

At another point, our Tacoma was slowed to a standstill as crowds of people sprinted through oncoming traffic to ooh and ahh at a mama grizzly and her cub feeding along the side of the road.

It was my first glimpse at a wild grizzly, but it felt all wrong. If I had been hunting alone, sitting still and quiet, watching the two of them feed peacefully, moving together through the woods, it would have felt like a holy moment. Instead, it felt like I was part of a crowd gawking at a sideshow. I didn’t even bother to snap a photo. It felt somehow sacrilegious.

Large portions of my national park trip were spent fighting hordes of humans who talked loudly, ogled wildlife, and disrespected their space and the space of people around them. As someone who likes the solitude of Nature, I sometimes felt pretty miserable.

I don’t know if I’ll ever return to Yellowstone. If I did, it definitely wouldn’t be in July, when so many vacationing families are trying to squeeze into the Park and capture what looks like serene moments in Nature but are far from peaceful.

I prefer natural stillness and calm, the kind I get when I disappear into the woods alone. Even if it isn’t the kind of tranquility that is particularly photo-worthy or gets hundreds of likes on social media.