Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs?

Let me establish my tourist bona fides before we go any further. I am a 47-year-old white man who has lived in the suburbs for the vast majority of my existence. I have spent a grand total of one week camping. I consider emptying the dishwasher to be hard labor. I don’t know how to pitch a tent, build a lean-to, start a fire without matches or a lighter, or climb any rock higher than three feet tall. I am not hardy. The only other time that Outside asked me to write for them, it was to review bathrobes, which are generally not worn outside. I own both cargo shorts and a fanny pack.

Finally, I am an American. Nothing screams “tourist” more than being a big, stupid American.

And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.

This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?

There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.

I drove in from Yellowstone’s West Entrance, and almost immediately got stuck in a bison traffic jam. Everyone who comes to Yellowstone is horny for bison, perhaps because they watched U2’s “One” video as many times as I did back when MTV still existed. But before I got to lay eyes on one of these majestic animals, I passed by dozens of signs, blockin’ out the scenery and breakin’ my mind, that explicitly warned me and others DO NOT FUCK WITH THE BISON (paraphrasing). The little brochure the rangers hand out at the entrance even gives you strict instructions for leaving wild animals alone. Don’t go within 25 yards of a bison. Don’t go within 100 yards of a wolf or a bear.

Now, you don’t need to tell me to keep my distance from the latter two species. I’ve watched enough movies to know that a bear will fuck me up. But bison are another story. Your fight-or-flight instincts don’t kick in when you see a bison firsthand. Quite the opposite. You feel serene. Peaceful. At one with the land. The average tourist is so taken by a bison’s gentle demeanor that they can’t help but be drawn to it—in May 2016, for example, a father and son even tried to kidnap a baby bison, tossing the little fella in their car because they thought he looked cold. The tourists were given a ticket; the bison was euthanized.

I would not be so dumb. In theory.

On my way into the park, I saw a full-grown bison chilling out by the Madison River, triggering a gawker’s block of traffic on either side of the road. There weren’t 25 yards of space between the road and the river, so it was impossible to get out of your car near the bison and remain at a safe distance. Still, few of my fellow motorists were able to resist. They got out and snapped photos without compunction, which made me think: Well, look, if they’re doing it, maybe I can too. It can’t charge all of us. That kind of attitude is why Yellowstone visitors end up gored by bison regularly, and then get roasted on Instagram for it.

So I stayed in my car, even though it pained me to do so. A day later I would drive by a full herd and, yes, get out of my car to stare at them. I was not alone. Dozens of cars and RVs pulled over to get a better look. It was a Discount Bison Safari, and we were all invited. I went up to one man checking out the bison with his wife and kids in tow. His name was Luke.

“Are we a safe distance from the buffalo?” I asked him.

“Oh, yeah, I think so,” he said confidently. This man wasn’t a ranger. He may not have even been a high school graduate. And yet I took him as an authority on social bison distancing, because I wanted to. That’s what we tourists do. We strive to make each other feel like we know what we’re doing, even when that’s plainly not the case. Five seconds later, Luke gleefully told me that this was the closest he and his kids had been to a bison herd, right on the 25-yard line. Was I alarmed by this admission? Nope. Was I thrilled by it? Maybe a little. Sure, I’d only been at this park for a geological millisecond, but I felt as if I knew the place like my own backyard. I was now a mountain man.

So I decided to check out the volcano.

The upper geyser basin, where Old Faithful is located, is the most touristy area of Yellowstone, with endless parking lots and ski lodge–style concessions that serve average food to people who lack the foresight to bring their own meals (me). The geyser blows roughly every hour on the hour, and tourists watch the show from a viewing platform a football field away. This is because the water spewing out of Old Faithful is both boiling hot and contains minerals that can dissolve human skin on contact. Remember when you watched Elmer Fudd sit on top of Old Faithful when you were a kid? Turns out Elmer was taking unnecessary risks doing that. He could have been hurt, and badly!

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!

On the way back to my hotel that night, I pulled over by the banks of the Madison and, with no wildlife in sight, dunked my hand in the river just so I could finally touch water. That was perhaps the only real moment when I felt at one with nature all week, because I actually interacted with it.

Of course, that’s one of the great fallacies that tourists like me subscribe to before visiting places like Yellowstone. Being a mammal, I come from nature. But growing up in the burbs my whole life, I never spent any time actively engaging with it. The result was that my relationship with the great outdoors was forged almost entirely through TV, novels, and trailers for A River Runs Through It. Nature was where man could find both tranquility and solitude. I fancied myself one such dime-store Thoreau. If I ever visited a place like Yellowstone, I once thought to myself, I would stare pensively at rushing creeks, savor every breath of fresh mountain air, and teach the bison herds that we humans aren’t so bad after all. I could instinctively exist here, just as the other animals did. In other words, I believed in fucking fairy tales. Just about every tourist with an iPhone does likewise.

The truth, which I learned quickly in my time at Yellowstone, is that nature is a goddamn mess, with humans only gumming up the works even more. The AQI my first day in the park was well above 100, because smoke emanating from Alberta wildfires, still raging far to the north, had drifted south. Despite switching into Asics (so rugged!) on my second day hiking, I still risked falling multiple times on steep mountain trails and at precarious canyon overlooks. I risked getting shot by cops or charged by moose because I had to park in a roadside pullout and go piss in the woods. I damn near collapsed from heatstroke one afternoon because park officials and I had very different notions of what constitutes a 0.6-mile hike. I was ready to go on a killing spree after being stuck in another bison traffic jam for 80 minutes. At the Old Faithful welcome center, I spiked my LDL by eating a hot dog with enough chili ladled on top of it to feed a bachelor party. And my hotel was within walking distance of a machine-gun range that was open to all comers. Any of those things could have killed me, and still jolly well might.

And you know why? Because there are thousands of me shuffling in and out of that park every day. Every hour. It’s our very presence inside the park boundaries that invites Mother Nature’s contempt. An intelligent person can’t walk into Yellowstone without realizing that our incursion into this sacred land, however we’ve tried to minimize it, has altered it irrevocably, and not for the better. There’s no way to be a “good” tourist here, because tourism itself is a process that defiles something that was once pristine. Yellowstone can kill you and me easily, this is true. What’s truer, and scarier, is how easily the opposite can occur. I saw so with my own eyes.

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