Yellowstone: Truly Wild

I'm a product design student at the University of Utah, a fairly large public university nestled in the mountains of Salt Lake City. Our studio had the unique opportunity to work in partnership with Yellowstone Forever, the official non-profit arm of Yellowstone National Park, to look at issues surrounding the park, the visitors, the wildlife, and various other controversial topics. Our goal: to help shed some light on overlooked opportunities the NPS (National Park Service) and Yellowstone Forever may not have considered previously, and to help bridge the gap between the non-profit sector and the federal park system itself.

The project was a huge success, with a number of innovative projects and proposals being brought to the table, more of which you can read at Field Studio, but that's not really why I'm writing this piece. Something happened as we visited the park, we all learned something truly amazing:

Yellowstone National Park is an absolute wonder to experience.

Having the chance to work directly with the park and Yellowstone Forever, we had the opportunity to visit the park on a couple of different occasions over the course of a semester, viewing the park at the conclusion of its busiest season, late August, and again in one of the slowest times of year, mid-November.

I myself have had the chance to visit the park once before when I was a kid. My family drove from Salt Lake City and stayed in a small cabin inside the park, but, being honest, I remember hardly anything about the visit aside from seeing a moose on the side of the road from our car window.

Having spoken with a number of other students about the park, I found that most people had had a similar experience to my own; visiting with their families once or twice in the past. But as we explored the park on our own for a number of days, I noticed their reactions were once again the same as my own—many, many wide eyes and open mouths.

There's an interesting culture that seems to be prevalent in social media and millennial culture: in order to experience something new and unbelievable, you need to spend the money on a plane ticket to somewhere distant, take the pictures at the key sights, then come home and tell everyone about it. Not that there's anything wrong with this. I myself am an avid traveler and find immense value in experiencing places like that.

But.

When you ask yourself, where can I go and get lost, where can I go to experience something wild and new? You really don't need to look any farther than Yellowstone National Park.

Now, I could sit here and write a step-by-step guide on "how to do Yellowstone," but there's a thousand of those and I think there's another way to do this. With a couple of compelling facts! (Lame, I know, but actually super interesting.)

1. Within Yellowstone National Park is the most isolated location in the contiguous 48 states. The only place you can go and be more than 20 miles from any road.
2. Yellowstone is one of the last, largest, nearly intact, natural ecosystems on the planet. Yes, on the planet. And one of the few that is actually protected.
3. Yellowstone is one of the only places where you're likely to see bison, moose, elk, black bears, grizzly bears, and gray wolves all within a protected area, and seeing one of any of these animals up close is an absolute treat (when done safely, please).

Now I know that facts are sometimes uninteresting, but that should tell you more than you need to know about the park. Yellowstone is a massive, vastly untouched span of wilderness and nature that is just waiting to be experienced.

One of the last truly wild places in the continental United States.

One of the only places you can go to get truly lost.

Now, I promise this isn't some sort of sponsored ad for Yellowstone or the NPS, but instead it's an encouragement to look inward instead, for experiences that you may never be able to have anywhere else on this planet.

Yellowstone National Park: your next stop for something truly wild.