Horrors of Yellowstone National Park

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Underneath its boiling rainbow pools and breathtaking landscapes, the Yellowstone National Park is hiding a massive dark secret, or rather, a lot of them. I've been genuinely obsessed with this park for my entire [music] life, but today we aren't looking at the tourist attractions. We're diving into the unsolved disappearances, the tragedies, the bizarre history, and the legends that haunt this place. Today, we're taking a look at the horrors of Yellowstone. If you're new here, hit that subscribe button and let's get straight into it.

[00:00:32]The Colin Scott death. On June 7th, 2016, 23-year-old Colin Scott [music] and his sister Sable drove into the Norris Geyser Basin area of Yellowstone National Park. Colin was from Portland, Oregon. He was young, healthy, and from everything that came out in the aftermath, adventurous in the way a lot of people in their early 20s are when they're in beautiful wild country and feeling comfortable in it. He and his sister were apparently interested in hot spring soaking, which is a legitimate and popular activity in certain designated locations in the American West. Yellowstone is specifically and explicitly not one of those places, and the park communicates that as clearly as a public institution can communicate anything. Norris Geyser Basin is not a subtle or ambiguous environment. The boardwalks there exist for a specific and well-documented reason. The ground in certain sections of Norris [music] is thin hydrothermal crust sitting directly over superheated water that is invisible from above. Warning signs are posted at every entrance and at regular intervals along every path. The park's language around off-boardwalk access is not buried in fine print or phrased diplomatically. Stay on the boardwalk.

[00:01:45]Do not leave designated paths. The water temperature in some features at Norris is at [music] or near the boiling point for that elevation. The acidity in that basin is among the highest recorded anywhere in the park. pH levels that are genuinely corrosive to organic material over very short periods of time. This is information freely available to every visitor before they arrive. Colin and Sable left the boardwalk.

[00:02:11]According to Sable's account and the park documentation from the investigation, Colin was attempting to check the temperature of a thermal pool when he slipped and fell in. Rangers responded as quickly as they could, but when they arrived and assessed the situation, the conditions in and around that specific [music] pool made immediate physical recovery impossible.

[00:02:31]The water temperature was recorded at approximately 212° Fahrenheit. The acidity was extreme. Sable had filmed some of what happened on her phone and that footage was later reviewed by investigators. It was not publicly released. Based on the descriptions given by Rangers involved in the response, that is almost certainly the right decision. What makes this case so difficult to process is what happened by the following When a recovery team returned fully equipped [music] to retrieve the body, there was essentially nothing left to recover. The combination of extreme heat and the highly acidic water chemistry of Norris Basin [music] had dissolved the body almost entirely overnight. Rangers described finding only trace remains. The official documentation used careful clinical language. The body had been dissolved by the [music] acidic water.

[00:03:20]Colin Scott, a 23-year-old man who walked into [music] that basin under his own power that morning, was gone in a way that language does not handle comfortably.

[00:03:29]I want to stop [music] and actually sit with what that means because I think it's easy to read that sentence and let the brain skip past the reality of it. A human body gone in under [music] 24 hours, dissolved by the same water that creates those extraordinary colors people photograph from the boardwalk every single day of the summer season.

[00:03:49]That same chemistry. That's what Yellowstone's thermal features [music] are when you remove the tourist framing and look at what the water does to organic material. Colin Scott's case is the most discussed Yellowstone thermal death in the park's history, but it's far from the only one. There have been at least 22 documented thermal [music] deaths at Yellowstone since 1872.

[00:04:11]In 1981, a 9-year-old boy fell into a hot spring at Norris and [music] died from his injuries. In 2000, a man fell near Old Faithful. In 2004, another man fell into a Firehole River thermal feature.

[00:04:26]The pattern across all of them is the same. The ground looks stable. The water looks still. The distance from the path looks manageable. And then [music] it doesn't. The boardwalks at Yellowstone are not excessive caution from overly careful administrators. They are the actual material difference between walking through [music] one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth and ceasing to exist in it. That is not [music] rhetorical. That is what the documented record shows.

[00:04:53]David Kirwan and Celestine Pool.

[00:04:56]In July 1981, a 24-year-old man named David Kirwan was visiting Yellowstone with his friend Ronald Ratliff. They were near Celestine Pool in the Fountain [music] Paint Pot area. Celestine Pool is not a subtle feature. The water is a vivid deep blue, the color that comes from the specific temperature and chemistry of superheated water, and it sits in open ground with a kind of visible mineral buildup that signals immediately to any attentive person that this is not ordinary water. Ronald Ratliff's dog jumped into the pool.

[00:05:30]David Kirwan went in after the dog. The water temperature of Celestine Pool is approximately 202° [music] Fahrenheit.

[00:05:38]David was pulled out by bystanders within seconds. Rangers arrived minutes later and found him at the edge of the pool. The burns covering his body were catastrophic. According to accounts documented by rangers and later published in park records, a ranger who reached him asked what had happened.

[00:05:55]David Kirwan reportedly looked at his own injuries and said, "That was stupid.

[00:06:00]How bad is it?" He died the following morning in a hospital in Salt [music] Lake City. He had burns over more than 90% of his body. The dog didn't survive, [music] either.

[00:06:10]What this story does, and why it gets remembered alongside the Colin Scott case when people talk about Yellowstone's thermal dangers, is that it removes every easy explanation. David Kirwan was not someone who didn't understand thermal features are dangerous. He didn't slip or fall in by accident. He saw his friend's dog in the water, and he made a conscious decision to go in after it. He was acting on something completely understandable as a human impulse. He was trying to save an animal he cared about. That impulse cost him everything. That is the specific horror of Celestine [music] Pool. Not carelessness, not ignorance, not someone who ignored the signs. A motivated, deliberate, [music] fully conscious attempt to enter the water and exit it quickly that was still fatal because the water does not negotiate. The ranger who responded to the scene later said what he witnessed that day permanently changed how he talked to visitors about thermal features [music] for the rest of his career at Yellowstone.

[00:07:07]The 1877 Nez Perce hostage crisis. By the summer of 1877, Yellowstone had been a national park for 5 years. Tourism was already happening. Small groups of visitors, mostly wealthy enough to afford the long journey west, were making their way through the geyser basins in guided parties. It was remote and rough, but people were coming because Yellowstone was already understood as something extraordinary.

[00:07:33]What those tourists in August of 1877 could not have anticipated was that they were about to find themselves in the direct path of one of the most dramatic military retreats in American history.

[00:07:45]The Nez Perce were a Native American nation from what is now Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. In 1877, following years of broken treaties and escalating pressure to confine non-treaty bands to a reservation, a large group of Nez Perce refused and fled. What followed was a running conflict covering roughly 1,170 miles across brutal terrain with multiple US pursuit as the Nez Perce moved toward the Canadian border and hoped for safety on the other side. Their route took them directly through Yellowstone.

[00:08:19]In late August 1877, moving fast and under military pressure, they entered the park and encountered several tourist groups in the Geyser Basin areas. One of those groups included George and Emma Cowan, a couple from Radersburg, Montana, on a camping trip with a small party of friends. They had been in the park for days and had no warning before the Nez Perce were already surrounding their camp. George Cowan was shot three times, once in the thigh during the initial encounter, once in the hip, and once in the head at close range when he tried to move at the wrong moment. Emma watched her husband shot in the head from a short distance and was certain she had watched him die. She and the remaining party members were taken with the group briefly before being released.

[00:09:04]The Nez Perce leadership did not want hostages slowing their movement. They were not a raiding party. They were people trying to survive a journey to the border, but the violence against the Cowan party and the terror of what those tourists experienced was completely real regardless of the larger historical context around it. Here's the thing about George Cowan. He wasn't dead. Shot three times, including once in the head, left alone in wilderness with no medical access, he regained consciousness after the group moved on and began crawling.

[00:09:34]He crawled for miles across multiple days surviving on what the landscape provided until soldiers eventually found him and got him to help. He recovered.

[00:09:43]He lived for decades afterward. Emma Cowan wrote a detailed first-hand account of everything that happened that August, and it still exists and is one of the most vivid primary documents from this period in the park's history. The Nez Perce continued through the park.

[00:09:58]Two men from a separate tourist party were killed at a different location during the passage. The group pushed north and through Montana for weeks more before being stopped by the army just 40 miles from the Canadian border in October 1877.

[00:10:13]For Yellowstone specifically, this period represents something that quietly gets set aside in the standard park narrative. This land was not empty when it was designated in 1872.

[00:10:24]The Nez Perce traveled through it for generations. The Shoshone, the Crow, the Bannock, and other nations knew this landscape in ways no government survey team ever would. The 1877 crisis was a direct collision between two completely different relationships to the same piece of land happening in the middle of geyser country in late summer while other tourists were writing letters home about how beautiful and strange it all was. Emma Cowan's memoir holds all of it at once. The specific terror of what happened to her and her husband. The days of not knowing if George was alive.

[00:10:58]And the unironic, genuine beauty of the landscape surrounding all of it that she keeps returning to even while the describing everything else. That combination of horror and beauty existing simultaneously in the same place feels like the most honest description of Yellowstone I've encountered anywhere.

[00:11:16]The disappearance of Vance Bateman.

[00:11:18]Not every horror at Yellowstone involves thermal features or wildlife. Some of them are simply the park swallowing someone and not giving them back. In June 1999, 57-year-old Vance Bateman was visiting Yellowstone with his family.

[00:11:33]Vance was an experienced outdoorsman from Walla Walla, Washington. He was not a casual visitor stumbling into terrain he didn't understand. He was someone who had spent significant time in wilderness environments and was [music] comfortable in them. On June 18th, the family was in the area near the Shoshone Lake Trail system, [music] one of the more remote sections of the park's backcountry. This is not a day hike area. Shoshone Lake is the largest backcountry lake in the lower 48 states with no road access. To get there and back requires covering serious terrain through dense forest, over ridges, and through landscape that is actively managed for solitude, specifically because so few people can reach it. Vance became separated from his family [music] group in that area.

[00:12:18]The exact circumstances of how the separation happened are not fully documented in what's publicly available.

[00:12:24]What is documented is what came after.

[00:12:27]When it became clear he had not rejoined the group as expected, park rangers were notified and a search was launched. The Shoshone Lake backcountry is not easy terrain to search. Dense lodgepole pine forest dominates much of it. The ridges and drainages create a landscape where a [music] person can be a short physical distance from searchers and completely invisible. Rangers deployed search teams on foot, brought in dogs, and used aircraft when the visibility and the tree canopy allowed for it. They searched methodically through the terrain that consistently works against searchers in the same ways backcountry Yellowstone always does.

[00:13:04]Dense cover, complicated drainage [music] patterns, thermal areas interspersed throughout, and a scale that is simply very large. Vance Bateman was never found. No clothing, no gear, no physical evidence that definitively established [music] where he went or what happened to him. He is still listed as a missing person connected to Yellowstone National Park. His case sits in a category that the park has more of than most people know about. The scale of Yellowstone, more than 2 million acres of land with significant portions of active thermal ground, dense forest, hydrothermal features, and serious wildlife presence means that a person who goes missing in the back country and is not found in the initial search faces very long odds of ever being found at all. The landscape keeps what it takes in a very complete way. What makes the Bateman case sit uncomfortably is the absence of any explanation. No dramatic event, no documented fall or attack or thermal incident, just a man who went into one of the most remote sections of the park with his family and did not come back out. The wilderness at Yellowstone is not required to provide explanations. It just doesn't.

[00:14:13]The super volcano.

[00:14:15]I want to spend real time on what's actually underneath Yellowstone because I think most people have a vague sense that a volcano is involved without fully processing what that means at the scale the system operates on. Yellowstone sits on a caldera, not a volcanic cone like the ones you picture when someone says volcano. A caldera is what forms when a magma chamber is so enormous that after a major eruption, the land above it collapses inward, leaving a vast depression in the landscape. The Yellowstone caldera is approximately 34 by 45 miles across. The entire park exists inside and around it. From ground level, you would never know because the landscape is forests and meadows and river valleys. The caldera doesn't look like a volcano from inside it because you are inside it. There have been three super eruptions at Yellowstone. The first, approximately 2.1 million years ago. The second, 1.3 million years ago.

[00:15:12]The most recent, 640,000 years ago. Each was a VEI 8 eruption, the highest category on the volcanic explosivity index, the classification reserved specifically for super volcano events.

[00:15:25]The Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which devastated hundreds of square miles of Washington state and sent ash across the continents, was a VEI 5. The Yellowstone super eruptions were roughly 1,000 times more energetic than that.

[00:15:40]The USGS Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monitors the system continuously.

[00:15:46]Thousands of small earthquakes happen at Yellowstone every year, most too small to feel without instruments. The ground level across the park rises and falls measurably as the magma chamber below shifts and breathes. There is a partially molten system sitting beneath Wyoming right now, active and changing, and scientists track it the way a doctor monitors a patient's vital signs. The scientific consensus is clear that there is no current evidence indicating an imminent super eruption. The system would generate unmistakable warning signals over a period of years or decades before anything catastrophic.

[00:16:20][music] We wouldn't be surprised. But, the scale of what would happen if one occurred is genuinely difficult to hold in your head as a real thing. A Yellowstone super eruption would deposit ash across the majority of North America. Regions within several hundred miles would be buried under feet of ash in the hours following the event. Agricultural land across enormous portions of the continent would be compromised, potentially for years. Sulfur dioxide injected into the upper atmosphere would trigger a volcanic winter effect. Global temperatures would drop. Food production systems across the northern hemisphere would be severely disrupted. The immediate death toll and the cascading collapse of infrastructure and supply chains across the United States alone would represent something entirely outside the range of any disaster in recorded human history. That's not dramatic language. That's the honest scale of what the system has already done three times before humans were here to document it. That is the floor this park is built on. That is what the boardwalks and the geysers and the visitor [music] centers and the Old Faithful webcam and all of it are sitting on top of. A system that when it last fully activated deposited measurable ash layers across 19 states and fundamentally altered the climate and ecology of the continent. And here's the thing I keep coming back to. You can go there right now. You can drive through the entrance, stop at Mammoth Hot Springs in the morning with steam rising off white mineral terraces into cold air, drive down to the Grand Prismatic and look at those colors from the boardwalk, stand at the rim of the canyon with the Yellowstone River a thousand feet below you, watch Old Faithful go off on its schedule as if the park is performing for whoever happens to be standing there. It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

[00:18:07]That is completely genuinely true. And simultaneously, you're standing on the surface of a system that has ended geological eras. Both things are entirely and simultaneously true. That's what makes Yellowstone different from everywhere else.

[00:18:24]The Lance Crosby grizzly attack.

[00:18:27]In August 2015, 63-year-old Lance Crosby was found dead near the Elephant Back Mountain Trail in Yellowstone. He'd been killed by a grizzly bear. What makes this case significant beyond the tragedy of it is the context around who Lance was. He wasn't a tourist unfamiliar with the park and its wildlife. He was an experienced seasonal employee who had worked at Yellowstone for multiple years. He had received wildlife safety training. He understood grizzly country.

[00:18:55]He had reportedly chosen to hike alone and without bear spray, which the park recommends without exception for [music] any backcountry travel. But he wasn't someone who wandered in ununiformed. He was someone who had been deliberately choosing to live and work in this environment year after year. The investigation determined the bear responsible was a female grizzly with two cubs who had been in that area. She had cashed part of Lance's body and was defending it when rangers located the scene. She was tracked, identified through DNA evidence, and after a formal review process was euthanized along with her cubs. That decision remains debated by people who follow Yellowstone wildlife management closely. Grizzly attacks at Yellowstone are rare but real. The park's grizzly population has recovered dramatically since the 1975 endangered species listing from an estimated 136 bears to over 700 today.

[00:19:48]That recovery is a genuine conservation success story. It also means more bears, more range, more overlap with human activity, and a meaningfully higher probability of encounter for anyone in the back country. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other out. What's uncomfortable about Lance Crosby's case is the specific implication it carries.

[00:20:11]This was a person who understood the environment better than most visitors ever will, who had been there long enough to know the trails and the wildlife patterns, and he still didn't make it back from a trail he had probably walked before. Yellowstone's back country is grizzly habitat in the deepest sense of that phrase. That is their territory in a way it is not yours, regardless of how long you've worked there or how many times you've walked [music] that trail without incident. Bear spray works. The research on this is consistent and clear. Bear spray has been shown repeatedly to be more effective than firearms in close-range [music] grizzly encounters.

[00:20:45]The park recommends it for every back country trip, every time, without exception. The Lance Crosby case is the honest answer to anyone who asks whether that recommendation is really necessary.

[00:20:57]Why the tribes called it the burning ground. Before Yellowstone was a national park, before it was on any European map, before any non-native explorer had watched a geyser erupt. The native nations of the surrounding region had developed their own relationship with this landscape over thousands of years. And for many of them, that relationship was built on deliberate and respectful avoidance. Multiple nations, including certain [music] brands of the Shoshone, the Crow, and the Bannock, referred to the Yellowstone region in terms that translate roughly as "the place where the ground smokes", "the burning ground", or "the land of bad [music] spirits". These were not poetic names. They were functional warnings passed down across generations because the landscape had consistently demonstrated over thousands of years that it warranted them. There is a completely practical explanation for this that [music] requires no spiritual framework. The ground at Yellowstone is genuinely dangerous without any modern [music] scientific vocabulary for describing why. People and animals fell through thermal crust. Wildlife wandered into pools and [music] died. Toxic gases vented without warning. The oral traditions that said, "Do [music] not camp there. Do not drink from those waters. Do not linger here." were not superstition. They were accumulated empirical [music] knowledge about a landscape that consistently punished people who ignored them.

[00:22:17]What I find genuinely interesting [music] is that some of the earliest European-American explorers who came back from Yellowstone with accurate descriptions were ridiculed. John Colter, who traveled through the region around 1807 and 1808, described boiling springs and shooting steam [music] and sulfur and fire and was widely dismissed. His account was called Colter's [music] Hell as a joke. The native peoples in the region had been living with accurate knowledge [music] of this place for thousands of years before Colter arrived. The people who laughed at his account had simply never been there. The spiritual dimension of the tribal relationship with Yellowstone is harder to summarize without oversimplifying things that deserve more nuance. But the thread running through many of these traditions is that the forces active in this landscape were not neutral background features. They were active. They were aware in some way. You entered into a relationship with this place [music] or you face the consequences of treating it like ordinary land. Standing next to a geyser that erupts on a schedule no human controls, watching superheated water launch a hundred feet into cold air while the ground vibrates [music] beneath your feet, the earth roaring at you from somewhere below the surface.

[00:23:27]It's genuinely not difficult to understand why people living near this place for thousands of years concluded [music] that something here was alive in a way that ordinary land wasn't because in a real geological sense, it literally is.

[00:23:40]The 1988 fires.

[00:23:43]In the summer of 1988, Yellowstone burned. Not a controlled burn, not a managed wildfire, but a firestorm that covered nearly 800,000 acres, roughly 36% of the entire park before it was finally extinguished by the first autumn snows in September. The fires of 1988 began as a combination of natural lightning strikes and a small number of human-caused ignitions in a summer that turned out to be the driest in Yellowstone's recorded history. The park's fire management policy at the time allowed natural fires to burn under certain conditions as part of the ecosystem's normal cycle.

[00:24:19]That policy had worked without catastrophe for years. In 1988, the conditions were different. The drought was extreme. The wind was persistent.

[00:24:29]And the fires that should have burned themselves out within days kept going.

[00:24:33]By July, it was clear that something unprecedented was happening. Individual fires merged into larger ones. Fire fronts advanced miles in a single day when the wind picked up. Flame lengths reached 200 feet in some areas. Embers were carried by wind more than a mile ahead of active fire lines and started new ignitions before any suppression effort could respond to them. A crew of 9,500 firefighters eventually worked the fires at peak operations. Military personnel were deployed. Every suppression tool available was used. The fires burned anyway because in those conditions, they simply could not be stopped. They stopped when the weather changed. For the wildlife, the 1988 fires were catastrophic in the immediate term and complicated in the long term.

[00:25:19]Around 345 large animals died directly from the fires. Bison, elk, deer, moose, all killed by the flames or by the loss of forage in the aftermath. Smaller mammals died in enormous numbers. The bird populations in burnt areas were decimated. The short-term impact on the ecosystem was severe and visible to every visitor who came to the park in the years immediately following. But Yellowstone recovered in ways that changed how ecologists and land managers think about fire in forest ecosystems.

[00:25:51]By 1989, new vegetation was already emerging from the burnt ground. The lodgepole pine forests, which are adapted to fire and whose cones actually require the heat of fire to open and release seeds, regenerated aggressively.

[00:26:05]The burn mosaic created a patchwork of habitat types that supported greater biodiversity in some species than the uniform mature forest had. The ecosystem absorbed what appeared to be a catastrophe and used it as a reset. What the 1988 fires demonstrated, and what still shapes how people think about Yellowstone today, is that this park operates on timescales and according to processes that don't account for what humans prefer or expect from year to year. The fire management policy that failed catastrophically in 1988 under those specific conditions was not wrong in principle. It was simply operating inside a system that occasionally produces conditions it can't handle.

[00:26:45]Yellowstone's ecosystem is not managed for human comfort. It manages itself according to cycles of fire, growth, volcanic activity, and climate that predate human presence here by millions of years. We are visitors to a place that was running long before we arrived and will be running long after we leave.

[00:27:05]Strange Yellowstone.

[00:27:07]I want to end on something a little lighter because for all the real horror Yellowstone contains, the park also has this layer of genuine strangeness that I love and can't leave out of a video like this. Rangers at Yellowstone deal with situations that simply don't arise anywhere else. The park manages every single season what has become a well-documented phenomenon around visitor behavior near wildlife. People have placed bison calves in their cars because the calf looked cold and they were worried about it. That has happened more than once. Visitor groups have crowded so close around bison for photographs that the animal charged and sent multiple adults into the air. A man once stood at the active edge of a thermal pool attempting to lower his feet toward the surface and genuinely could not understand why rangers were running at him from two directions. The bison thing deserves more attention than it gets because the reputation and statistics are completely misaligned.

[00:28:00]Yellowstone consistently averages more visitor injuries caused by bison than by bears every single year.

[00:28:07]Every year. Not because bears are not dangerous, because they absolutely are, but because bison are everywhere in this park at all times. They're very large, they accelerate much faster than their size suggests is possible, and they have no interest in the social contract you're trying to maintain by standing just a little bit closer for a better angle. A full-grown male bison weighs up to 2,000 lb and runs 35 mph. The grizzly bear has the terrifying reputation. The bison sends more people to emergency departments every summer. The 2003 Norris disturbance is something I keep coming back to when I think about Yellowstone's unpredictability. In that summer, ground temperatures across parts of Norris Geyser Basin spiked [music] dramatically with very little warning.

[00:28:52]New thermal vents opened in locations when none had previously been. Trees began dying from heat exposure at their root systems. Sections of trail were closed for months because the surface of the ground was actively too hot to walk on safely. No eruption, no earthquake, >> [music] >> no dramatic precursory event. The system simply adjusted to a new configuration and the surface responded accordingly.

[00:29:15]The Norris disturbance is the event that Yellowstone scientists reference most consistently when they want to illustrate that the park's thermal behavior is not static and is not done changing. There is also a matter of the lights. Multiple early visitors to Yellowstone and various rangers over the decades wrote about unusual glow effects around certain thermal features during darkness. These are real and they have real scientific explanations that are, I would argue, almost as interesting as any supernatural alternative.

[00:29:45]Bioluminescent bacteria in certain spring runoff channels produce actual light in darkness. The thermophilic microorganisms responsible for the vivid daytime colorings in hot springs produce faint bioluminescence under the right conditions after dark. There are sections of Yellowstone at night where the ground glows, where heat radiates visibly into cold dark air, where the sounds of the thermal features carry across the landscape in ways that feel designed rather than geological. It is explained and yet does not feel fully explained. It's beautiful and it is strange and it is real. The last thing I want to mention, and the one that captures something true about this place in a way that's hard to state directly, is a pattern that comes up in wildlife research around the park. There are documented cases going back decades of large animals, including wolves, bison herds, and elk exhibiting strong avoidance behavior around certain thermal areas, turning back from routes they have used many times before, refusing to enter terrain they could physically cross, choosing significantly longer paths around specific sections of park landscape. Some of this reflects learned behavior passed through generations of animals. Some correlates clearly with gas venting that animals detect through smell in ways humans walking the same trail can't.

[00:31:02]>> [music] >> And some of it the researchers cannot currently account for with available data. The animals know something about this landscape that we are still in the process of learning. Given that they have been living in it and passing that knowledge forward across thousands of generations while we have been visiting for 150 years, that probably makes a certain kind of sense. That's the thing about Yellowstone I keep returning to across everything we talked about today.

[00:31:26]It's one of the most extraordinary and beautiful places on Earth. The kind of place where you understand immediately why someone in 1872 decided it needed to be protected forever. The bison and the wolves and the geysers and the rainbow springs and Old Faithful on its own schedule as if the park is showing off for whoever happens to be standing there [music] are all completely real and worth every photograph and every word ever written about them. And somewhere underneath the visitor centers and the parking lots and the boardwalks [music] and the ranger stations and the gift shops, the hot spot is still there. The magma chamber is still shifting. The thermal plumbing running underneath all of it is still adjusting to configurations we don't fully understand. The ground is still deciding on its own schedule and according to its own logic what it's going to do next and when.

[00:32:15]All right, guys. That is the horrors of Yellowstone. Thank you so much for watching all the way through this one.

[00:32:20]That was genuinely so much fun to research and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what this place contains. There's so much more here. Let me know in the comments what you want to see next or what you think about any of the stories we covered. Subscribe if you want more videos like this. I appreciate you guys being here so much. Have a great night, everyone.