Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park, WY
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Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the first national park in the United States and is widely regarded as the first national park established anywhere in the world, a designation that predates the modern conservation movement by decades and set the legal and philosophical template every subsequent national park system has followed. The park sits atop the Yellowstone Caldera, one of the largest active volcanic systems on Earth, whose underlying geothermal activity powers more than 10,000 hydrothermal features, including Old Faithful, a geyser that's erupted predictably enough to be named for its reliability since the park's earliest days of tourism. Yellowstone's 1995 reintroduction of gray wolves, absent from the park since the species was deliberately eradicated in the 1920s, became one of the most studied and celebrated conservation success stories in American wildlife management, credited with cascading ecological benefits across the park's entire elk, vegetation, and river-system balance. Yellowstone's combination of being the world's first national park, its extraordinary concentration of geothermal features sitting atop an active supervolcano, and its landmark wolf reintroduction has made it the essential reference point for what a national park is supposed to protect and showcase.
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