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Yellowstone National Park
The world's first national park, atop a supervolcano
Yellowstone, established in 1872, was the first national park in the world, the model for every park that followed. Sprawling across northwestern Wyoming and into Montana and Idaho, its 3,470 square miles (8,983 km²) sit atop one of the largest active volcanic systems on the planet — a supervolcano whose heat drives the greatest concentration of geysers and hot springs on Earth, including the famous Old Faithful and the rainbow-edged Grand Prismatic Spring.
The park is a high volcanic plateau ringed by mountains, drained by the Yellowstone River, which carves its own colorful "Grand Canyon" below a thundering waterfall. Above the geothermal wonders spread vast forests and grasslands that shelter one of the largest concentrations of wildlife in the lower 48 — bison, elk, grizzly bears, and the wolves famously reintroduced in 1995, restoring a missing piece of the ecosystem.
Yellowstone draws nearly five million visitors a year to a landscape unlike anywhere else, where the ground steams and bubbles and the underlying volcano, though quiet, is monitored closely. It anchors the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the last large, nearly intact temperate ecosystems on Earth.