Yellowstone Sense of Place Story

You can download this episode (the fourth in the “Travel With A Sense of Place” series) for free and its 3:38” length makes it perfect for filling out a 30-minute time slot. In this visual essay of still photos shot in Yellowstone National Park, travel writer Dick Jordan takes you on an emotional journey to a hellish place which would become the world’s first national park, but whose description was so “other-worldly” that, at first, many did not believe it could even exist on Earth. But photographs taken by William Henry Jackson and watercolors painted by the artist Thomas Moran during an 1871 expedition to the Yellowstone region moved the Congress to act the following year to set aside the area as a “public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit of the people.” Without Yellowstone there would be no Acadia, no Big Bend, no Everglades, no Grand Canyon, no Haleakala, no Kenai Fjords, no Lassen, no Mount Rainier, no Redwood, no Sequoia, nor any other places on today’s A to Z list of U.S. national parks. Without Yellowstone, there would be no respite from the congestion and clamor of the nation’s cities, no refuge on the planet where, as John Muir said, “nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” Documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, has called the national parks “America’s Best Idea.” And by creating Yellowstone National Park, we have exported that best of America’s ideas to the rest of the world, and by doing so, have encouraged it to save its own, best places.

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