Huge Collapsed Volcanos Host Dangerous Animals

Rocky Mountain Beer Explorer sent our top reporter to Yellowstone National Park in early September to check on the other major caldera in the West. While its easy to be smug about our Valles Caldera in northern New Mexico and its young and obvious caldera, we must return to the feet of the great one once in a while and go to Yellowstone.

The Valles Caldera National Preserve encompasses a 15 mile diameter caldera which is basically a collapsed volcano. Yellowstone has a 45 mile diameter caldera so it really is the great grand daddy of calderas in the West. And while the Valles Caldera is beautiful with its streams, elk, aspens and warm springs, Yellowstone has bizarre and unbelievable “thermal features” and lots of them. The 2.2 million acre national park teems with grizzly bears, bison, mountain goats, bighorn sheep and other dangerous animals.

Everyone who is more than 5 years old in the West knows about Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone, the great hot fountain of water that blows up to 56 feet about every hour. It has bleachers for the public to watch from and a visitor center with a great bank of windows that look out on the geyser. Yet there are many other geysers as well, some of which only go off every four days or every 4 hours plus or minus an hour or two. Hot pools with great colored portals of green and blue minerals dot the landscape. Mud boils in holes and steam rises from little openings in the woods as you walk around in the lodgepole forests, trying to avoid the grizzly bears that grub around for seeds and small children. Caves out in the woods belch carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide rises from disgusting looking holes filled with messy soup.

We visited Yellowstone with two professional guides who kept our time full with everything from visits to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone to early morning searches for wolves and bears in the seemingly remote Gardner Valley. Everywhere we went, except in the backcountry, we found crowds of people, parking lots and traffic like you find in California clogging he highways. Yet the vast majority of the park is wilderness with virtually nobody around.

Even if the Valles Caldera National Preserve lacks the geysers, great hot pools and grizzly bears, it makes up for it with a rarified solitude and a sense of belonging that people comment on, even if they are from far away. I remember working on a controlled burn with the National Park Service in the Valles Caldera. I was walking along igniting the decadent grasses with my drip torch when I found a little spring emitting a sizeable stream into the Valle San Antonio. The stream emptied immediately into the Rio San Antonio but when I bent over to feel the water, I realized it was about 90 degrees, which explained all the algae and polygons growing in the stream. The others working on the fire missed this obscure thermal feature, but it played in my mind as I watched the fire fill the western sky with the scents of wilderness.

Yellowstone has had its share of fire too and the National Park Service dealt with numerous large fires that had started in the surrounding national forests and burned into the park in 1988. Now those burn scars are filled with young lodgepole pines that grow among the standing dead poles of their parents. There are more recent burns too and the sky will filled with smoke from fires near and far during our visit.

In Yellowstone we started and ended our trip in Bozeman, a town that was a dying ranching town when I visited there in the late 1970s. Now it has subdivisions filling the hay fields on the outskirts and downtown has “gastro-pubs” and fine foods and lots of beer halls filled with noisy students from Montana State University. Plenty of tourists too as this is the gateway to the northwest corner of the National Park.

Bozeman is not Espanola or even Santa Fe. Yellowstone attracts around 4.1 million people a year while the Valles Caldera National Preserve has under 100,000 though the Park Service expects that number to grow over the years. Bozeman has that somewhat frenzied feeling of a town that has been discovered and its reputation is growing among people who want to work from home in a beautiful place. Still I like the feeling of New Mexico where the peculiar mixes with the ordinary and the natural world is over-the-top beautiful.

When I was in Yellowstone, I marveled at how many geysers and mudpots and bubbly-plops there were in the park. Many of them had big parking lots to accommodate the crush of visitors. I thought it might be nice if we could have just one geyser for the Valles Caldera, if Yellowstone could spare just one. But we’ll have to be satisfied with San Antonio Hot Springs and those hidden little springs that won’t attract many tourists.

After sampling the crowds at Yellowstone, I was very happy to come home to New Mexico and see our local National Park Service rangers at the Valles Caldera, talking about elk and bears and volcanoes and the coming winter that we all hope will fill the Valle Grande with snow.