Air Date: Week of March 7, 1997

Facts about... Yellowstone National Park's 125th anniversary.

Transcript

CURWOOD: One hundred and twenty five years ago, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation creating the world's first national park, Yellowstone. The park area has been home to humans for thousands of years. Stone tools unearthed there indicate habitation by Native Americans since the last Ice Age. The first European explorer reported to lay eyes on this land was a fur trapper named John Coulter. He passed through around 1807. Six decades later a Federal survey of the area prompted Congress to set aside the more than 2 million acres as a national park. The park Congress created and named after the Yellowstone River is home to more geysers and hot springs than the rest of the world combined. It also has a greater variety and number of wild animals than anywhere else in the contiguous 48 states, including the recently reintroduced gray wolf. It is also one of the last remaining strongholds of the grizzly bear. And for this week, that's the Living on Earth Almanac.