This book will serve as your interpretive guide to the magnificent Grand Loop Drive traversing the heart of Yellowstone National Park. You are about to experience one of the world’s greatest wilderness preserves. For 142 miles, the Grand Loop Drive not only travels through forests, meadows and mountains but will also take you through or by the Earth's largest concentration of geysers and geothermal features, one of North America's greatest wildlife spectacles, a petrified forest, the continent's largest high-altitude lake and a canyon carved by the Yellowstone River so colorful that it left 19th-century explorers and artists speechless.

When you make the effort to understand the geology, plant and animal ecology, and human story behind this magnificent wilderness, it's easy to conclude that the old adage "truth is stranger than fiction" must have been thought up with Yellowstone National Park in mind!