Recent numbers released by the National Parks service show Yellowstone tours as the fourth most popular of all the national parks tours with 2,870,295 people visiting there last year. The top three were Great Smoky Mountains (9,289,215), Grand Canyon (4,279,439) and Yosemite (3,242,644). Olympic National Park rounded out the top five with 2,749,197 visitors. There are a total of one hundred forty seven national parks in the United States, so most residents have one within driving distance of their home.

Yellowstone tours remain popular because Yellowstone park contains over three hundred active geysers and the largest high elevation lake in the North America, 7000 feet above sea level. There is also a large selection of wildlife there for your viewing pleasure, including sixty seven species of mammal and over three hundred types of birds. Each year the number of people who tour Yellowstone increases as more Americans choose to stay close to home on their vacations.

On August 15 and 16 the Department of the Interior is sponsoring their third fee-free weekend of the summer at Yellowstone National Park and other participating national parks around the country. The last two weekends they did this were June 20 and 21 and July 18 and 19. Both were a resounding success. The park has also been providing a free daily web cast from Old Faithful geyser with commentary and questions answered by Park Ranger George Heinz. It’s all part of a drive to create new interest in America’s national parks, a campaign that will no doubt increase the number of visitors this year. 

Finally, for all of you Green folk out there (and that should be all of us), Xanterra Parks and Resorts, one of Yellowstone’s food concessions, has come up with new technology that enables them to recycle the cooking oil that helps feed nearly 22,000 people a day and use it to replace diesel fuel in Yellowstone that was previously used to power the park. Xanterra cooks with close to 11,000 gallons of cooking oil a year and using that to replace diesel will reduce pollution and carbon emissions in the park significantly. The conversion is still being done but steps taken so far indicate that it will be a resounding success.