The sights of Yellowstone are so fantastic that when the first white person to visit described what was there, he was roundly criticized as delirious or possibly a liar. It wasn’t until the world saw the paintings of Thomas Moran from the Hayden Expedition some 70 years later that people began to believe such a wondrous place could exist.

Yellowstone National Park is a nearly 3,500-sq.-mile wilderness recreation area atop a volcanic hot spot. Mostly in Wyoming, the park spreads into parts of Montana and Idaho too. Yellowstone features dramatic canyons, alpine rivers, lush forests, hot springs and gushing geysers, including its most famous, Old Faithful. It's also home to hundreds of animal species, including bears, wolves, bison, elk and antelope.

Yellowstone is home to over 60% of the world’s geysers – natural hot springs with unique plumbing that causes them to periodically erupt in towering explosions of boiling water and steam. And while these astounding phenomena and their neighboring Technicolor hot springs and bubbling mud pots draw in the crowds (over 4 million people each year), the surrounding canyons, mountains and forests are no less impressive.

Teeming with moose, elk, bison, grizzly bears and wolves, America's first national park also contains some of the country's wildest lands, just begging to be explored.