Quick answer: What did John Fenzel find when he returned to Yellowstone after twenty-nine years?
In October 2026 John crossed Yellowstone from the north gate to the west gate in a single day with his family and a naturalist guide. He found a forest grown up from the 1988 burn and a park whose history reads as a long record of mistakes followed by slow corrections.
John last drove into Yellowstone in 1997, when the great fire of 1988 was nine years old and the wolves had been back for two. With his son Luke in his last semester at Montana State in Bozeman, and the interior roads closing for the season on October 31, he went back this October with naturalist guide Maia Zaluski of Yellowstone Safari Company. They left Bozeman before first light and drove the park from the north gate to the west gate in a day. The Yellowstone River, the longest river in the lower 48 with no dam on it, ran beside the road from Livingston. Below Gardiner, pronghorn grazed the flats, more of them now than before because wolves kill the coyotes that prey on pronghorn fawns. Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the arch at the north entrance on April 24, 1903. From 1886 to 1918 the United States Army ran Yellowstone, beginning with about fifty cavalrymen under Captain Moses Harris. The soldiers patrolled on long skis in winter and caught poachers who were killing the last wild bison, but their orders were to shoot wolves and mountain lions on sight. At Mammoth, a bull elk the guides know as number 24 was still holding his cows at the end of the rut. Up on the plateau the talk turned to wolves. The survivors of a pack destroyed by its neighbors in the first years of reintroduction fled into Pelican Valley, learned to hunt bison, and their descendants hold that valley today. A wild pack is a family, led by a breeding pair, and outside the park hunters wait at the boundary, so the guides no longer radio a sighting near the line. The road to Canyon runs through the 1988 burn, when about a third of the park burned and the lodgepole pines, whose sealed cones open in the heat of a fire, reseeded the ground. The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone drops 308 feet. Thomas Moran sketched the canyon in 1871 with the Hayden survey, alongside photographer William Henry Jackson, and in 1872 Congress created the first national park. Through spotting scopes at Steamboat Point the family watched a grizzly feeding in an old burn as she fattened for winter. On Yellowstone Lake, lake trout that someone illegally released have eaten the native cutthroat out of the shallows where osprey once fished. At Old Faithful, each eruption forces its water through a narrow pinch in the rock, which is why the geyser erupts instead of simply overflowing. John also corrected something he had believed for twenty-nine years: about 96 percent of Yellowstone lies in Wyoming, though Montana has three of its five entrances. The essay opens a two-week series for paid subscribers on the stories from that day.
Why it matters for leaders: Yellowstone's record is mostly one of mistakes and corrections. The Army shot the predators and the Park Service put out every fire, and each looked like good stewardship at the time. Institutions learn slowly and after damage, and they learn at all only when someone writes the evidence down where the next person can find it, as the soldiers once did and the Wolf Project does now.
Q: Who ran Yellowstone before the National Park Service?
A: The United States Army ran Yellowstone from 1886 to 1918. About fifty cavalrymen under Captain Moses Harris arrived in August 1886, and the Army later built Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth, patrolled the park on skis in winter, and protected its last wild bison from poachers.
Q: How much of Yellowstone National Park is in Wyoming?
A: About 96 percent of Yellowstone lies in Wyoming, with about 3 percent in Montana and about 1 percent in Idaho. Montana has three of the park's five entrances, which is why many visitors think of Yellowstone as a Montana park.
Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/twenty-nine-years-later
By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation