Yellowstone visit a treat

People planning to visit Yellowstone National Park before winter, or who are considering a trip next year, should include the Canyon Visitor Education Center on their itinerary. My family and I visited the center for the first time recently, and it is a worthwhile stop.

The exhibits in the two-floor center, which opened in 2006, focus on the geologic and volcanic nature of the park.

Among the exhibits are huge, ash-filled blocks comparing the size of previous eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

The smallest of the three Yellowstone eruptions, the Henry's Fork caldera eruption 1.3 million years ago, was 280 times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption. That Yellowstone event released 280 cubic kilometers of ash.

Another popular exhibit is the 9,000-pound kugel ball — a large sphere of granite spinning on a fine layer of water that depicts the world's volcanic hot spots. Kids and adults delight in spinning the sphere.

Computers show real-time earthquake and other geologic data being collected around the park.

As for wildlife viewing, I recommend heading for the Lamar Valley in the park's northeast corner. For two days, we easily saw wolves playing near the Lamar River, and lots of bison. Remember to take precautions. A mama grizzly killed a man in the park on July 6, and another man was killed on Aug. 26. The circumstances around the latest killing are not yet known. Although incidents like this are extremely rare, there are more than 600 bears in the greater Yellowstone area.

Late-season anglers should find water levels finally returning to normal. Yellowstone also has dealt with plenty of snow and a slow runoff, leaving many streams and rivers too high to fish until recently.Outdoors