Yellowstone National Park Bingo

Brown humped shapes on the sage flats, or one animal walking down the middle of the road. Stay in the car.

A bison can run about 35 miles an hour and jump a fence about 5 feet high, which is surprising for an animal the size of a car.

The wide grass valley in the northeast corner. Pull over at dawn and look for herds and the animals that follow them.

Crow, Eastern Shoshone, Bannock, and Tukudika ground long before it was the place to find wolves; the northeast valley runs along the year-round Gardiner-to-Coo…

Tan and white, smaller than a deer, built to run. Watch for a white rump patch flashing across the sage.

A pronghorn can hold about 55 miles an hour for half a mile and close to 45 mph over much longer distances, the fastest sustained speed of any land animal in the Western Hemisphere.

The geyser that goes off about every 90 minutes. The board inside the visitor center posts the next window.

Intervals run 60–110 minutes — short eruptions feed shorter waits, long ones (over 2.5 minutes) push it to the 90-minute pattern that has held since the 1998 ea…

Traffic stops because a herd is using the road. Photograph the line of cars, not just the animals.

Far out across the sage, gray and small at that distance. Look for a spotting scope pointed at nothing you can see.

Wolves were gone from Yellowstone for about 70 years. In 1995 the park brought them back, and today between about 83 and 123 wolves live there.

Heat-loving microbes make the rings: orange and brown at the cool edges, yellow closer in. The blue middle is too hot for them. That blue is the water.

The third-largest hot spring on Earth — roughly 370 ft across, 121 ft deep — with rings of orange, ochre, and green that are heat-tolerant bacteria sorted by te…

Read the predicted time at the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center, then time the real one on a watch. How close?

Listen for a squeak in the rock piles high up, then find a small round animal carrying a mouthful of grass.

A pika does not hibernate. Instead it spends all summer clipping plants and piling them under rocks to dry into haypiles, then eats from those piles all winter under the snow.

River meadows between Canyon and the lake. The pullouts here are for scanning, so bring binoculars and wait.

Crow and Eastern Shoshone summer range along the Yellowstone River between Canyon and Fishing Bridge.

From a pullout, find steam rising out of open ground miles from any boardwalk, and photograph it.

White stone steps built by hot water carrying dissolved rock. Find a spot where water is still running over them.

Carbonate-rich water rises through Mississippian limestone and lays down travertine the moment it meets the air, roughly two tons a day across the active terrac…

Shoulder hump, dished face, no black-bear point to the ears. Watch the meadow edges early and late. Keep your distance.

You can tell a grizzly from a black bear by the hump of muscle over its shoulders and its long, straight claws, up to about 4 inches, built for digging, not climbing.

A canyon of yellow rock with the river running green at the bottom. That is where the park's name comes from.

Twenty miles long, 800–1,200 ft deep, walls of rhyolite altered by hydrothermal activity — puffs of steam still rise off the canyon faces.

South Rim overlook that lines up the Lower Falls straight down the canyon. Short walk from the parking area.

A paved overlook on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with the canonical angle on the 308-ft Lower Falls — the view Thomas Moran painted in 1…

Stand downwind of a mud pot and say what it smells like. Rotten eggs is hydrogen sulfide coming up from below.

Big ears, black-tipped tail, and a bouncing four-footed hop when it runs. Common near Mammoth in the evening.

Mule deer are named for their ears, which are about three-quarters as long as their whole head. Those big ears catch faraway sounds and also let heat escape to keep the deer cool in the desert.

A steaming cave that thumps and sloshes. Stand at the rail and listen before you look.

The NPS Historic Tribes page records the Kiowa tradition that places Dragon's Mouth as the hot spring where their creator gave them the Yellowstone area for the…

Where hot water spreads, lodgepoles die standing and turn bone white. Photograph the bare trunks against green forest.

The stone arch at the north entrance in Gardiner. Read the words cut across the top and say who the people are.

The stone arch at the only year-round entrance, cornerstone laid by Theodore Roosevelt on April 24, 1903.

A road-to-ridge climb to a lookout tower at 10,219 feet. You can see most of the park's middle from the top.

Six miles round-trip from Dunraven Pass up to the 10,219-ft fire-lookout summit, with a glassed-in interpretive shelter and panoramas twenty to fifty miles into…

Hot water cooked the iron in the canyon rock and turned it yellow and orange. Get a photo that shows the color.

In West Yellowstone. Bears and wolves that cannot live wild anymore, close enough to see how big they really are.

An AZA-accredited sanctuary opened in 1993 for grizzlies and wolves that couldn't be released back to the wild — naturalists narrate the enclosure from a few fe…

Pick up the booklet at any visitor center, finish the pages for your age, and get sworn in by a ranger.