In 1807, a trapper named John Colter walked out of the mountains and told people he'd seen ground that steamed and rivers that boiled. They laughed at him. For the next sixty years, anyone who described Yellowstone accurately got called a liar, because the truth was stranger than most people could believe. The place sits on top of one of the largest volcanoes on Earth. Half the world's geysers are inside its boundary. People have lived there for more than eleven thousand years, and their descendants are there today. In 1872, the United States set two million acres of it aside and said it belonged to everybody, permanently — something no government had tried before. Then came the hard part, which was figuring out what that actually meant. Rangers shot the wolves. The park built bleachers so tourists could watch grizzly bears eat garbage. Every wildfire got extinguished for eighty years, until the summer a third of the park burned. Each time, sincere people worked hard and made things worse, and each time somebody eventually noticed and said so. This is the story of how the land got made and how humans slowly, clumsily learned to take care of it. Written for readers nine to twelve, with the arguments left in.