Yellowstone, USA
In the northwest corner of Wyoming is an area of some two million square miles of volcanic plateau, forest and mountainous terrain scoured by glaciers and scorched by fire. It is also the site of the world's largest calderas with over 10,000 thermal features and more than 300 geysers. Even as late as the latter third of the nineteenth century, the Yellowstone area of Wyoming and Montana was considered terra incognita.
"As I clipped down the ski bindings I noticed through the corner of my vision a distant movement on the snow. Two coyotes emerged from the forest margin and were travelling quickly across the snowfield. I crouched low, hoping they may pass nearby. With apparent utter disinterest of my presence they paced like metronomes in a perfectly straight line across the snow in single file directly and unnervingly towards me. I held my breath, their course never altered and they bounded powerfully by within three metres, without even a glance. I looked into their steely eyes, half closed in the lightly falling snow. I had been visited by princes of the winter woods."
