
Yellowstone: The World's First National Park
Yellowstone sprawls across 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and this entry in the Vintage Series takes a straightforward, unnarrated-feeling look at the park that started the whole idea of setting land aside as a national park. The camera moves through the geyser basins, catching eruptions and the steam rising off hot springs, then follows rivers down to waterfalls before settling on the wildlife that draws most visitors in the first place: bison herds grazing in open valleys, along with wolves and bears moving through the timber. There's no narrator building an argument here, just footage of the terrain and animals that made Yellowstone famous well before it became a preservation model copied by nearly every country with wild land left to protect. It plays as a plain record of the park's landscape and animals rather than a history of how it came to exist, useful mainly for seeing the geology and wildlife up close.