Groups of bachelor bull elk with massive antlers coated in velvet are a stone's throw from park roads. Herds of buffalo stop traffic in Hayden Valley.

"The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the world," said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. "The park was created and is now administered for the benefit enjoyment of the people."

Nothing has changed since Roosevelt's time and in some ways it is even better than it was. Average people with a desire to see the world's most spectacular display of geothermal features and magnificent wildlife can visit the park easily. In Roosevelt's time it was a journey by train, wagon or horseback. Today we just turn the key instead of saddling up.

My family's first journeyed to Yellowstone when I was 11 years old. It fascinated me. Decades later it is even more fascinating. It is like reading a good book. On your first visit you skim through the chapters (Drive from one end of the park to the other doing the great American road tour) and read the plotline on the inside cover of the book (Find out it was the first National Park and see Old Faithful). As you grow older and learn more about the park you savor the storied history and ecological changes chapter by chapter.

The grandeur of Yellowstone is nearly overwhelming. It puts a capital A back into Awe inspiring. Old Faithful geyser is the front cover of the book. Seeing it for the first time overwhelmed my parents. At age 11, I was more interested in the bears and catching Yellowstone cutthroat trout than standing around watching a geyser. There were fish to be caught.

The chapter I wanted to experience was the one where the little kid catches the big fish. Bears also intrigued me. How did they catch fish? Would they steal my fish? Where did they live in the winter? How come some bears were really big and called grizzlies and others were call black bears? Somehow these two chapters in nature fit together but I didn't know how.

Trout and bears:

A Yellowstone Chapter

The really interesting thing and sometimes madding thing about Yellowstone is that the chapters in its book keep getting rewritten.

As a child I though it was great that bears begged for food along the roads of Yellowstone. Park officials kept a lid on the annual number of people getting mauled and when it happened you didn't hear about it.

No one mentioned the park averaged 48 injuries to humans each year by bears from 1930 to 1960. Listening to Yellowstone Park Bear Management Team member and biologist Kerry Gunther explain that today such injuries are rare with only one or two occurring yearly surprised me.

At 11, catching and keeping six big Yellowstone cutthroat trout was my aim in life. I fished off Fishing Bridge along with hundred of other anglers to catch big spawning cutthroats. Bears took a backseat to human anglers.

Today Fishing Bridge is closed to fishing and you will not see a bear begging food along the roads of Yellowstone Park. New chapters in bear management and fish management have been written.

Bear biologists now use radio collars that can track the exact location of a bear via satellite.

Grizzly bears are the poster children and black bears take second seat. The movements of grizzlies are closely tracked and their movements correlated with their food sources - they move from the open mountain slopes where they eat army cutworm moths by the millions, to their annual treks to fish for cutthroat trout near Fishing Bridge.

Gunther explained how a DNA hair sample project helped them determine not only identification of individual bears but also information about the food they eat. That's technology experts only dreamed of when I was 11 years old. Yellowstone grizzlies are far more carnivorous than their bear brethren in Glacier National Park and other places. This is a serious concern since cutthroat trout are a bear food sources.

Yellowstone cutthroat trout face one of the worst chapters of their history in Yellowstone Lake. Breeding pairs of trout have dropped like a stone fluttering to the bottom of the famous lake. At Pelican Bay, where up to 30,000 Yellowstone cutthroat once congregated to spawn, only 250 returned this season to breed.

Two dark forces have converged - disease and predation. Whirling disease is now apparently attacking the nervous systems of baby cutthroat trout. Sometime in the early 1990s lake trout appeared in Yellowstone Lake. Voracious predators, lake trout prospered because of abundant food.

Meeting with National Park Service fisheries researcher Dan Mahoney, I watched him remove finger long trout from a special wire cage submerged in a small stream emptying into the lake. He is checking which streams carry whirling disease.

"Whirling disease is a serious concern for the trout," said Mahoney.

Later, he showed our group the 30-foot commercial net boat biologists use to catch as many lake trout as possible. Over the last several years of fishing, they have averaged removal of 11,000 to 15,000 lake trout. According to Mahoney, the good news is that the catch rates are leveling off indicating progress is being made in checking the lake trout bloom.

As a kid my only interest was in catching as many cutthroats as legally possible. Whirling disease was still confined to Europe and lake trout were some fish from the far north. Bears seemed everywhere. Things have changed.

Time to visit Yellowstone again

It is time to visit Yellowstone again. Open your own special book on its natural wonders. As Roosevelt said, "Yellowstone is absolutely unique in the world."

At 11 years old my interest book was simple; fish, bears and a geyser. Today, new and changing chapters have opened up. Each time I visit the park I learn things I never knew existed.

Visit Yellowstone and re-open your book to the features you love and new ones that excite you.