He wrote the definitive history of our first national park, Yellowstone

In Other News #10 // Celebrating the stories of everyday heroes among us.

Randall Wilson lost track of how many times he traveled to Yellowstone.

From his home state of Pennsylvania, it’s a trek measuring more than 2,000 miles.

He figures he made the trip at least 10 times, during the course of writing his newly-released book, A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park.

Wilson well remembers how many years he spent writing.

“It took eight years—I wanted to attempt to create a comprehensive history of Yellowstone, because it didn’t seem to exist,” says Wilson, a professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College for 25 years.

The last time a similar book had been written about Yellowstone? In the 1970s.

And a lot of history has unfolded across the park’s two million acres—spanning Wyoming, Montana and Idaho—since then.

“In the past 40 or 50 years, there were big wildfires in ’88, the reintroduction of wolves, problems with bison and elk, problems with wildlife and tourism, then climate change and more wildfires,” Wilson says.

He says he was compelled to document these happenings, along with the park’s physical and natural history. But he also wanted to reexamine the context of Yellowstone’s story, and how it fits into a bigger story about American history.

To Wilson, writing the book he envisioned was really about chronicling the history of Yellowstone as an American icon.

Here’s how and why he tackled this epic project.