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Jan 20
Books and souvenirs about Yellowstone National Park are displayed on wooden shelves in a gift shop, including plush bears, postcards, and guidebooks. Informational signs and various reading materials fill the shelves.

Your Yellowstone Reading List

Yellowstone is more than a national park—it’s a living, breathing ecosystem shaped by fire, ice, animals, and people. The following books explore the science, history, and personal stories woven into this remarkable landscape, revealing why Yellowstone continues to fascinate readers, writers, and conservationists alike.

Browse All Yellowstone Books

The Official Guide

Cover of Yellowstone: The Official Guide, featuring a vibrant aerial view of thermal hot springs with yellow, orange, green, and blue colors. Text reads: The Official Guide to Touring the Worlds First National Park.
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This is our #1 best-selling publication! Published by Yellowstone Forever, the park’s nonprofit education partner since 1933, this guide includes all of the information you need to plan and enjoy your trip to our first national park- from reservations to road maps to recommended activities.

Reign of Wolf 21

Book cover for The Reign of Wolf 21 by Rick McIntyre, featuring a close-up of a black wolf’s face on a black background with yellow and white text.
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In this compelling story, Rick McIntyre profiles one of Yellowstone’s most revered alpha males, Wolf 21. Find other Rick McIntyre titles here.

Yellowstone in a Day

A travel guidebook cover titled Yellowstone in a Day features bison walking across a geothermal area with trees in the background.
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Designed by local park experts, our Yellowstone in a Day tour guide is an informative guide that simplifies your trip to Yellowstone with three classic sightseeing day trips.

Flora of Yellowstone

Book cover of Flora of the Yellowstone by Whitney Tilt, featuring an illustration of various wildflowers and grasses in a natural landscape with a soft, green background.
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Designed for easy use, this guide presents an overview of each species in Yellowstone, complete with photos and illustrations, botanical descriptions, preferred habitats, and interesting tidbits on the plant’s ecology and cultural use.

Women in Wonderland

Book cover for Women in Wonderland by Elizabeth A. Watry, featuring historic photos of women at Yellowstone National Park, including women on horseback near a stone arch and portraits of women in old-fashioned attire.
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In her one-of-a-kind book, author Elizabeth Watry shares stories of the female legends of Yellowstone.

Yellowstone’s Birds

Cover of Yellowstones Birds, showing three swans in flight over misty water with tree trunks in the background. The title and editors’ names are visible on the top and lower left side.
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A beautifully illustrated survey of Yellowstone’s breathtaking birdlife, written by a team of renowned ornithologists and wildlife biologists.

Field Guide to YNP & Grand Teton

Field guide book cover for Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, featuring photos of wildlife, landscapes, and natural features, with blue and yellow text highlighting key park attractions and authors name, Kurt F. Johnson.
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The essential nature guide to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, written by a local wildlife biologist and eco-tour guide.

Ghostwalker | Expanded Edition

Book cover of Ghostwalker by Leslie Patten, featuring a mountain lion standing in a forest clearing with cactus, under a dark, cloudy sky. Subtitle: Tracking a Mountain Lions Soul through Science and Story.
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Ghostwalker presents a complete picture of mountain lions in the West today, uncovering the intimacies of their secretive lifestyle as well as the issues they face in our changing world.

Yellowstone Yesterday & Today

Book cover titled Yellowstone Yesterday & Today features historic and modern photos of Yellowstone landmarks, including geysers and rock formations, overlaid on a vintage map background.
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More than 100 historic images spanning Yellowstone’s long history take on new meaning when precisely matched with Paul Horsted’s modern photos of the same locations.

Eavesdropping on Animals

Book cover for Eavesdropping on Animals by George Bumann, featuring a deer with a small bird perched on its back, standing in a green grassy field.
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In Eavesdropping on Animals, George Bumann shares the fascinating stories and insights he has gained from studying wildlife around the world for more than forty years, the last twenty of which have been spent leading popular programs on animal language and intelligence in Yellowstone National Park.

Braiding Sweetgrass | National Best Seller

Book cover of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, featuring a braid of sweetgrass across a white background with green and gold text.
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Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults

Book cover of Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults shows illustrated hands braiding green grass. Subtitle: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Authors and illustrator are listed below.
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Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.

Death in Yellowstone

Book cover of Death in Yellowstone by Lee H. Whittlesey, featuring a bear silhouette with a waterfall inside, red birds, and the subtitle: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park.
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The chilling tome that launched an entire genre of books about the often gruesome but always tragic ways people have died in our national parks, this updated edition of the classic includes calamities in Yellowstone from the past sixteen years, including the infamous grizzly bear attacks in the summer of 2011 as well as a fatal hot springs accident in 2000.

Rebirth by Fire

Book cover showing intense orange flames. Title reads Yellowstones Rebirth by Fire: Rising from the Ashes of the 1988 Wildfires by Karen Wildung Reinhart. Includes small images of plants and a bird.
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This landmark new book features 93 photos from the historic 1988 Yellowstone fires, dramatic accounts from those on the front lines, and the remarkable story of Yellowstone’s rebirth as blackened mountainsides have given way to green stands of lodgepole pine and aspen.

Yellowstone Wolves

Book cover for Yellowstone Wolves, showing two wolves walking across a snowy hill with overcast skies. Includes subtitle and editors’ names.
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Here, for the first time in a single book, is the incredible story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone National Park as told by Doug Smith, co-editor Dan Stahler, Erin Stahler, Matt Metz, Kira Cassidy and the very people responsible for their reintroduction, study, and management.

American Wolf | A True Story

Book cover for American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee. The background is blue with a silhouette of a wolf howling at the bottom. Gold text highlights the title and subtitle: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West.
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Before wolves were nearly driven to extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s and later reintroduced to the Rockies, sparking cultural conflict, Nate Blakeslee chronicles the powerful true story of O‑Six—a charismatic, fiercely intelligent alpha female wolf whose strength, compassion, devoted motherhood, and rise as a beloved icon among wolf watchers and global followers came to symbolize the modern struggle over the American West.

A Hunger for High Country

Book cover for A Hunger for High Country by Susan Marsh, featuring flying birds over a grassy hill with mountains and a purple sky in the background. Subheading: One womans journey to the wild in Yellowstone country.
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In this memoir‑inflected portrait of the West, Susan Marsh recounts how her dream job with the Forest Service in Montana ends in conflict and disillusionment, before she finds renewal in western Wyoming through encounters with wild landscapes, danger, and beauty that shaped her life as a woman in conservation.

Yellow Wolf: His Own Story

Book cover for Yellow Wolf: His Own Story by L.V. McWhorter. Three people sit in front of a decorated tipi with a dog. Items hang on the left side. Title in red and black text.
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Researchers consider this account of the Native American strategy and policy to be a foundation book for any study of the Nez Perce.