YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYO. - Many of the visitors to Yellowstone National Park breeze through on tour buses. They load and unload at Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and slow down for the requisite photo of roaming buffalo.

But the best parts of the Yellowstone experience -- like the awe of watching a 250-foot geyser whose eruption can only be pinpointed to a three-hour window or seeing the profile of a wolf in the distance after you've waited for the fog to clear-- come from being patient with the park.

Yellowstone is world's first national park, a geyserland that the government deemed worthy of protection in 1872.

More than 300 geysers -- two-thirds of the geysers in the entire world -- are found in the park's 3,472 square miles miles, along with roughly 10,000 other thermal features, like brilliantly hued hot springs and gurgling mudpots.

The Yellowstone River winds gently through Hayden Valley, then roars in spectacular waterfalls into the 20-mile-long Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

And across the valleys of "America's Serengeti," bison and elk dot the landscape, along with the occasional wolf, grizzly, coyote or moose.

My husband and I spent most of our seven nights at the Canyon Campground. The campground, with 272 well-maintained sites, is about as close to centrally located as you can get in Yellowstone. It is also one of the few campgrounds with showers. Those two qualities alone were enough for us, but when we arrived we also found comfortable sites nestled among lodgepole pine trees with restrooms and a dishwashing sink close by.

We came into the park with ambitious plans to see to grizzlies, wolves, moose and bison -- we hoped from a safe distance. After four days of nervously scanning trails for bear tracks in the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park, I was ready to patiently sit roadside above the valleys and let the animals come to me.

We'd been in the park just 45 minutes when we saw a group of eight bison sitting in the shade as we entered Hayden Valley from the south.

In 1902, Yellowstone's native bison herd had dwindled down to just 23 animals before it was mixed with bison from private herds. Now, the bison flourish, numbering about 4,000 in the park.

The animals are often called buffalo, and rangers will tell you that the terms "buffalo" and "bison" are used interchangeably in the United States. Scientifically, however, buffalo, a distant relative of the American bison, are found only in Africa and Asia.

A few days later, in one of many "buffalo jams" we encountered, a large bison was making its way down the center of the road between stopped cars on either side. Its shaggy head suddenly appeared from behind the van in front of us, and it turned to cut in front of our rented Toyota Corrolla, rubbing its coat along the bumper, then along the passenger side of the car as I sat frozen in my seat.

We heard that early morning and evening are the best times to spot bears and wolves, so we planned our days around wildlife watching early and late, with time in between for exploring Yellowstone's geological features. We forced ourselves from cozy sleeping bags into chilly air before 6 a.m., bundling up in our thickest clothing and grabbing breakfast bars for the road. We drove until we saw groups with long spotting scopes, then, figuring those people knew what they were doing, hopped out of the car.

If you stick around the park for a few days, you're bound to run into some of the unofficial tour guides of Yellowstone. They're the people with walkie-talkies scattered strategically throughout the geyser basins, carrying notebooks with the exact times of each geyser's last few eruptions, or the guys in flannel jackets who set up spotting scopes in Hayden Valley well before dawn.

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