New Episode: When Yellowstone Erupts: A Geologic Gothic

October 27, 2026

Some morning in the geologic future, the magma chamber under Yellowstone empties in an instant. Ennis, Whitehall, Bozeman, Livingston, Gardiner, and the rest of southwest Montana are gone before the sound of the blast can reach them, cooked alive by a wall of superheated gas and ash moving downslope at close to 1,000 miles an hour. Then comes the sound itself, many times louder than Krakatau, rupturing eardrums for thousands of miles in every direction. Inside the park, everything from the smallest blade of grass to the largest grizzly is simply vaporized.

The blast is 2,000 times the size of Mount St. Helens, and it leaves a caldera fifty-five miles across. But the eruption is only the beginning. Ash blots out the sun over most of the country and then the globe, dropping the world into a long volcanic winter. Planes fall from the sky as their engines choke. Crops fail for years, maybe decades. Millions who survive the first day face starvation and a slow poisoning that turns their own bones against them. Viewed from a certain angle, the people killed in the first minutes are the fortunate ones.

The newest episode of Distinctly Montana Stories follows the catastrophe from that first flash all the way through the decades of cold and dark that come after, to a lone figure walking the lava field two generations later, trying and failing to picture what happened there.

Listen now: