In Finnish stories they are more often giants. People told that some things in nature, like big or weird stones, are made by Kalevas sons. Stories tells that while people became Christians, they started to hate Kaleva's sons who remained pagans. Soon Kaleva's sons had to go away. All the time Christian people took more land, Kaleva's sons had to go farther away. At one island they staid and did not want to leave. Priests came and they cursed Kaleva's sons until they took a big stone and sailed with it away. They have not been seen since that, but sometimes they come at night and hits crop or even forest down.
Almost the same thing happened to Hiisi people who resembles trolls. Christian humans made them to flee also.
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park is a national park in the United States. It was the world's first national park. United States President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law to create it. The name was taken from the Yellowstone River, which flows through the park. Yellowstone was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.
Yellowstone National Park is famous for its geysers and hot springs. The park contains about half the world's geysers. The world's most famous geyser, the Old Faithful Geyser, is in Yellowstone National Park. It also is a home to grizzly bears, wolves, bison and elk. Many tourists visit the park each year to see the geysers and animals there.
The park is the center of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This is the largest remaining nearly intact ecosystem in the Earth's northern temperate zone. It includes many types of ecosystems, but the biggest is the subalpine forest.
People have lived in the Yellowstone area for about 11,000 years. Some native Americans still lived there when the first people came from Europe in 1807/1808. John Colter, a trapper, came within the Lewis and Clark Expedition and visited a large area that was unknown to the western world at that time. Three years later, he returned to St. Louis and told the people there that he had discovered a wonderland of hot springs and geysers. This area was Yellowstone, but nobody believed him, so Yellowstone still was not a famous place.
For the next sixty years, only a few other trappers traveled through the area, and the same thing happened to them. When they reported that Colter had been right, nobody listened to their stories. Then three expeditions between 1868 and 1871 visited Yellowstone and took the news of its wonders back to the East. One year later, on March 1, 1872, the United States President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law to create the first national park in the world.
For the first sixteen years, there was no money for the park. So from 1886 to 1917, the US Army ran it. Then the new National Park Service took over, which has run Yellowstone ever since.
Yellowstone was proposed to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. The UNESCO committee elected Yellowstone because it has "significant geological phenomena and processes, unique... geothermal forces, natural beauty, and wild ecosystems where rare and endangered species thrive. [It is] one of the few remaining intact large ecosystems in the northern temperate zone of Earth".
About 96 percent of the park is in Wyoming. Three percent is in Montana and only one percent in Idaho. It is about large, bigger than Rhode Island or Delaware.
The park is on the Yellowstone Plateau, at an average elevation of above sea level. There are mountain ranges on most sides of the plateau. These are mountain ranges of the Middle Rocky Mountains, which range from to in elevation.
Three deep canyons are in the park. They were cut through the volcanic tuff of the Yellowstone Plateau by rivers over the last 640,000 years (since the last huge explosion). The most famous is called the "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone".
The Continental Divide of North America runs diagonally through the southwestern part of the Park. This separates the Pacific from Atlantic water drainage areas. The origins of the Yellowstone and Snake Rivers are near each other but on opposite sides of the divide. As a result, the waters of the Snake River flow to the Pacific Ocean, while those of the Yellowstone find their way to the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Mexico.
Yellowstone is the site of a huge ancient volcano, whose remains are called the Yellowstone Caldera. The caldera is the largest volcanic system in North America.
The cause of the volcano was a "hotspot" in the Earth's mantle, over which the American continental plate moved. 640,000 years ago a huge volcanic explosion blew of rock and lava into the air. It was 1000 times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption.
Yellowstone is still a geologically active volcano; which means that an eruption is expected in the future. The U.S monitors it. Geological Survey. There is ground movement, geysers, and small earthquakes. The caldera floor has been rising, but experts say there is no immediate danger of eruption.
For three months in 1985, 3,000 minor earthquakes occurred in the northwestern section of the park. Beginning on April 30, 2007, sixteen small earthquakes with magnitudes up to 2.7 occurred in the Yellowstone Caldera for several days. These swarms of earthquakes are common, and there have been 70 such swarms between 1983 and 2008. In January 2010, more than 250 earthquakes were detected over a two-day period. Seismic activity in Yellowstone National Park continues and is reported hourly by the Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Yellowstone is widely seen to have the finest megafauna (very big animals) wildlife in all over the United States. There are almost 60 species of mammals in the park, including the gray wolf, the threatened lynx, and grizzly bears. Other large mammals are the bison (buffalo), black bear, elk, moose, mule deer, white-tailed deer, mountain goat, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and mountain lion.
Bison once numbered between 30 and 60 million throughout North America. Yellowstone is one of their last strongholds. Their number had increased from less than 50 in the park in 1902 to 4,000 by 2003.
The highest number of bison in the park was 4,900, in 2005. Despite a summer estimated number of 4,700 in 2007, the number dropped to 3,000 in 2008. That was after a harsh winter and a controversial brucellosis management when hundreds were sent to slaughter. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has stated that with vaccinations and other means, brucellosis can be eliminated from the bison and elk herds throughout Yellowstone.
Starting in 1914, the U.S. Congress gave funds for ""destroying wolves, prairie dogs, and other animals injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry"" on public lands. After the wolves were gone from Yellowstone, the coyote became the park's top canine predator. However, the coyote cannot bring down large animals. The result was a great increase in lame and sick megafauna.
By the 1990s, the Federal government had changed its mind on wolves, in a controversial decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wolves, imported from Canada, were brought into the park. A survey conducted in 2005 showed there were 13 wolf packs, totaling 118 wolves in Yellowstone and 326 in the whole ecosystem.
The increase in the number of wolves in the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho has been so successful that they are no longer on the endangered species list.
About 600 grizzly bears live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, with more than half living within Yellowstone.