Wifi in the wilderness

My family was in Yellowstone National Park last week, and we needed to find a wifi hotspot so that my daughter could log in and add some college classes to her fall class schedule.

We saw this and went to the Visitor Center with our laptop:

yellowstone wifi?

Only one problem. That little graphic sign doesn’t mean wifi.

It means amphitheatre.

Low tech. A place for non-digitized presentations on plants, animals, rocks, the Shoshone tribe, and Wyoming natural history.

I felt a little silly.

But then again, maybe it would be silly to have wifi in the middle of a historic national park like Yellowstone. Come on, Yellowstone is about nature! A place to which we flee our technology culture.

So it’s cool with me that there was an amphitheatre instead of a hotspot. But maybe they should change their sign.

[Actually, Yellowstone sits on top of a huge geothermal phenomenon called a hotspot, which powers Old Faithful, the Black Dragon's Lair and all the other thermal wonders of the park. But of course that kind of hotspot is about hot lava under the ground rather than internet access above it.]