Gift shops in and around Yellowstone National Park are filed with postcards, videos and guidebooks featuring grizzly bears and gray wolves. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a photograph—or even a passing mention—of three much rarer species found only in Yellowstone.
Thanks in part to unique microclimates created by the park’s hot springs, fumaroles and other thermal features, Yellowstone is the only place on earth where you’ll find Ross’s bentgrass, Yellowstone sand verbena and Yellowstone sulfur wild buckwheat.
But most visitors to the park will never see these obscure plants.