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West Thumb geyser basin is on the western shore of an inlet of Lake Yellowstone, seventeen miles east of Old Faithful. A half-mile boardwalk loop around the area showcases an ersatz Lewis Carroll wonderland of steaming craters with exotic names like "Lakeside Spring", "Abyss Pool", "Blue Funnel Spring", "Epherda Spring", "Perforated Pool", "Percolating Spring", " Thumb Geyser", and "Collapsing Pool". "Fishing Cone" is in the shallows by the shore, under a foot of lake water, through which the steam rises. The paint pots are small hot springs filled with mud mixed with sulphur, and they slowly boiled and erupted like a pot of pudding. A female elk and her calf had wandered into the thermal area, oblivious to the danger. Here, as in the other thermal areas of the park, the there was no telling where the earth crust was too thin to support weight. The calf knelt down and waited while her mother ate grass. The sun was beginning to set and the light was fading. It was about 8:30 PM. We had about 75 miles yet to travel through the park, north to Gardiner, Montana. We had to pass through another construction area, albeit one that was stopping work for the night. Still, the speed limit was 35 mph, and as darkness crept out of the woods, caution prevailed. Slight twists and turns in the two-lane blacktop unwound into flat straight-aways through placid, steaming meadows. At one point, a coyote skulked along the side of the road, glared over his shoulder at our headlights and trotted into a grove of evergreens. Due to the absence of air pollution and light pollution, the deep blue sky was freckled with stars, and we stopped at one point to get out of the van and gaze at them. The sky and jagged outline of pines, the steaming meadow and eloquent silence all fit together as logically and as compactly as a poem. *****
Next morning, Friday, we returned to Yellowstone through the north entrance. Five miles inside, we stopped at the Mammoth Hot Springs, a colony of travertine deposits sprouting terrace-like from the side of a mountain. Some deposits seemed to resemble giant cauliflower. The more terraced-looking springs looked like miniature rice paddies that had been hit by an atomic explosion. The bacteria and algae in the hot water that bleeds from these formations determine the color of the built-up minerals. Some build-ups were stained a rust-colored brown; others tie-dyed a light pink or green. The thermal area was criss-crossed with boardwalks, and an occasional bluebird would alight on the railing a safe distance from us to give us the once-over. From the southeast, a rainstorm quickly crawled over the mountain and scolded the area with rain for twenty minutes before sailing over to the next range. The sun came out again, and we drove to the upper terraces and came upon a herd of elk crossing the road, behind a giant orange-stained tumor of travertine as big as a one-story house. They gracefully sauntered in slow motion across the pavement and into the woods, heading for higher ground. Around the other side was a forest of misshapen gray trees. When the spring first came though the crust of the earth here, the trees died, cut off from nutrients in the soil. The dried wood now acts like a wick, sucking up water and mineral; the trees are slowly turning to stone. They stood, twisted and tortured, their branches grasping like claws at the sky. From there, we headed south to the Norris Geyser Basin. Along the way, we stopped at Roaring Mountain, a towering, gray mass of what looked like ashes. Between the steam and quiet hissing, it almost seemed to breathe. Five miles below the Roaring Mountain is the Norris Geyser basin. A thermal plain sweating with deep open hot springs and tattooed with green and orange algae. Steam rose lazily from various points, like a tribe of dying campfires. On the other side of the bluff was an active geyser bed, and a large crowd of people surged down the boardwalk to get a good look at the eruption of the geyser Eucinious. Though not shooting as high as Old Faithful, Eucinious was to give a more spectacular, yet intimate show. Eucinious was a bowl in the ground, approximately ten feet in diameter. It began to fill slowly, like a bathtub, with hot water; and it progressively began to steam. The crowd waited patiently along a boardwalk that encircled two-thirds of the area, and few people spoke. A military helicopter passed overhead. "Maybe it's the President," someone said. The president was vacationing in Jackson Hole at the time. The water began to
boil and roil about, and a cloud of steam rose. The air reeked of sulphur.
Our part of the boardwalk was as close as fifteen to twenty feet away.
Steam covered Eucinious. We could see nothing, but we heard the geyser
hiss and bubble. The breeze blew the steam away, and Eucinious spat a
short stream of water into the air, then another, even higher. The steam
covered and then was whipped away again by the breeze, a curtain that
constantly opened and closed. And Eucinious teased us for twenty minutes,
roaring and spurting and then seeming to die down. And then, another sudden
eruption, and another. The crowd oohed and ahhed as if it were a fireworks
display in reverse. And then it was over. The bubbles died down, the pool's
level lowered, and Eucinious was pulled back into the earth. All that
remained was an empty hole and many wet people. |