Fisherman at lake turning to cook in a boiling spring the trout just caught, Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Publication

Fisherman at lake turning to cook in a boiling spring the trout just caught, Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Description

You are looking northeast from the shore of Yellowstone Lake across Thumb Bay, one of its many spreading arms. The place is extraordinary in many ways, but the most striking peculiarity of all is the possibility of such a proceeding as you see now--that fisherman has just caught in the lake the plump trout on his line and now he is lowering his prize into a spring of boiling water, only a few feet from the cool depths of the lake itself. The waters of the boiling spring evidently rise from sources absolutely separate from the lake bed--as separate as if they came up in pipes set by a plumber! Yet geologiests say the boiling waters like those of the Lake are of meteoric origin, i.e.: were deposited in the form of rain or snow, but that they gradually filtered down through the ground into rock hollows leading to subterranean depths of terrific heat. The most famous spouting geysers are off at your left (northwest) twenty or thirty miles away by the wagon-road. Even if the geysers were not here with their weird fascination, this lake would deserve a throng of visitors for the sake of its beauty in this rare situation, almost a mile and a half higher than sea-level. Its mountain-walled basin covers 139 square miles. Just here along the shore, the waters are seldom more than twenty or thirty feet deep, but there are places where the bed sinks 300 feet. The waters are alive with plump, pink-fleshed salmon-trout. (See H.M. Chittenden's "Yellowstone National Park;" Encyclopaedia articles on "Geysers," etc.) From Notes of Travel, No. 13, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.