Keppler's Cascade, Charming Rapids of Firehole River, Yellowstone Nat. Park, Wyo.

Publication

Keppler's Cascade, Charming Rapids of Firehole River, Yellowstone Nat. Park, Wyo.

Description

KEPLER CASCADE, FIREHOLE RIVER, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. The Firehole River! What a name that was conjure with in the old days when farroving hunters and trappers used to come back to the frontier settlements with incredible tales of a land buried deep in the forbidding mountains and black forests of the Rockies, where gigantic fountains of boiling water leaped out of the ground hundreds of feet into the air, where whole valleys and mountainsides roared and smoked, where hills were hung with a myriad of alabaster balconies brimming with crystal waters and rivers flowed through abysmal canyons whose walls glowed with the tints of the rainbow or ran over beds which, as Jim Bridger expressed it, were "hot at the bottom." People in the settlements laughed scornfully at such tales and nicknamed the region where all these phenomena were supposed to exist "Colter's Hell," after the intrepid wildernes wanderer, John Colter, who preceded even Bridger in the exploration of the Park area. But this valley or "hole," as the early explorers used to call such depressions among the mountains, contains all the marvels they claimed for it and more. Even the river that was "hot at the bottom" is there. It is none other than the Firehole as it flows through the Geyser Basins, where in some places hot springs bubbling up beneath the stream make the bottom warm. The beautiful Kepler Cascade we pass as we leave the Upper Basin to go to Yellowstone Lake. Its rushing waters, leaping and laughing down the steps of a rocky stairway between canyon walls overgrown with trees, would undoubtedly be more celebrated if they were not overshadowed by so many sights more marvelous only a few miles away. (Elev. 7,500 ft. Lat. 44° N.; Long. 111° W.)