From Pt. Lookout N. down canon to river 1200 feet below, Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Publication

From Pt. Lookout N. down canon to river 1200 feet below, Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Description

You are facing towards Montana twenty miles away. The Canon hotel is up at your left. Half a mile behind you the Yellowstone River has just made its final leap over the cliffs at the Lower Falls and now the stream that you see boiling with foam away down there at the bottom of the conon is hurrying away from you on its way to join the Missouri. The depth of the gorge (almost a quarter of a mile straight down) makes it look like a comparatively small stream, but it is actually almost 200 feet wide and the current, as you can well imagine, is tremendously swift and strong. Every hour of the day between five and six million gallons of water come pouring over the precipice just behind you, so it is no wonder the river down below rages at its task. Geologists say that this stupendous gorge has all been cut and eaten away by the water in past ages. Evidently the floods in earlier times must have been hot and borne in solution corrosive mineral substances from the geyser plateaus higher up, for these ragged cliffs show that they have been bitten as well as worn into their present forms. The rocky walls are of volcanic stone called rhyolite and their coloring is famous all over the world-a blaze of reds and yellows, orange and pink, softening into olive, cream and brown, and set off by the green of the trees. (See H. M. Chittenden's "Yellowstone National Park," also encyclopaedia articles on the subject.) From Notes of Travel, No. 13, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.