Angel Terrace, Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., U.S.A.

Publication

Angel Terrace, Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., U.S.A.

Description

ANGEL TERRACE, YELLOWSTONE PARK. Stretching up the side of Terrace Mountain from Mammoth Springs Hotel--up and away into the forests--we find all manner of forms and all degrees of activity, beauty, and decay. Here and there are high, rough calcarcous cliffs, built up by springs that lived, labored, and died there centuries ago. The once delicately formed and delicately colored deposits are now only ragged walls of dark, gray stone, too flaky and fragile for any use as building material--or for any other useful thing yet thought of. Like uncanny skeletons, these tumbling cliffs are but the remains of once beautiful forms, whose vitality and sustaining forces have departed. All around us, as if trying to re-vitalize, or at least to cover the ugliness of the ancient deposits, are comparatively recent springs, some of which are surprisingly fresh and beautiful. the Angel Terraces, in these opening years of the twentieth century are as exquisite in form and coloring as any that now grace the slopes of this strange mountain; but they are comparatively young and limited in extent. In time they may loom up as grand and commanding on the general slope as the Jupiter Terraces now are.