Sunrise in Yellowstone Park, where the earth's great fires still burn--over Upper Geyser Basin.

Publication

Sunrise in Yellowstone Park, where the earth's great fires still burn--over Upper Geyser Basin.

Description

This is up in the western part of the Park, between Yellowstone Lake (20 miles away at your right) and the Idaho line. The northern entrace to the Park at Gardiner is nearly sixty miles away at the north. The water at your feet is a marshy pool near Firehole River, and over beyond it you see steam from the Lioness and Cubs, the Beehive and the Giantess, floating up into the morning sky. The Canon of the Yellowstone is about twenty-five miles away beyond that tree-pricked horizon of the hills. Did you ever see more beautifully clear reflections? Notice how perfect they are, from the grass blades in the pool itself to the treetops on those distant hills, every least particular is duplicated by the gleaming mirror. The woods over there on the hillside are full of birds and wild animals. Hunters and trappers are forbidden to molest the hairy and feathery inhabitants of this government reservation; fish only may be caught by sportsmen for their own use. Most of the woodgame is of a harmless sort, but wolves are not uncommon, panthers have been seen, and bears are sufficiently well known to make prudent tourists chary of meeting them alone, especially if it is a question of a she-bear with cubs to be protected. You can see from here that some of the trees nearest the geysers have been killed by the scalding steam, or by root-baths of boiling water. The bare, crusty-looking ground around the craters is covered with a deposit of sinter or "geyserite," left there by the evaporation of the boiling waters. From Notes of Travel, No.13, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.