From Pt. Lookout, 1200 ft. above river, up canon to Lower Falls (308 ft.) Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Publication

From Pt. Lookout, 1200 ft. above river, up canon to Lower Falls (308 ft.) Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Description

You are looking about S. W. from a projecting angle in the rim of the Canon; it is half a mile from here to the precipice where you see the Yellowstone river flinging itself over and breaking into clouds of mist and spray. The Canon Hotel and the highway followed by coaches are off at your right on this (north) side of the river. Lake Yellowstone, whose waters are pouring over that cliff at the rate of some 90,000 cubic feet per minute, is 17 miles away beyond that dip in the horizon at the left. the lake is not actually the source of the river, but only like a big pendant on the river's ribbon-parts of this rushing flood come from mountains at the south of the Park limits; the stream is carrying off the surface drainage of 1900 square miles as a contribution to the Missouri, 350 miles away, behind you in North Dakota. The walls of the canon along here average nearly 1000 geet high, and these cliffs worn and eaten out by the raging waters show all sorts of gorgeous coloring-reds, yellows, every tone of burnt orange and sulphur and brown. The rock formation is nearly all rhyolite, a volcanic stuff piled up here ages ago by eruption from the crater of an old-time volcano; the wearing out of this magnificent gorge has been accomplished partly by the mechanical action of the running waters and partly by their chemical action, during long ages when the stream must have been hot and strongly charged with solution of corrosive mineral stuff from the geyser basins. From Notes of Travel No. 13, copyright 1904 by Underwood & Underwood.