Mud volcano, a Weird and Repulsive Crater of Boiling Mud, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

Publication

Mud volcano, a Weird and Repulsive Crater of Boiling Mud, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

Description

MUD VOLCANO, YELLOWSTONE NAT. PARK, WYO. One of the loveliest portions of Yellowstone Park we enter after we leave the hotel at the foot of Lake Yellowstone. Here is a level sheltered area of about fifty square miles called Hayden Valley. Leading from Yellowstone Lake a road traverses Hayden Valley to Yellowstone Canyon. It follows the left bank of the Yellowstone river which winds towards the northwest. About seven miles from the hotel and at the left of this roadway we come to one of the most weird and extraordinary sights in the Park. In the midst of all this natural beauty is hocated this horrible object called Mud Volcano. Crawling up the steep bank of its circular crater, this is the view that confronts you as you gaze shudderingly over the edge into its crater. Forty feet below you the earth yawns open like a cavernous mouth, from which a long, black throat, some six feet in diameter, extends to an unknown depth. This throat is filled with boiling mud which rises and falls in nauseating gulps, as if some monster were strangling from a slimy paste which all its efforts could not possibly dislodge. Occasionally the sickening mixture will sink from view, as if the tortured wretch had swallowed it. Then you will hear hundreds of feet below you an unearthly retching; and, in a moment, it will all come up again, belching out with an explosive force that hurls a boiling spray of mud much higher than the surrounding slope. By this time you have retreated to a safe distance because a single drop of this mud would burn like moulten lead. The horrible appearance of this muddy mass and the groaning sounds which accompany its manifestations have been likened to "an entrance to Inferno."