Riverside Geyser Spouts a 100-Foot Jet over Firehold River, Yellowstone Nat. Park.

Publication

Riverside Geyser Spouts a 100-Foot Jet over Firehold River, Yellowstone Nat. Park.

Description

RIVERSIDE GEYSER SENDING ITS 100-FOOT JET OBLIQUELY ACROSS FIREHOLE RIVER. If we are so fortunate as to be there at the right time, once in every 6 or 7 hours, the first memorable spectacle we shall witness in the Upper Geyser Basin will be an eruption of Riverside Geyser. This magnificent spouter, standing at the foot of the Basin, which we enter by the highway from the N., projects a huge column of water and steam obliquely across the Firehole to a distance of between 80 and 100 ft. from its crater in the rocks on the very margin of the stream. Riverside is but one of the 26 geysers which, crowded into a little valley about a mile long and a half-mile wide, together constitute the greatest geyser group in existence. The Norris Basin boasts 8 gushers and the Lower Basin 5, so that the Upper Basin has twice as many as the other two combined. In addition, it contains about 400 hot springs. Its geysers and other thermal phenomena go to prove, according to the theory generally accepted, that vast bodies of heated lava surviving from the volcanic era exist close to the surface under the whole Yellowstone Park region, being particularly close to it in the valleys of the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers. On the other hand, Col. H. M. Chittenden, the noted historian of the park, maintains that these phenomena can be attributed only to "the great reservoir of internal heat which here, as in all volcanic regions, must be presumed to lie near the surface." If Col. Chittenden is right there is no certainty that our Park may not sometime again be devastated by an outburst of volcanic energy.