Mountain of "Petrified Water"-Pulpit Terrace and Mammoth Springs Hotel, Yellowstone Nat. Park, Wyo., A

Publication

Mountain of "Petrified Water"-Pulpit Terrace and Mammoth Springs Hotel, Yellowstone Nat. Park, Wyo., A

Description

PULPIT TERRACE AND MAMMOTH SPRINGS HOTEL, YELLOWSTONE NAT. PARK. You are almost entirely surrounded by the high walls of the Rockies as you stand here in National Park, for its 3300 square miles are taken partly from Wyoming, partly from Montana and partly from Idaho. Though you are 600 miles in a straight line from the nearest waters of the Pacific Ocean, the high mountains around you now help make the Pacific, for a part of their snows and rains rolls down to form the Snake River, a tributary of the westward Columbia. Though you are nearly 900 miles from the Gulf of California, the mountains up here help fill it, for they start the Green River running down to swell the fierce and rapid Colorado. Indeed, though you are 1300 miles from the gulf of Mexico, the mountains of this Park contribute to that, too; they send rains down the Yellowstone to the Missouri and on by the Mississippi. In past ages the region all about here was covered with active volcanoes. Even now, though the earth's surface is cool and solid, there are scattered through the Park innumerable openings where water comes up boiling hot from contact with rocks at fiery heat somewhere away down below. These curious terraces right beside us are part of an immense mass of rock that has been forming century after century, by the slow accumulation of material that had been dissolved in the water, boiling up through the great geysers. Ages upon ages water has boiled out of the earth here, leaving, as it partly evaporated and partly cooled, a little more of this rock material, a little more, and more. Now "terraces" like this where we stand cover nearly two hundred acres.