The Book of the National ParksYard, Robert Sterling
History
The Book of the National Parks
Yard, Robert Sterling
National parks and reserves -- United States
Elsewhere throughout the park the innumerable hot springs seem to be
less charged with depositable matter; elsewhere they build no terraces,
but bubble joyously up through bowls often many feet in depth and
diameter. Often they are inspiringly beautiful. The blue Morning Glory
Spring is jewel-like rather than flower-like in its color quality, but
its bowl remarkably resembles the flower which gives it name. Most
springs are gloriously green. Some are the sources of considerable
streams. Some stir slightly with the feeling rather than the appearance
of life; others are perpetually agitated, several small springs
betraying their relationship to the geysers by a periodicity of
activity.
When the air is dry and the temperature low, the springs shoot thick
volumes of steam high in air. To the incomer by the north or west
entrance who has yet to see a geyser, the first view of the Lower Geyser
Basin brings a shock of astonishment no matter what his expectation. Let
us hope it is a cool, bracing, breezy morning when the broad yellow
plain emits hundreds of columns of heavy steam to unite in a
wind-tossed cloud overlying and setting off the uncanny spectacle.
Several geysers spout vehemently and one or more roaring vents bellow
like angry bulls in a nightmare. This is appropriately the introduction
to the greater geyser basins which lie near by upon the south.
Who shall describe the geysers? What pen, what brush, shall do justice
to their ghostly glory, the eager vehemence of their assaults upon the
sky, their joyful gush and roar, their insistence upon conscious
personality and power, the white majesty of their fluted columns at the
instant of fullest expansion, the supreme loveliness of their feathery
florescence at the level of poise between rise and fall, their
graciousness of form, their speedy airiness of action, their giant
convolutions of sun-flecked steam rolling aloft in ever-expanding volume
to rejoin the parent cloud?
Perhaps there have been greater geyser basins somewhere in the
prehistoric past. There may be greater still to come; one or two
promising possibilities are in Alaska. But for the lapse of geologic
time in which man has so far lived, Yellowstone has cornered the world's
geyser market. There are only two other places where one may enjoy the
spectacle of large geysers. One of these is New Zealand and the other
Iceland; but both displays combined cannot equal Yellowstone's either in
the number or the size of the geysers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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