The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870Langford, Nathaniel Pitt
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The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870
Langford, Nathaniel Pitt
Langford, Nathaniel Pitt, 1832-1911 -- Diaries; Yellowstone National Park -- Discovery and exploration
Six miles above the upper fall we entered upon a region remarkable for
the number and variety of its hot springs and craters. The principal
spring, and the one that first meets the eye as you approach from the
north, is a hot sulphur spring, of oval shape, the water of which is
constantly boiling and is thrown up to the height of from three to seven
feet. Its two diameters are about twelve feet and twenty feet, and it
has an indented border of seemingly pure sulphur, about two feet wide
and extending down into the spring or cauldron to the edge of the water,
which at the time of our visit, if it had been at rest, would have been
fifteen or eighteen inches below the rim of the spring. This spring is
situated at the base of a low mountain, and the gentle slope below and
around the spring for the distance of two hundred or three hundred feet
is covered to the depth of from three to ten inches with the sulphurous
deposit from the overflow of the spring. The moistened bed of a dried-up
rivulet, leading from the edge of the spring down inside through this
deposit, showed us that the spring had but recently been overflowing.
Farther along the base of this mountain is a sulphurous cavern about
twenty feet deep, and seven or eight feet in diameter at its mouth, out
of which the steam is thrown in jets with a sound resembling the puffing
of a steam-boat when laboring over a sand-bar, and with as much
uniformity and intonation as if emitted by a high-pressure engine. From
hundreds of fissures in the adjoining mountain from base to summit,
issue hot sulphur vapors, the apertures through which they escape being
encased in thick incrustations of sulphur, which in many instances is
perfectly pure. There are nearby a number of small sulphur springs, not
especially remarkable in appearance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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