Wonders of the YellowstoneRichardson, James (Geologist)
History
Wonders of the Yellowstone
Richardson, James (Geologist)
Yellowstone National Park
"Between the Lower and Upper Falls the cañon is two hundred to nearly
four hundred feet deep. The river runs over a level bed of rock, and
is undisturbed by rapids until near the verge of the lower fall. The
upper fall is entirely unlike the other, but in its peculiar character
equally interesting. For some distance above it the river breaks into
frightful rapids. The stream is narrowed between the rocks as it
approaches the brink, and bounds with impatient struggles for release,
leaping through the stony jaws, in a sheet of snow-white foam, over a
precipice nearly perpendicular, 115 feet high.[1] Midway in its descent
the entire volume of water is carried, by the sloping surface of an
intervening ledge, twelve or fifteen feet beyond the vertical base
of the precipice, gaining therefrom a novel and interesting feature.
The churning of the water upon the rocks reduces it to a mass of
foam and spray, through which all the colors of the solar spectrum
are reproduced in astonishing profusion. What this cataract lacks in
sublimity is more than compensated by picturesqueness. The rocks which
overshadow it do not veil it from the open light. It is up amid the
pine foliage which crowns the adjacent hills, the grand feature of a
landscape unrivalled for beauties of vegetation as well as of rock and
glen. The two confronting rocks, overhanging the verge at the height of
a hundred feet or more, could be readily united by a bridge, from which
some of the grandest views of natural scenery in the world could be
obtained--while just in front of, and within reaching distance of the
arrowy water, from a table one-third of the way below the brink of the
fall, all its nearest beauties and terrors may be caught at a glance."
"We rambled around the falls and cañon two days, and left them with the
unpleasant conviction that the greatest wonder of our journey had been
seen."
A few scattered sentences, culled from Dr. Hayden's calmly scientific
account of the falls, will suffice to show that Mr. Langford's
description "o'ersteps not the modesty of nature."
[Illustration: UPPER FALLS OF THE YELLOWSTONE.]
"Above the Upper Falls the Yellowstone flows through a grassy,
meadow-like valley, with a calm, steady current, giving no warning,
until very near the falls, that it is about to rush over a precipice
140 feet, and then, within a quarter of a mile, again to leap down a
distance of 350 feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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