Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park Read Online Free Page B
Author: Tim Cahill
Tags: Travel
it is a big chunk of land.
It was revered bear researcher John Craighead who began using the term Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) in the 1960s. In 1987 the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (a cooperative Forest Service and Park Service Group) defined GYE as just under 12 million acres, while a citizens’ advocacy group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (let’s hear sustained applause), defined it as nearly double that, according to the National Park Handbook for Yellowstone.
Whether a person can live with the definition or not, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, generously characterized, encompasses 43,750 square
miles.
Is that bigger than Rhode Island? Of course it is. It’s also bigger than thirteen other states and the District of Colombia. It is only 8,000 square miles smaller than all of England, and nearly three times the size of Switzerland.
That’s some backyard.
Every year millions of us gather at Old Faithful, the fountain on our property, in the backyard. It’s fine to bump shoulders with others and watch Old Faithful blow, but I’ve also walked to Observation Point, a little less than a mile north, to see the eruption. One night late last October, when I wanted a little privacy, I put on a headlamp and walked up to Observation Point to see an eruption or two under the light of a full moon. It was an experience I enjoyed in utter privacy.
There are, of course, many other places in the park where you can see untrammeled thermal features. The Brimstone Basin is all the way to hell and gone out the southeast arm of Yellowstone Lake. It seems to be little visited, but even features reasonably close to Old Faithful are not too crowded and are pleasant to visit. It just takes a little walking to get to them.
Artists’ Paintpots
T HERE IS A PULL-OFF ON THE GRAND LOOP A little south of Norris, and a sign directing you to Artists’ Paintpots. It is a short, mostly level half-mile walk that gains some altitude at Paintpot Hill.
If the geysers inspire awe—and they do—the paintpots generally make people laugh. They are the comedians in the pantheon of thermal features. Nathaniel Langford thought the mud in the pots looked like “thick paint.” He wrote that in the pots a “bubble would explode with a puff, emitting . . . a villainous smell.” He didn’t say that while some of the bubbles burst like boiling water, rather soundlessly, others break in a flatulent manner, creating a sound that invariably makes people laugh. You might be the world’s most sophisticated individual—it won’t matter. You’ll still laugh when the mud pot farts.
The trail goes under some electrical wire strung up on poles—where’d that come from?—then proceeds slightly uphill. Steam rises out of a few holes in the ground, where water sloshes around deep inside. These fumaroles—I’m sorry about the nature of the extended metaphor here—sound like a giant’s toilet constantly flushing itself. A vague odor of rotten eggs colors the air in the vicinity of the fumaroles.
Now geysers and fumaroles and mud pots all exist because of the molten rock seething just under the surface of the land, in the bowl of the hotspot’s martini glass, if you will. Rain and snowmelt percolate below the surface. This water becomes superheated and rises, as hot water will, toward the surface. It wants to be steam, but the pressure of the earth in various narrow columns and chimneys won’t let it. In those places where the earth opens above, the water flashes to steam and explodes into the air.
This is how geysers work.
Fumaroles,
Lonely Planet Yellowstone
says, are essentially dry geysers “bursting with heat but without a major water source, whose water boils away without reaching the surface.” In other words, these are thirsty geysers whose eruptions happen underground. What you see on the surface are odd-shaped holes in the ground, belching steam. Fumaroles may flush or roar, and when they roar, the sound is
It was revered bear researcher John Craighead who began using the term Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) in the 1960s. In 1987 the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (a cooperative Forest Service and Park Service Group) defined GYE as just under 12 million acres, while a citizens’ advocacy group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (let’s hear sustained applause), defined it as nearly double that, according to the National Park Handbook for Yellowstone.
Whether a person can live with the definition or not, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, generously characterized, encompasses 43,750 square
miles.
Is that bigger than Rhode Island? Of course it is. It’s also bigger than thirteen other states and the District of Colombia. It is only 8,000 square miles smaller than all of England, and nearly three times the size of Switzerland.
That’s some backyard.
Every year millions of us gather at Old Faithful, the fountain on our property, in the backyard. It’s fine to bump shoulders with others and watch Old Faithful blow, but I’ve also walked to Observation Point, a little less than a mile north, to see the eruption. One night late last October, when I wanted a little privacy, I put on a headlamp and walked up to Observation Point to see an eruption or two under the light of a full moon. It was an experience I enjoyed in utter privacy.
There are, of course, many other places in the park where you can see untrammeled thermal features. The Brimstone Basin is all the way to hell and gone out the southeast arm of Yellowstone Lake. It seems to be little visited, but even features reasonably close to Old Faithful are not too crowded and are pleasant to visit. It just takes a little walking to get to them.
Artists’ Paintpots
T HERE IS A PULL-OFF ON THE GRAND LOOP A little south of Norris, and a sign directing you to Artists’ Paintpots. It is a short, mostly level half-mile walk that gains some altitude at Paintpot Hill.
If the geysers inspire awe—and they do—the paintpots generally make people laugh. They are the comedians in the pantheon of thermal features. Nathaniel Langford thought the mud in the pots looked like “thick paint.” He wrote that in the pots a “bubble would explode with a puff, emitting . . . a villainous smell.” He didn’t say that while some of the bubbles burst like boiling water, rather soundlessly, others break in a flatulent manner, creating a sound that invariably makes people laugh. You might be the world’s most sophisticated individual—it won’t matter. You’ll still laugh when the mud pot farts.
The trail goes under some electrical wire strung up on poles—where’d that come from?—then proceeds slightly uphill. Steam rises out of a few holes in the ground, where water sloshes around deep inside. These fumaroles—I’m sorry about the nature of the extended metaphor here—sound like a giant’s toilet constantly flushing itself. A vague odor of rotten eggs colors the air in the vicinity of the fumaroles.
Now geysers and fumaroles and mud pots all exist because of the molten rock seething just under the surface of the land, in the bowl of the hotspot’s martini glass, if you will. Rain and snowmelt percolate below the surface. This water becomes superheated and rises, as hot water will, toward the surface. It wants to be steam, but the pressure of the earth in various narrow columns and chimneys won’t let it. In those places where the earth opens above, the water flashes to steam and explodes into the air.
This is how geysers work.
Fumaroles,
Lonely Planet Yellowstone
says, are essentially dry geysers “bursting with heat but without a major water source, whose water boils away without reaching the surface.” In other words, these are thirsty geysers whose eruptions happen underground. What you see on the surface are odd-shaped holes in the ground, belching steam. Fumaroles may flush or roar, and when they roar, the sound is
Readers choose
Heather Blake
John Berger
Autumn Gunn
E. E. Knight
Kelly Elliott
Emma McLaughlin
Stephen Budiansky
Julia Franck
Amy Lee Burgess