The Yellowstone Conundrum Read Online Free

snow; a cross between fingernails on a blackboard and the high-pitched squeal of a rat scurrying into a hidey-hole.
      His breath shot forward in an elliptical arc followed in sync with an esophageal wheeze from Randy’s 68-year old lungs. In a cartoon world his breath would have frozen and fallen into a crinkly pile, which he’d have to repeatedly climb over as he walked across the flat expanse between the warmth of the old winter lodge and the iconic geothermal event. 
      In reality, his humid vapor, heated to a toasty 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, evaporated instantly in the minus twelve morning air—all except for the vapor close to his head, which clung to the artificial fur on his $400 parka, the white ring making Randy’s head look like he was peeking out from a dirty toilet bowl. The weatherman from KWYS in West Yellowstone said it would warm up to six degrees by the end of the day! Woo-hoo! Old Faithful Village was living up to its distinction of being the coldest place in America.

     
      Underneath his feet he could feel the earth trembling; as advertised by the internet company’s web site. Feel the earth move under your feet as Carole King belted out in her 1971 hit single and lead song on Tapestry . Randy smiled to the remembrance.
      “Hurry, up!  We’re going to miss it if you don’t move your wrinkled old butt!” shouted Randy’s wife Nadine who was a good fifteen paces ahead of him.
      “Whose idea was this, anyway?” Randy grumbled. 
      “The kids said we had to see this at sunrise,” she replied, turning her back to him and resuming her own trundle across the empty parking lot of the Yellowstone Inn—only open during the summer months—toward the Old Faithful geyser. Randy, Nadine and six other old folks had taken a snow coach from the end of the paved road in West Yellowstone at the western entrance to the park; $57 one-way per person; a ride all of them agreed was spectacular.  They’d spent the night at Old Faithful Snow Lodge, run by the concessionaire Xanterra who purchased the Fred Harvey Company in 1968 and slowly became a big player in servicing popular National Parks; Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, Zion, Rocky Mountain, Mount Rushmore and others.
      “Besides, the snow coach is headed over to the falls in an hour,” Nadine added. The tour included Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone vista point where the frozen Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River could be seen roaring a mile up the canyon.  
      The roof of the iconic lodge was covered with more than two feet of snow; icicles, some as long as twelve feet and sharp as razors, hung all long the southern exposure; the icicles forming as the snow began to melt in the afternoon, then freeze and re-freeze until maintenance had to dislodge them by force.
      They passed the Do Not Feed the Bears and Feed the Bears and Get Arrested signs, before finally reaching the wide expanse of the geysers’ spill area; a No-Man’s land of whitish-pinkish viscous geyser wash, marked by a low fence and more warning signs like; Stay on the Path , and the ever-popular No Access Beyond This Point .
      Still, every year more than a handful of idiot tourists, not all of them teenagers, managed to obtain third-degree burns from the super-heated boiling water flushed out of cracks in the Earth’s surface on a regular basis; one such crack being the Old Faithful Geyser. The water, heated by close association to magma, the core material of our planet, the heating unit that sustains all life on Earth, the material that provides the water vapor which creates our atmosphere; and is so hot that if it wasn’t water it would be fire.
      By the time Nadine reached the sign proclaiming Next Eruption in 5 minutes , steam was choo-chooing out of the geyser’s blow-hole, nature’s way of saying Its Showtime!
      “Do you have your camera?” she asked, knowing the odds were highly in favor of the camera being in the cabin. If pressed