K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

“What about it?”

“An advisory turned southern Washington into a Woodstock rock concert, so many people wanted to get to that volcano to have a look at it. That mountain killed people, remember, lots of people.”

Seifert’s voice did not trail away. He kept up the verbal fusillade. “Where the hell is the big volcano in Yellowstone National Park, will you tell me that? There’s no god-forsaken volcano east of Mount Hood, for chrissake.”

“That is not true, governor.”

“Yeah, tell me how I’m wrong.”

“The entire park is a volcanic structure, governor—the whole thing. All of it! You know that.”

“Bullshit. I’m not buying this. I’ll be back with the big boys from Wyoming and Idaho, and we’ll get this thing turned around. We’ll take your volcano advisory, whatever you call it, and cram it and your federal paycheck down your throat.”

Liz left Mammoth Hot Springs, leaving Wesley to struggle with the volcano advisory fallout. She contemplated spending her last weekend in the park in solitude at the Park Point research cabin on the eastern margin of the lake. There she could tidy up her research, collect her things and examine the vast new fumarole clusters where biologist Jamie Hebert had met his death. If there was time, she was determined to make the trek into the heart of Brimstone Basin to see the expanding steam fields for herself.

As she engaged the ignition of her Subaru, moderate tremors wriggled though the terrain. The woman shrugged off the rumbling and ran the car out of the lot. In the rearview mirror, long extinct Liberty Cap cone, poised on the grand mineral terraces that gave Mammoth Hot Springs its name, gagged, coughed and disgorged a boiling flood of calcium carbonate-laced water.

The geophysicist avoided Route 89. It would take another week for contractor crews to clear the rockslide and open the road beyond Obsidian Cliff, so she detoured eastward to Tower Junction and turned south for Canyon Village and Fishing Bridge. At the junction of the upper loop roads at Canyon Village, she drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. On a whim, she deserted the car and descended the short path to Lookout Point.

The scientist reached a railing at the lip of a twenty-mile chasm near the very heart of the vast park. The canyon was a gothic cathedral in reverse. Instead of vaulting overhead, it soared below, more than 1,200 feet beneath the soles of Liz’s boots. At the far reaches of the divide, a silver wave of Yellowstone River water cascaded 300 feet from the heights and plunged into the yellowing depths, filling the recesses with spray and vapor. In the 1800s, artist Thomas Moran stunned patrons in the cities of the East when he unveiled his wall-size oil on canvas of the majestic canyon and falls, an image so fantastic that critics dismissed it as a dream fantasy hatched in the painter’s mind.

In her hands, the protective railing holding back her body from plunging into the chasm shimmied. Gripping the rail tightly, feeling the seismic pulse of the land, she promised herself that she would return to this dynamic landscape soon. But next pilgrimage, she would bring Pelee with her. The trip would be atonement for having neglected her daughter for so many months. She and the child could share in the mystery and marvels of the vast plateau.

More road miles south, the Subaru approached the Mud Volcano territory. Inside the car’s cab, thudding acoustic poundings gained access. On the windshield, brownish gray spatters slapped, a few thick, ugly drops at a time.

“I’ll be darned,” Liz muttered to herself as she geared down the car and brought it to a stop in the road.

Cautiously, she emerged from the vehicle and scanned the forest margin as booming reports rolled across the road. The highway surface rippled with heat and smelled of heated sealing tar. Tall evergreens to the west bobbed, their branches peppered with a vile-colored substance coursing through the canopy.

Liz had heard tall tales of Mud Volcano. Not a soul since the first Yellowstone explorers had witnessed the thermal monster flinging surges of pulverized rock mud into the surrounding woodlands. The massive mud pot was now doing just that, bubbling furiously, vomiting a heavy slick and pumping loud steam volleys into the atmosphere.

The drizzle of hot mud intensified, drops enlarging to the dimension of dimes and quarters. Liz ducked into the car and gave the accelerator a kick. The car lurched south, speeding through a hail of earthly excrement. When the rig emerged into the clear, it dripped with a steamy slime of filth, the windshield smeared to near opacity.

Running in four-wheel drive down the narrow access trail to Park Point, Liz reached the newly appointed research cabin. Rather than mount the stairs and go inside, she walked west instead, downhill to the shores of the lake.

The diamond gem of all North American mountain waters lay brooding, moody. Rotten spring lake ice coated the waters and framed massive rafts of forest debris. Sky and ice were as one, the color of backwater scum, except where vast black openings in the ice unmasked plumes of boiling water upwelling from gapping fissures and steam craters on the lake floor. The spruce and pine along the shore were black scarecrows, branches brittle, roots baked.

A stone bench took Liz’s weight. Head in her hands, she studied an impoverished environment before her. It seemed she was seated at a sick bed, unable to comfort a chronically ill patient. Her first night on the lake many months earlier, under the spell of the full moon, the waters had been fresh, cool, the forests vigorous. The watery basin was just beginning to run a fever then. Now the disease was advanced.

She had been correct to admonish Wesley to close the park for good. What would tourists find once they came, besides campgrounds ruined and inns destroyed, the lake road a rough, hastily-bulldozed gravel strip, more geyser basins closed, most of the lake off limits and constant tremors that banished sleep from the weary. Why put thousands in jeopardy? For safety’s sake, it would be best to shut down the park for the whole season. An advisory was the right thing to do. She hoped Wesley had made the call.

Early the next morning, the odor of rotten eggs seeped through the Park Point cabin floors. Liz threw the door and windows open letting the chill in, but the smell would not leave. Stuffing a granola bar into her mouth, she donned her pack and ran from the cabin southward down the Thoroughfare Trail.

It took nearly an hour to reach Alluvium Creek, the liquid avenue pointing the way to Brimstone Basin. The area lay smothered with mineral film and rock mud vomited from countless fumaroles large and small. Liz cracked deposit samples from the margins of the flows, then struck off to the east, climbing uphill, hiking over tremulous ground. The sulfurous stench increased as she ascended and the forest shone of lifeless bone, bark sloughing from the tree trunks in sheets.

At once the dead forest stands fell away and a stark black and white desert loomed. Naked, steaming thermal fields expanded to the horizon, filling a broad valley and sweeping into the low foothills fronting snow-crowned peaks on the eastern park boundary.

Brimstone Basin was a forbidding ruin, Liz’s feet, nose, eyes and ears telling her so. High heat permeated the souls of her boots. Her socks soaked through with sweat. The reek of volcanic elements soiled the air and the basin rumbled from the exhaust of hundreds of steam vents. The ground was a curmudgeon, trembling as if with Parkinson’s disease.

The brow of a low sprawling dome blocked the advance into Brimstone. Liz picked her way uphill with care and crested the rise, coughing as she went. She stopped on unstable ground at the edge of a drop. The hillock fell away, leaving an appalling wound in the landscape. Dozens of fissures snaked through the slumped terrain, all shrouded in thick clouds of poisonous steam. At the base of the depression, a black smoldering dome filled the lowest terrain, a miniature version of the lava dome housed in the crater at Mount St. Helens. Little or not, it was a small cancer, being fed from below by a magma bloodstream.