K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

Seven stories tall, the Old Faithful Inn dominated the skyline in the Lower Geyser Basin. A monumental rustic structure, it was the largest building in the world constructed of round peeled logs. Its dramatic earthy design influenced national and state park facilities all across the country.

Liz jogged into the building, finding its doors open, the towering lobby unlit and the interior air cool. Marooned on an acre of highly polished plank floor, she revolved in place to survey the stunning enclosed space. The lobby ceiling vaulted to timbered recesses eighty-five feet above the floor. Massive cross timbers supported upper floors, an intricate lattice of roof support logs and freeform railings fashioned from peeled branches and small crooked trees. Glass domed lights nesting in the timbers were cold, doing nothing to illuminate the vast interior dimensions.

“Hello.”

The salutation from Liz echoed in the cavernous expanse, the wood failing to soak in the sound waves.

“Anyone here?”

“Anyone here?” The identical response bounced off the walls.

No human voice ventured from the halls, main desk or open floors. No soled shoes clattered on the acres of polished floor. Without the banter of guests and the flow of foot traffic, the immense scale of the American landmark was unfriendly, eerie. The sense of isolation was profound, exaggerated by the enormous emptiness.

A heavy thump sounded along the length of the floor. Low vibrations followed, skittering down the planks, running up the timber support columns and braces, and infiltrating the ceiling rafters and finish boards. The wood—perfect for augmenting acoustic waves—hummed, giving voice to the seismic prattle rising from the earth.

The vibrations increased, setting the walls in motion. The moving timbers gave voice to low-frequency moans and bellows, interspersed with pops, snaps and whistles. The air became saturated with the noise, growing louder as the tremor increased in intensity, as if suddenly a pod of humpback whales had somehow paddled into the enclosed atmosphere over the lobby.

Jabbed by a growing sense of alarm, Liz twisted on her heels and ran from the great room, burst through the great lobby doors and sprinted away from the building to open terrain in the direction away from dormant Old Faithful geyser. The shaking continued, the ground dancing a wild jig, the tempo increasing, the steps faster, faster. From the great inn came the sound of crashing and clatter as unseen objects fell, tipped over and shattered.

A sonic shriek rifled up from the earth. The volume of it punched the breath from the geophysicist’s lungs, hobbling her. Through the air, solid particles hissed by at bullet speed and were overtaken by the scream of steam. Old Faithful, on the opposite side of the great inn, roared to life, but not as the familiar hot water geyser trailing fans of fine mist. Its plumbing ruptured, the geyser had lost its water supply, and pressures had found ways to reroute fluid through the subterranean catacombs far below. The continuous shaking tremor, however, managed to clear out some lost silica-lined pipes and open new channels to ground level.

The tremor gave back to Old Faithful its thermal powers, but now only in the form of raw, visceral, super-pressurized steam. The sound of cannon shot boomed through the land as Old Faithful launched fountains of white scalding vapor hundreds of feet perfectly straight up into the reddening late day light. Rock shrapnel blitzed the log walls of the hotel and machine-gunned away the window glass. The structure shielded Liz from the blast but not from a monstrous vision rising lightning–quick, far above the grand gabled roofline. A tornado on end, it seemed to Liz, a skyscraper-high boiling fury. Awestruck by the sight and banshee scream of the thermal monster, she could only stand dumb before it.

Shivery dawn etched spidery filaments of frost on window glass. The geophysicist awoke in the safety of her car, seatback prone, sleeping bag unzipped but pulled up to the chin. Much of the night she had laid awake, tense, startled every time the new incarnation of Old Faithful roared to life—each cycle just thirty-five minutes apart. Tremors were unwelcome bedfellows throughout the long night, shaking her awake if she did nod off.

Liz was desperate to communicate with someone, anyone. Rummaging in her pack, she failed to locate her cell phone. Try the landline in the hotel, she instructed herself. Sprinting to the hotel lobby, she found the hotel lobby in shambles, the electricity down. Glass shards littered the floors. She tried numerous phones in the lobby and experimented with the switchboard. All were silent.

Defeated, she resolved to drive Route 89 south through the Grand Tetons and run the half-day loop east and north through Riverton, Thermopolis and Cody to Cooke City and the northeast gate back into Yellowstone. Living on peanuts and water, she could at least keep hunger pangs at bay a while.

Backtracking over the continental divide toward West Thumb, the scientist kept her speed down, knowing that elk, bison and moose would be out in some numbers in the cool early morning hours, foraging near the highway at Duck Lake. As the Subaru descended the thousand vertical feet off the divide toward the small body of water, she imagined the stress the animals must be under, going about their lives on ground that would not keep still. The creatures were far more sensitive to a whole array of stimuli than humans. Could they get used to it? What being on earth could get used to constant tremors?

As the highway leveled out on the in-run toward Duck Lake, Liz rounded a wide switchback turn that opened out onto a broad panorama of Yellowstone Lake and the encompassing lake basin plateau and mountains. The view did not grab her attention; a herd of elk did. The large creatures stood at attention in the road and on either side of the asphalt. Every one of them had its head up, ears forward. They peered eastward, away from the approaching car. Liz stopped the vehicle, but still the many elk stood fast, immobile, not one acknowledging the hum of the engine.

Across the vast sweep of the lake waters rolled the deep rumble of artillery shell bursts from a far distant battlefield. Underfoot unrelenting seismic pulses shook the soils. Liz ran a hand over her face in a gesture to relieve tension when as one the entire herd of elk pivoted to the west and bolted, their speed turning them to blurs as they raced over the road away from the lake vista.

The elk’s flight behavior spooked the scientist. A student of ancient Chinese accounts depicting bizarre behavior on the part of animals that could sense the onset of violent earth movements, Liz knew the elk’s panic could be a precursor to unforeseen geological trauma. The animals were gone at once, leaving her alone. She felt abandoned. It was unsettling. She pushed in behind the wheel to find the image of her daughter’s face in the windshield.

Afew steps from the water’s edge of Yellowstone Lake, Wesley pulled a water sample from a smoking seep stained uranium-salts orange by the living bodies of billions of thermophilic bacteria. As he capped a vial, he was startled by a piercing squeal of tires on pavement. A Subaru Forester charged into view, skidding to avoid his service truck parked in the highway on the edge of West Thumb Geyser Basin. Apparently the driver didn’t notice the truck until it was almost too late. The car swept by within inches of the parked rig, throwing up clouds of dust from the shoulder. The speeding vehicle shuddered to a stop.

Liz materialized on the road, legging it toward the diminutive geyser complex tight by the shores of Yellowstone Lake.