Chance turned the footsteps of the first white man toward Yellowstone. In 1807, John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was wounded in an Indian battle near Jackson Hole. In escaping, he journeyed northward and penetrated Yellowstone as far as what is now known as Tower Falls.
More than twenty years later, Jim Bridger, a famous frontier guide, also entered the region that had come to be known as “Colter’s Hell” and verified the fantastic tales of his predecessor. But even then, no one accepted the story. Colter and Bridger were in the position of Marco Polo who had discovered an empire so strange that its very existence was doubted.
Not until 1870, when a public exploring party made a thorough study of the region, were its wonders accepted as fact. Then, action quickly followed. In 1872 a bill was introduced before congress and speedily passed, that established Yellowstone as the first of our National Parks. A vast rectangle of 3,438 square miles lying in the northwest corner of Wyoming and overlapping into Montana and Idaho, Yellowstone is a broad, volcanic plateau with an average elevation of 8,000 feet, and with mountain peaks in and around the park rising as high as ten and twelve thousand feet ... more than two million enchanted acres with the greatest and most varied array of wonders in all the earth.
But all this is recent history. Take a brief look at the amazing past of Yellowstone. Millions of years ago, the present high plateau was a parched, arid plain sheltered behind the buttresses of the continent’s two great mountain ranges—Appalachia in the East and Cascadia in the West. Slowly, the land sank and Yellowstone was buried a hundred fathoms deep under the arctic waters of the Sundance Sea. As the invading waters retreated, a shift in temperature changed Yellowstone into a huge subtropical marsh where giant dinosaurs drowsed and fed in the green half-light that filtered down through jungle trees.
The next great geologic change saw Yellowstone thrust skyward by the slow buckling of earth’s crust ... scorched and shaken by a million years of volcanic activity ... covered by a vast sea of molten rhyolite. The hot lava slowly cooled and was in turn engulfed by creeping rivers of blue-green glacial ice.
As this new ice age withdrew, countless sediment-bearing streams roared down from the melting glaciers and, aided by the bitter winds of high places, began carving Yellowstone into its present form.
The Cathedrals are natural Gothic spires of hard stone that resisted erosion by the river when it carved the deep gorge of Gallatin Canyon. These formations are especially beautiful under a Montana moon.
