[ larger]

Upper Geyser Basin [larger]

[The Geysers]

Nature has lavished her gifts on the region of the Yellowstone—wild woodland, crystal rivers, gorgeous canyons and sparkling cascades—all under the guard of mountain sentinels around whose lofty heads group every form of cloud castle that vagrant winds can build. But of all the wonders that God in His mysterious way has there worked to perform, none is so strange—so startling—as the geysers.

To count them, great and small, would be like counting the stars, and to measure in words their awful power, or picture their splendor of sparkle and symmetry—that, no one can do. They must be seen to be appreciated, and once seen—the memory and mystery of them will linger to the end of the longest life. They are as different as geysers can be. There are dead geysers—dead from bursted throats—mere boiling pools now—shaped to resemble a variety of familiar things; with depths that the eye cannot sound, and colors—blues, greens, purples, reds—down their deep sides and in the wonderful tracery about their rims, so blended, so beautiful that one may well believe that all the paints on the palette of the Master were commingled in their decoration.

One blubbers and gurgles and grumbles awhile, and then with an angry roar lifts a great column of mud into the air. Another steams and growls through an orifice hundreds of feet wide in seeming angry spite that years ago it blew out its throat and ceased to gush forever. [A] But the geysers that most attract are the regular-timed spouting wonders—the Giant and Giantess, Old Faithful, the Grand, the Fountain, the Castle and others whose names mark the geography of the Park.

[ [A] In 1888, Excelsior, then the greatest geyser in the known world, while playing with unusual vigor, ruptured its crater and has never spouted since. In its former periods of activity it is said to have raised the Firehole river seven feet in as many minutes with its waters. (Ed.)