Into the upper end of this cañon the river, about seventy feet wide, makes a sheer leap of three hundred and ten feet. From the near-by rim, this wonderful waterfall appears like an enormous, fluffy, endless pouring of whitest snowflakes. The magnificence and wildness of its setting combine to make it one of the most imposing waterfalls in the world.
Copyright by Haynes, St. Paul
The paint-pots are the curiosities of the Park. They are craters, or irregular-shaped ponds, in the earth, filled with brightly colored mud, thick and hot, of fine texture, and in appearance resembling kalsomine or paint freshly mixed and colored. The mud in many pots is red or pink; that in others is lavender, blue, orange, or yellow. Occasionally a rugged vat of this mud is found boiling away—very suggestive of slaking lime. In other cases, plastic mud throbs and undulates as steam-jets now and then escape through it. Here and there this bright steamy mud opens like a full-blown lily. The paint-pots near the Fountain Geyser, those east of the road in Gibbon Meadows, and those close to the lake at the Thumb are the more attractive.
John Muir, in "Our National Parks," says of the Yellowstone:—
Beside the treasures common to most mountain regions that are wild and blessed with a kind climate, the Park is full of exciting wonders. The wildest geysers in the world, in bright, triumphant bands, are dancing and singing in it amid thousands of boiling springs, beautiful and awful, their basins arrayed in gorgeous colors like gigantic flowers; and hot paint-pots, mud springs, mud volcanoes, mush and broth caldrons whose contents are of every color and consistency, plash and heave and roar in bewildering abundance. In the adjacent mountains, beneath the living trees the edges of petrified forests are exposed to view, like specimens on the shelves of a museum, standing on ledges tier above tier where they grew, solemnly silent in rigid crystalline beauty after swaying in the winds thousands of centuries ago, opening marvelous views back into the years and climates and life of the past. Here, too, are hills of sparkling crystals, hills of sulphur, hills of glass, hills of cinders and ashes, mountains of every style of architecture, icy or forested, mountains covered with honey-bloom sweet as Hymettus, mountains boiled soft like potatoes and colored like a sunset sky.
I had lively scrambles and saw much petrified wood in the rough mountainous country at the northwest corner of the Park. But the roughest and most scenic section visited was around Sylvan Pass. This rugged, narrow pass cuts through high, crowding mountains. To the north, Hoyt Mountain and Avalanche Peak rise precipitously; to the south, Grizzly and Top Notch Peaks. Sylvan Lake, whose peculiar wild beauty is unexcelled, is near this pass. The tree-sprinkled, grassy section near the Lamar River, in the northeast corner of the Park, was the most charming and parklike section visited.
The Grand Teton, a peak of towering, bold individuality, looms imposingly as seen from various points in the Park. Its appearance across Yellowstone Lake, from a point near the outlet, is magnificent. Another excellent view of it is obtained from the stage-road midway between Upper Geyser Basin and the Thumb.
The Grand Teton territory might well be added to the Park; likewise a stretch of the rugged, mountainous territory lying along the southeast corner, and the mountainous tract immediately west and north of the northwest corner of the Park. All these belong to reserved government lands, and could without difficulty be administered as a part of this wonderland.