Swan Lake (4.5 miles) is a little pond on the right of the road.
Willow Park (8 miles) comprises the valley of the lower course of Obsidian Creek. It is a dense growth of willows, and forms an attractive sight, either in the fresh foliage of spring or in its autumnal coloring.
Apollinaris Spring (10 miles) is on the left of the roadway, in a pine forest. Tourists generally stop and try its water.
Obsidian Cliff (12 miles) is composed of a kind of volcanic glass, black as anthracite, which abounds at this point in enormous masses. The Indians once quarried implements of war and the chase here, and many fine arrowheads have been picked up by explorers. The building of the first road along the base of this cliff has some historic celebrity, owing to the novel method employed. It was done by Colonel Norris, who thus describes it:
Terry Engr. Co.
Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.
Obsidian Cliff and Beaver Lake.
"Obsidian there rises like basalt in vertical columns many hundreds of feet high, and countless huge masses had fallen from this utterly impassable mountain into the hissing hot spring margin of an equally impassable lake, without either Indian or game trail over the glistering fragments of Nature’s glass, sure to severely lacerate. As this glass barricade sloped from some 200 or 300 feet high against the cliff at an angle of some 45° to the lake, we—with the slivered fragments of timber thrown from the heights—with huge fires, heated and expanded, and then men, well screened by blankets held by others, by dashing cold water, suddenly cooled and fractured the large masses. Then, with huge levers, steel bars, sledge, pick, and shovels, and severe laceration of at least the hands and faces of every member of the party, we rolled, slid, crushed, and shoveled one-fourth of a mile of good wagon road midway along the slope; it being, so far as I am aware, the only road of native glass upon the continent." [BA]
[BA] Annual Report Superintendent of the Park, 1878.