Near the central part of the park, encircled by a forest and elevated nearly eight thousand feet above the sea-level, lies a remarkable body of water supplied by ice-cold streams formed by the melting snow on the surrounding mountains. This body of water, of which the Yellowstone River is the outlet, is the famous Yellowstone Lake, thirty miles long and twenty miles wide; it is filled with trout.
Here the fisherman can catch hundreds of trout in a short time, but unfortunately most of them are afflicted with a parasitic disease, rendering them unfit for food. Researches have been made seeking the cause of the disease in order, if possible, to apply a remedy, but so far to no purpose. It is conjectured that the superabundance of fish together with a dearth of suitable food lowers their vitality, thus rendering them liable to disease.
Yellowstone stands next to Lake Titicaca as the highest large body of water in the world. The sunrise and sunset effects on the lake are most beautiful. A steamer plies on the lake carrying mail and passengers. The bird life on this body of water and its shores is represented by swans, geese, ducks, cranes, pelicans, curlews, herons, plovers, and snipe.
For beauty and grandeur the lower falls and canyon of the Yellowstone River are unsurpassed. A body of water seventy feet wide rushes forward with impetuous speed and joyously takes a leap of more than three hundred feet to the rocks below, where, breaking into millions of particles, it forms a great cloud of spray. The water then dashes on with renewed vitality between the walls of a canyon fourteen hundred feet deep, and most gorgeously painted by nature in such a variety and lavishness of tints that they defy the most skilful artist to reproduce them.
As one gazes from the edge of the chasm into and along the depths below, he attempts in vain to measure the fulness and beauty of this handiwork of nature. He is too amazed for utterance and remains spellbound, communing only with himself and nature regarding the unfathomable significance of such marvels. When the famous painter, Thomas Moran, desired to reproduce in colors on canvas this masterpiece of nature, he gathered his inspiration from Artist Point, and after he had finished the celebrated painting which now adorns the Capitol at Washington, he acknowledged that the beautiful tints of the canyon were beyond the reach of human art.
The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone has no equal on the face of the globe. With a breadth equal to its depth, this richly decorated canyon stands out unique among the world's wonders. Its beautiful panorama of stained walls, down which trickle streams of water which brighten the tints in some places and soften them in others, extends for a distance of three miles. The entire canyon is fifteen miles in length.
A most interesting place to visit, but outside the itinerary of most tourists, is the Fossil, or Petrified, Forest. This section, especially attractive to the scientist, lies in the northeastern part of the park just north of Amethyst Mountain.
To one who can read Nature's books, a wondrous volume is open, disclosing in its strata the hidden secrets of many by-gone geological ages. Here on the north flank of the mountain are two thousand feet of stratifications. On the ledges, tier above tier and story above story, are seen the opal and agate stumps and trunks of twenty ancient forests, some of the trunks being ten feet in diameter.
What wonderful stories do they tell of life and death, of flood and volcanic fire, ranging through the eons of the past! So perfect are these petrifactions that the annual rings can be easily counted and even the grain of the wood is plainly visible.
As one traverses this wonderland he is impressed by the evidence of the stupendous forces that lie smouldering beneath the crust of the earth. It is not improbable that at some future time, by the further wrinkling or sinking of the surface of this part of the American continent, the slumbering volcanic fires may be awakened to new life and activity.