The Paint Pots are springs which boil incessantly their pasty clay, which boiling over hardens, building up a rim around the pot. In one group of seventeen pots are as many different colors.
The center pot is a pearl gray, while grouped about it are smaller pots of various shades of pink, gray, chocolate, yellow, red, lavender, emerald and sapphire blues and white, mortar thousands of years old that would make the heart of a plasterer glad. Here is a plaster which when hardened, whether by sun or fire, never cracks.
Of a somewhat different character are the chocolate jugs on the banks of the Fire Hole River. These springs are rich in iron. The sediment hardens as the water pours out, building up gradually a brown jug-like cone.
The Blue Mud Pot is quite as interesting as the Paint Pots. Its circular basin is twenty feet in diameter. The mud is about the consistency of thick plaster. This mud pot presents a beautiful picture as the puffs of mud burst with a thud-like noise giving off perfect little rings which recede to the sides of the crater. This spring is strongly impregnated with alum. In this vicinity is a spring of pure alum water and several of sulphate of copper.
These springs are clear and deep, having beautiful basins, the rims of which are lined with incrustations of brilliant colors.
In a gloomy wood we came to the Devil’s frying pan, a shallow, hot, boiling spring which sputters, sizzles and hisses equal to any old-time, three legged skillet, sending out sulphurous odors that would delight the nostrils of Lucifer himself.
Hell’s half acre is quite as interesting as its name. Here in times gone by Excelsior Geyser shook the earth.
One lovely morning we mounted to our seats in the stage coach, the driver cracked his whip over the heads of the leaders, six creamy white horses pricked up their ears, sprang forward at a gallop and we were off to the Continental Divide.
We had just crossed a glade where deer were grazing when a hail storm, a mountain hail storm, overtook us. In five minutes the ground was white, the hail laying two inches deep, and such hail, an Illinois hail storm is tame in comparison.
The horses plunged forward, the hail was left behind, and we paused on the Great Divide. Down from this watershed the waters flow east and west.