Here the cloud-piercing peaks of the American Rockies reach their greatest altitude, and the scenery is of the wildest and most impressive character. The Grand Teton, 13,747 feet elevation, overlooking the magnificent Jackson Lake basin, has been climbed but twice by white men.
Since the Yellowstone Park was established, in 1872, the wonders of this region have been more or less familiar. But prior to 1870 they were believed to exist largely in the fertile imagination of the trapper.
The Park region, as we will call it, lay between the old-time northern and southern routes of frontier-day travel across the continent. It is true there were Indian trails leading across and through it, but the Indians, superstitious by nature, seem to have avoided the localities of the geysers and hot springs, and their north and south bound trails lay to the east or west of these areas that now fascinate and interest us.
In 1807, along one of these outside trails—one that just skirted the eastern side of the geyser zone, which here lies along a well-defined north-and-south axis—came the first white man who visited the region. He saw the two beautiful lakes, Jackson and Yellowstone, the dazzling Grand Cañon and its two falls, probably some of the hot springs, and possibly some of the inferior geysers. His trail is shown—marked "Colter's Route in 1807"—on the map of the great explorers Lewis and Clark in 1814. But it was after their return to civilization that they learned of this "hot springs brimstone" locality.
John Colter was a prince of adventurers. His life as a border hero, explorer, and trapper rivals that of any character of fiction; his discovery of the Yellowstone, while on a mission to an Indian tribe, was purely accidental, but it brought him lasting fame. He, himself, probably never realized its importance.
Two or three other old-time and adventurous mountaineers, particularly James, or "Jim," Bridger, afterward visited this locality, but people in general utterly refused seriously to consider, let alone believe, what these men told them regarding it.
Bridger was a man of remarkable ability as a guide and mountaineer, although unable to read, or even to write his own name. He was the discoverer of Great Salt Lake, and as a guide and natural-born scout had no superior, if, indeed, an equal, among frontiersmen. In this capacity he served numerous government and other expeditions and explored and traversed a large part of what was then the Far West. He could tell many a good story about his hairbreadth escapes, and lived to a ripe old age.
To attempt a word-picture of this region and its weird and unusual features is almost useless, and yet every one who visits it endeavors to do so. No words can be found adequately to describe the hot springs, that are numbered by the thousands, and the marvelous hues of their waters and their basins, rimmed and ornamented by fluted and beaded parapets of indescribable delicacy and beauty. Nor can the geysers, leaping suddenly from their deep, nether-world reservoirs, be pictured by words in such a way as to convey to the mind a real image of their strange and fascinating reality.
The first printed description of one of them was by another trapper, Warren A. Ferris, of the old American Fur Company. He visited a geyser area in 1834, but his account of it was not published until July, 1842.
Numerous waterfalls are found here, from cascades a few feet in height to cataracts having twice the leap of Niagara; lakes lie deeply embosomed among the high peaks or the heavy forests, and one of them, twenty miles in length and a mile and a half above the ocean, is now being navigated—think of it!—by motor-boats; thousands of miles of crystal trout-streams, kept supplied with trout by the government hatcheries, radiate in every direction; a natural glass cliff, an Indian quarry for arrow-heads in the ancient days, towers above a lake formed at its base by the wise and cunning beavers. There is, too, a low mountain of pure sulphur, with beautiful boiling sulphur-pools splashing at its foot; and, in contrast to these, there is a gruesome volcano of mud belching from a dark, malodorous cavern, while almost beside this is a beautiful, clear pool of hot water formed by a stream flowing from beneath a green Gothic arch.