Yellowstone National Park - A Misty Landscape

Most of the park's thermal features are concentrated in the geyser basins of the west-central part of the park. This rare and unpredictable landscape, threatening, powerful, and touched with subtle beauty, occupies much of the great lava-filled caldera that is now, for the most part, a broad broken plateau.

In the channels where water flows out of pools, the temperature patterns show plainly; the main flows are often too hot for visible life, but along the edges filaments of colored algae undulate slowly in the current. The channels themselves are beds of pearly geyserite, shot with colored minerals and lumpy with the coated shapes of sticks, pine cones, bones, anything that has fallen into the water. Along the borders grow dense clumps of yellow monkey flowers; nurtured by the warm soil and steamy air, they bloom early, and their bright blossoms continue all through the summer.

Hot water flows across much of the ground. Running down glistening slopes of terraces of mineral-stained geyserite, it blends into a landscape that is both sinister and beautiful. Steam drifts out of the ground in small wisps, venting through unseen cracks and jarring the senses with the smell of hydrogen sulfide. Here and there, reedy plants tolerate beds of warm mud. The hoofprints of bison and elk can endure for weeks in places where the sulfur-scented mud has dried.

Distant pines are hazy through the mist. In front of them stand the bleached trunks of a forest of dead trees, barkless and branchless, testimony that the pattern of underground heat is sometimes restless. A few dead trunks have fallen, and their pale color blends into the barren earth. Yet all is not dead in the geyser basins.

Along the marshy banks of the Firehole River, misty with the steam of nearby hot springs, fumaroles, and geysers, a flock of sandhill cranes settlers to feed. Moving slowly on their long, spindly legs, they poke with daggerlike beaks for the roots of marsh plants, and occasionally make quick jabs after tadpoles, frogs, or fish. Later in the season, when the marsh grasses bear seeds, the cranes will feed almost exclusively on the wild grain, forgoing meaty tidbits.

In the pines nearby, cow elk laze in the shade, and in the broad meadow through which the river meanders, a coyote is on the prowl. Searching the meadow, it covers a large area without much more than a pause. Abruptly it stops; it looks intently at something, waits, and then leaps soundlessly forward in a single bound. For a few seconds nothing can be seen above the grass but its tail, tense with excitement. The head reappears and the routing resumes. The prey, perhaps a mouse, was apparently faster than the coyote.

From somewhere among the sparse forests that cover the Twin Buttes, two rounded gray hills on the far side of the meadows, come two loud sounds. One is a low beating that begins slowly and within a second or two speeds up, like someone gaining momentum upon an Indian drum, and then quits. The other sound is that of wood being ripped apart by something powerful. The first sound is easy to identify: it is the courtship drumming of a male grouse. The other may be the sound of a bear, perhaps even a grizzly, looking under fallen logs for insects, grubs, ground squirrels, and mice.