Yellowstone National Park - Canyon of Light

The Yellowstone River meanders northward across the open, rolling landscape until, at the fringe of the valley, the land begins to change. The forest no longer keeps its distance; lodgepole pines crowd the banks. The banks themselves are higher, and outcroppings of dull gray rock seem to cramp the water's passage. The river runs deeper now and darker; its channel narrows and straightens. No longer a nursery for goslings, it flows with urgency, power, and resolve.

A roar is heard in the distance. Between its banks, now hundred-foot walls of steep, dark rock, the river dives onward at an ever-increasing rate. The very rocks resonate with the tempo of its passage. And then, in a burst of sound and spume, the water curls over a ledge to fall 109 feet into a deeper, darker chasm. This is the Upper Falls, and it is only a prelude. Ahead is the Lower Falls, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

After roaring onward for half a mile or so between walls of dark stone, the river seems to hesitate at the brink of another precipice, and then it thunders over and down, into the canyon 308 feet below. The foot of the falls, indeed, its bottom third, is lost in the spray that washes the sides of the canyon and nurtures a broad swathe of low green mosses.

During the day, when rainbows ride the spray, the entire Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is bathed in sunlight and suffused with a glow that reflects from its walls, the rich, yellow stone for which the river and the park itself are named. Through geologic time these rocks have taken on the colors of minerals in the hot water that seeps through their substance. Now it is as though the canyon were itself a source of light; one half expects the yellow glow to linger into night.

Approached from either side, the canyon is a sudden surprise. There is little in the relatively level, glacier-scoured landscape to suggest that this steep gorge, as much as 1,200 feet deep, lies just ahead. To one who knows the glacial history of the area, the V-shaped canyon is even more of a surprise.

It is a basic rule of geology that glaciers transform such narrow, V-shaped, river-cut canyons into broad, U-shaped valleys. As it happened here, however, the glacier flowed across the canyon, not down its length. It buried the land beneath ice up to 3,000 feet thick, crushed and rearranged the surface, scraped the canyon's rim, but did not carve its depths. The result is a sharp-edged gash in the earth, whose walls drop so precipitously that its depth is hard to judge.

When, from the rim, you watch an osprey, with a wingspan of five feet, dive and slowly diminish to a tiny dot, you begin to appreciate the scale of the scene before you. Standing on bare rock, astride a shallow scar left by a wall of glacial ice more than 10,000 years ago, you look down into a far deeper, older scar, the glowing chasm that was cut by rushing water through stone that once gushed molten from the fiery heart of the earth. For just a moment, you are on intimate terms with nature's most awesome forces.

It is the intimacy that is the essence of Yellowstone's many miracles. To walk on wooden boards a yard or less above a sea of boiling mud as a thunderstorm is born; to feel the air grow still and chill as steam billows; and then, through the warm, enveloping cloud, to feel the nips of a thousand sleety bits of ice upon your face, this is an experience of the soul. Many such experiences are here. In this park, the ancient elements of fire, water, air, and earth are all infused with the immense power of nature in her wildest dress, and their violent potential, like that of the lumbering bear of the forest or the moose that solemnly grazes in the shallows of a river, is a real and constant presence. Chaos threatens to erupt from every geyser, to bubble forth from cauldrons of seething mud, to crash down from sudden thunderclouds; and yet the powerful potential seldom overwhelms. Rather, it encloses, embraces, touches the visitor in ways that can never be forgotten.

It is our good fortune that those who came before us were so moved by the miracle of Yellowstone in all its facets that they took steps to keep it whole, to protect it as no land had ever been protected before. It is our responsibility to ensure that those who follow shall also inherit this place that nature and humankind, working in harmony, have preserved.