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And so one mounts his horse with a cheerful sense of pleasures to come, and half a day later rides into the fuming valley of the Upper Geyser Basin, the greatest of all the centers of volcanic activity. As one emerges from the forest, Old Faithful is just in the act of throwing its splendid column of hot water a hundred and fifty feet in air, the wind blowing out the top in white spray, until the geyser resembles a huge, sparkling, graceful plume set in the earth. The geyser holds its height much longer than one expects; but presently it falls. away, rallies often, throws up lesser jets, and finally sinks, hissing and rumbling, into its brown cone, leaving all the rocky earth about it glistening, smoking with hot water. The little crowd of spectators on the convenient benches press the buttons of their kodaks once more, and hurry to the next geyser on the list. All this valley smokes with pools and hot rivulets flowing into the Firehole River; there are many curious, grotesque cone formations very appropriately named, each bearing its label on a white stake. And on the hill stand the big, ugly eatinghouse, swarming with tourists, and a store where one may buy photographs of the wonders, and souvenir spoons, which will help to convince the friends at home that no wonder has been missed.

THE MAN WHO BUILT THE ROAD

Beyond the Upper Basin one cannot
escape a veritable suc-
cession of marvels. At
the Fountain there are
many strange forms
of geysers
and hot
springs, often gorgeous
in coloring, surrounded
by water-formed rocks
in many curious and
beautiful designs, and
veritable caldrons of
bubbling mud, and bears
in the garbage-piles, and
I know not how many
other wonders. At Norris

there are growling, jagged holes in the earth, belching forth huge volumes of hot steam, which, having killed and bleached all the verdure of the near mountain-side, has given the whole valley an indescribable air of desolation, as if the forces of nature had gone wrong- the very work of the devil, after whom so many of the marvels are named. Farther along one shudders under the brow of Roaring Mountain, makes a wry face while sipping water from the Apollinaris spring, wonders at the Hoodoo rocks, or admires the gorgeous-colored pulpits and terraces of the Mammoth Hot Springs.

And yet after all these things, amazing as they are, one turns again to the road and the mountains and the trees. Undue emphasis may have been laid upon the odd, spectacular,. bizarre-those things, dear to the heart of the American, which are the "biggest," the "grandest," the "most wonderful," the "most beautiful" of their kind in the world. But the Park is far more than a natural hippodrome. The geysers appeal to one's sense of the mysterious: one treads on the hollow earth not without an agreeable sense of danger, thrills with the volcanic rumblings underneath, waits with tense interest for the geyser, now boiling and bubbling, to hurl its fountain of hot water into the air; one is awed by these strange evidences of a living earth, guesses and conjectures, as the scientists have been doing for centuries, and then, somehow, unaccountably weary of these exhibitions, turns to the solemn, majestic hills, to waterfall and marshy meadow, to the wonderful trail through the forest. For, after all, the charm of the Park is the charm of the deep, untouched wilderness, the joy of the open road.

Indeed, the very name

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Drawn by Ernest L. Blumenschein. Half-tone plate engraved by J. W. Evans

ON HYMEN TERRACE

Park, associated as it is with smooth lawns and formal, man-guarded tree-groups and streamcourses, seems out of place when applied to these splendid mountain-tops. Here is a space nearly sixty miles square-a third larger than the State of Delaware, and, with its adjoining forest reserves, which are really a part of the public wilderness, nearly as large as Massachusetts or New Jersey. Visitors see only a narrow road-strip of its wonders, though the best; upon vast reaches of mountain and forest, lakes, rivers, geysers, cañons, no man looks once a year; probably many areas have never been seen by human eyes. The United States regular soldiers who guard it keep mostly to the roads, the boundaries of the Park being for the most part so wild and rugged that even poaching hunters could not cross them if they would.

It was a carping German traveler who complained that this Park was no park.

"Look at your dead trees and burned stumps in the woods," he said, thinking perhaps of the well-groomed, man-made forests of his native land," and your streams, full of driftwood. It is not cared for." And Heaven help that it may never be cared for in that way! Not a park, but a wilderness, full of wild beauty and natural disorder, may we keep the place as nature left it, disturbing no land-slide where it lies, no natural dam of logs and stones heaped here by mountain freshet, no havoc of wind-storm or avalanche. The windfall, with its shaggy spreading roots full of matted earth and stone, rapidly being covered with grass and moss, and the river-bed full of bleached driftwood, each has its own rare quality of picturesqueness, its own

fitting place in this wild harmony. There is beauty even in the work of the forest fire, which has left whole mountain-sides of freshly scorched pine foliage, a deep golden red smoldering in the sunshine; and many a blackened bit of forest, longer burned, leaves an impression of somber shadows, of silence and death, which cannot be forgotten. One even comes to begrudge this wilderness its telephone poles, its roads, and the excellent stone embankments which keep them from slipping down the mountainsides into the swift streams below; for they detract from its wild perfection. We may behold nature in its softer and more comely aspects almost anywhere; but every year, with the spread of population in our country, it becomes more difficult to preserve

genuine wilderness places where hill and forest and stream have been left exactly as nature made them. Already our indomitable pioneers have driven the wilderness into the very fastnesses of the mountains, so that only remnants now remain. And this great Yellowstone Park remnant has been fortunately set aside. by the government for the enjoyment and inspiration of the people forever.

And not only for the enjoyment of the people, but for practical use as well. Nothing gives the American keener joy than to plan a pleasure and then find that he has also developed a business opportunity. So Yellowstone Park, set aside for the wonders of its geysers and its great cañon, turns out to be the very

continental fountain of waters. Here in the tops of the Rockies, within the Park or near it, rise the greatest of American rivers. At one spot the traveler may stand squarely upon the backbone of North America, the continental divide: at his right hand a stream flows outward and downward, find

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ing its way through the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean; at his left a rivulet reaches the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and thence the Gulf of Mexico. And to the southward of the Park rise the head-waters of the Platte and the Colorado rivers, and to the northward the head-waters of the Missouri. Protecting these mountains, preserving the forest, excluding cattle and sheep, help to conserve and maintain the water-supply and keep the flow of all these rivers steady and sure, a need which grows greater with every year's development in the irrigated desert land.

We come, at last, to the final glory of the Park, the splendid cañon of the Yellowstone. Yellowstone Lake, a deep basin of snow-water, 7721 feet above sea-level, debouches at its northern end into the narrow Yellowstone River. Flowing for a dozen miles or more through a wild and rugged country, this turbulent stream comes suddenly to a rocky ledge, over which it leaps 112 feet downward into a resounding gorge. Gathering itself in a huge, swirling pool, foam-flecked,

SENATOR CARTER OF

MONTANA

it

flows onward a few hundred feet and takes another tremendous leap, this time 311 feet, straight into the awful depths of the Grand Cañon. So great is the fall that most of the water, bending over the brink of the precipice, smooth, oily, and green, is dashed into spray, widening out at the base and drifting against the steep cañon walls, which the constant moisture has clothed with soft green mosses and other minute water-growths. Thence it collects in a thousand gleaming rivulets, gathers in brooks and cascades, and gushes back into the river-channel. From the summit of the awful precipice above the falls one may trace the stream along the depths of the cañon-seen at this distance a mere hand's-breadth of foamy water broken by varied forms of cascades, pools, and rapids, and all of a limpid greenness unmatched elsewhere.

Niagara is greater, more majestic in the plenitude of its power, having twenty times the flow of water; but it cannot compare

with these falls in the settings of cañon and forest, in the coloring of rock, water, sky all so indescribably grand, gorgeous, and overpowering.

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A PIONEER

Somehow I had thought of the cañon as rock-colored, gray, somber, perhaps like the gorge of Niagara; and it was with a thrill that I first saw it in all its savage glory of reds and yellows, greens and blues. Surely never was there such a spectacle. Imagine, if you can, but you never can, -a mighty cleft in the level earth a third of a mile wide, its brinks sharp, precipitous, reaching over twelve hundred feet downward, sometimes almost perpendicular, sometimes banked with huge heaps of talus or buttressed with spindling pinnacles and towers often surmounted with eagle-nests, and all painted, glowing with the richest color-vast patches of yellow and orange, streakings of red and blue, with here a towering abutment all of red, and there another all of yellow. At the bottom flows the gleaming green river, and at the top the dark green forest reaches to the cañon-edge, and sometimes, even, rugged and gnarled pines, the vanguard of the wood, venture over the precipice, to find footing on some ledge, or to hang, half dislodged, with angular dead arms reaching out into the mighty depths, a restingplace for soaring eagle or hawk. The sides of the cañon, being not of solid rock, but of crumbling, soft formation, have furnished plastic material for the sculpturing of water and wind, which have tooled them into a thousand fantastic forms. One's eye traces out gi

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AN ENGLISH TOURIST

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