IV.
Yellowstone National Park, Canyon Hotel, August 16: We were not disappointed in the weather today. A rarer Sunday morning never dawned, not even in the mountains. There were still some remnant clouds in the sky. Fortunately, too, these did not disappear entirely. All day bits of fleecy clouds floated between the sun and the earth, not enough to darken, but just enough for contrasts. The air was bracing and there was plenty of it.
As usual, our coach led all the rest. Forty or fifty came trailing behind. Every one was filled with persons in high glee and in great expectations. The road was a winding one along the Yellowstone River, up ridges and dipping down into hollows, with many a curve and a few short angles, the rolling and tumbling river nearly always in sight. The river is the outlet for the lake, or rather, the lake is but an extension,in width, of the river, forming a large reservoir for the waters from the mountains and from the springs, thus insuring a constant flow for the river.
After leaving the lake, the waters in the river flow on as they do in any other river, leisurely and calmly. The water is wonderfully clear, coming from the snows in the mountains. The rocky bottoms of the river are visible from the tops of the coaches and fishes may often be seen swimming and darting about. Across the river there is a gradual ascent of ground, until it forms a skyline of miniature mountain peaks. There are vast mountain meadows clothed in grays and browns, autumn colors mingled with the colors of the sage. It makes an indescribable color and the effect of it also is an indescribable one. On our own side of the river we are riding through endless beds of flowers, the kind of beds that nature makes in a large and liberal country. Their colors are blue and purple and red. Of mountain daisies, yellow flowers on delicate stems, there are millions. The flowers alone would be worth coming to see, to say nothing of the furzy mountain meadows, like vast oriental rugs spread out by the hand of a generous God!
The water in the river is green, when it flows over beds of moss and black and foreboding when it runs under the shadows of the overhanging rocks. As we proceed on our journey, these projecting rocks become more numerous. The banks gradually grow more precipitous and the channel, narrower. The waters grow more disturbed. Signs of some impending catastrophe to the river multiply. The waters now roll and surge. From side to side they dash themselves against the rocks, filling the air with a spray. The river becomes furious and it makes a great commotion. Finally, in one great dash the waters rush over the upper falls, a distance of one hundred and ten feet down. Then, imprisoned in a narrow gorge, seething and foaming and roaring, they rush forward until they come to the lower falls, where they make a spectacular descent of three hundred and six feet, filling the air with foam and spray and the scene with glory, all the way down. The whole thing is God-like, that is the only phrase that can describe it. God-like in power, in beauty and in majesty.
The lower falls is the beginning of the greater glory of the Yellowstone river. Atthe bottom of the gorge the tumultuous waters continue on their way, so far down that what is a river looks like a yellow ribbon. From the river bed the gorge widens and makes the magnificent spectacle of the Canyon of the Yellowstone river. If such a gorge had been cut in the dullest stone, it would be an awe-inspiring thing, but cut through rocks of the brightest hues the scene is bewildering, amazing and enthralling. And the longer you look at it, the more the wonder grows. What at first appears to be a wild riot of colors, yellow predominating, becomes a fabric of the most delicate colorings, blended as nature blends colors and softened as time softens them. There is no color and no shade that is missing. There is as much there as the eye has time or capacity to develop. No one has seen it all, no one will ever see it all. Each man sees but a fraction and a fragment of it. All the eyes of the world cast into one with all time at its command could not exhaust the possibilities of the combinations in forms and colors.
Here, I thought, is the one place where no traveler can be disappointed, no dreamer disillusioned. Here the things that are, are more than the things imagined. Thisis the transformation scene of all the earth. This is the one great masterpiece in nature, perfect in all its details, endless in all its combinations of colors and forms, imposing in its grandeur. As I looked at it, I felt that nature had nothing more to say to me and that in the way of scenery my heart had nothing more to long for. Here is the throne of majesty in the temple of the beautiful. With unuttered thoughts in his mind and unfinished sentences on his lips, one must turn away from the Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Monday morning, when we rode away from the scene, a dense fog hung over the river. Others were coming where we were leaving. Our day’s journey was back to the Mammoth Springs Hotel. For us the Park was a finished book, however many the pages which we had skipped, and however imperfectly we may have read the few passages that fell under our eyes. Streams and meadows, cliffs and mountain peaks covered with snow, lined the way outward bound, but it seemed to me that, somehow, the falling of the waters and the glimmering of the colors of the Canyon, dimmed all other things.