Nature has lavished her gifts on the region of the Yellowstone—wild woodland, crystal rivers, gorgeous canyons and sparkling cascades—all under the guard of mountain sentinels around whose lofty heads group every form of cloud castle that vagrant winds can build. But of all the wonders that God in His mysterious way has there worked to perform, none is so strange—so startling—as the geysers.

To count them, great and small, would be like counting the stars, and to measure in words their awful power, or picture their splendor of sparkle and symmetry—that, no one can do. They must be seen to be appreciated, and once seen—the memory and mystery of them will linger to the end of the longest life. They are as different as geysers can be. There are dead geysers—dead from bursted throats—mere boiling pools now—shaped to resemble a variety of familiar things; with depths that the eye cannot sound, and colors—blues, greens, purples, reds—down their deep sides and in the wonderful tracery about their rims, so blended, so beautiful that one may well believe that all the paints on the palette of the Master were commingled in their decoration.

One blubbers and gurgles and grumbles awhile, and then with an angry roar lifts a great column of mud into the air. Another steams and growls through an orifice hundreds of feet wide in seeming angry spite that years ago it blew out its throat and ceased to gush forever. [A] But the geysers that most attract are the regular-timed spouting wonders—the Giant and Giantess, Old Faithful, the Grand, the Fountain, the Castle and others whose names mark the geography of the Park.

The Geysers

They are variously located in three distinct basins which are far enough apart to give the traveler by stage a few geysers with each day's entertainment. These basins are great wastes of a white deposition called in Park vernacular "the formation" under which must be boiling one of the mighty cauldrons of the earth, for one can feel under foot a tremble, and can hear through a hundred orifices the hiss of steam and the angry murmur of the waters below.

The coming and going of the geysers is an astonishing and awe-inspiring spectacle, and so accurately timed and so certain to perform are they, that no one need miss the experience. The geyser passive is a hole at the summit of a cone. The cone rises gradually from the plane of the formation and, ragged and deep, growls hoarsely and steams fitfully. Thus it is a moment before its time for activity, and then comes the geyser active. There is a loud preliminary roar and then suddenly, with a rush and power almost terrifying, a white obelisk of scalding, steaming water is lifted into the air sometimes 250 feet, and there held scintillating and glistening in the sun until the play is over, when it sinks gradually back from whence it came, and the fitful growling and steaming begins anew.

Every geyser has a time of its own and there are thousands of them, varying in size from the little growler that sputters and spits a thimbleful from its tiny throat, to the Giant that three times a month plays for ninety minutes, 250 feet high.

How old the geysers are, recorded time does not tell, but one or two of the wise men, who are always measuring the duration of things by some system of calculation, have determined by multiplying the deposition from each eruption by the height of the cone, that the Giant, for instance, has been playing some thousands of years.

If those who come and go across the land every year on pleasure bent only knew how curious and beautiful geysers are, the National Park would count its visitors by multitudes.