Ten miles of yawning chasm-down the canon from Inspiration Pt, Yellowstone Park, U.S.A.

Abstract

You can see now beyond the Park limites; those farthest hills on the horizon are some thirty miles away in Montana. The Lower Falls and Canon hotel are three miles away behind you. The river that you see white with foam as it tears along over its rocky bed almost a quarter of a mile below your feet is hurrying off northeastward to cary the drainage of 1,900 square miles of this mountainous plateau down into the Missouri. It seems almost unbelievable that the river could have cut out this gigantic cleft in the plateau, but geologists declare that it is so; in earlier times--so they say--the waters were probably hot like the geyser waters and charged with corrosive solutions of mineral stuff that not only wore away, but ate away the rocks. All this must have taken immensely long periods of time, and yet even this action of the river is modern in comparison with the formation of the canon's rocky walls. They are mostly rhyolite, a volcanic rock that must once have been fiery liquid stuff, thrown up and out from the mouth of a great volcano. It is a long backward look over the earth's history that we get from this perch above the gorcge. The most brilliantly colored part of the canon is just behind you, where the cliffs are gorgeous with yellow, orange and red like maple foliage in the fall of the year. This ten-mile stretch ahead is more thickly wooded with pines and spruces. (See H. M. Chittenden's "Yellowstone national Park," also encyclopaedia articles on the subject.) From Notes of Travel, No. 13, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.