Beside the treasures common to most mountain regions that are wild
and blessed with a kind climate, the Park is full of exciting
wonders. The wildest geysers in the world, in bright, triumphant
bands, are dancing and singing in it amid thousands of boiling
springs, beautiful and awful, their basins arrayed in gorgeous
colors like gigantic flowers; and hot paint-pots, mud springs, mud
volcanoes, mush and broth caldrons whose contents are of every
color and consistency, plash and heave and roar in bewildering
abundance. In the adjacent mountains, beneath the living trees the
edges of petrified forests are exposed to view, like specimens on
the shelves of a museum, standing on ledges tier above tier where
they grew, solemnly silent in rigid crystalline beauty after
swaying in the winds thousands of centuries ago, opening marvelous
views back into the years and climates and life of the past. Here,
too, are hills of sparkling crystals, hills of sulphur, hills of
glass, hills of cinders and ashes, mountains of every style of
architecture, icy or forested, mountains covered with honey-bloom
sweet as Hymettus, mountains boiled soft like potatoes and colored
like a sunset sky.
I had lively scrambles and saw much petrified wood in the rough
mountainous country at the northwest corner of the Park. But the
roughest and most scenic section visited was around Sylvan Pass. This
rugged, narrow pass cuts through high, crowding mountains. To the
north, Hoyt Mountain and Avalanche Peak rise precipitously; to the
south, Grizzly and Top Notch Peaks. Sylvan Lake, whose peculiar wild
beauty is unexcelled, is near this pass. The tree-sprinkled, grassy
section near the Lamar River, in the northeast corner of the Park, was
the most charming and parklike section visited.
The Grand Teton, a peak of towering, bold individuality, looms
imposingly as seen from various points in the Park. Its appearance
across Yellowstone Lake, from a point near the outlet, is magnificent.
Another excellent view of it is obtained from the stage-road midway
between Upper Geyser Basin and the Thumb.
The Grand Teton territory might well be added to the Park; likewise a
stretch of the rugged, mountainous territory lying along the
southeast corner, and the mountainous tract immediately west and north
of the northwest corner of the Park. All these belong to reserved
government lands, and could without difficulty be administered as a
part of this wonderland.