YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 11 



bushes. The Sahara-like aridity of the staring sands 

 in the geyser basin is relieved by a few hardy little 

 dwarfs. The crossing of the continental divide, which 

 nine out of ten visitors imagine will be a place of 

 rocky steepness, is marked by a little lake full of 

 water-lilies! Contrasts extend even to temperature 

 conditions: There are tiny plants, gay with bloom, 

 under the edges of the mountain snowbanks; and a 

 low form of plant life (one of the algae) waves its 

 trailing filaments in the almost boiling water of the 

 hot springs. 



But the plants are more than a variegated and 

 interesting setting and complement to the other won- 

 ders of the Park. They are not static, passive things, 

 but actors in a most intense drama of their own, a 

 silent play of struggle and success, tragedy and tri- 

 umph, that to those who can read it aright is as ab- 

 sorbing as an epoch in the history of our own race. 



The stage is broad, and the time of the acting is 

 in keeping with the magnitude of the setting. The 

 drama began at the end of the glacial epoch, fifty or 

 a hundred thousand years ago. This region must 

 then have presented a most desolate aspect. Where 

 the ice had plowed, the sides of the hills and canyons 

 were scraped to the bare bones of the rock. In the 

 lower valleys lay the moraines, dumps of mud and 

 boulders left by the glaciers as they melted ; smooth, 

 round hills now, but then scarred with a thousand 

 gullies cut by the torrential rains, looking very much 

 like the "bad lands" of Dakota. Even the lower moun- 

 tains had heavy caps of snow throughout the year, 

 and many of them still bore stubs of glaciers on their 

 sides. Ice floated on the sullen lakes ; the rivers 

 were gorged with turbid, muddy water throughout the 

 brief summers. The only signs of warmth were un- 

 healthy ones: huge volumes of steam rising into the 

 chilly air from the white blisters on the landscape 

 that were the geyser and hot springs formations. 



