16 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



irregular intervals of days, weeks, or months. Some very small ones 

 play every few minutes. Many bubbling hot springs, which throw 

 water two or three feet into the air once or twice a minute, are really 

 small, imperfectly formed geysers. 



The hot-spring terraces are also a rather awe-inspiring spectacle 

 when seen for the first time. The visitor may climb upon them and 

 pick his way around among the steaming pools. In certain lights 

 the surface of these pools appears vividly colored. The deeper hot 

 pools are often intensely green. The incrustations are often beauti- 

 fully crystallized. Clumps of grass, and even flowers, which have 

 been submerged in the charged waters become exquisitely plated, as 

 if with frosted silver. 



But the geysers and hot-water formations are by no means the 

 only wonders in the Yellowstone. Indeed the entire park is a 

 wonderland. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone affords a 

 spectacle worthy of a national park were there no geysers. But you 

 must not confuse your Grand Canyons, of which there are several in 

 our wonderful western country. Of these, by far the largest and 

 most impressive is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, in 

 Arizona. That is the one always meant when people speak of visiting 

 "the Grand Canyon," without designating a location. It is the 

 giant of canyons. 



GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE 



The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is altogether different. 

 Great though its size, it is much the smaller of the two. What makes 

 it a scenic feature of the first order is its marvelously variegated 

 coloring. It is the cameo of canyons. 



Standing upon Inspiration Point, which pushes out almost to the 

 center of the canyon, one seems to look almost vertically down upon 

 the foaming Yellowstone River. To the south a waterfall twice the 

 height of Niagara rushes seemingly out of the pine-clad hills and 

 pours downward to be lost again in green. 



From that point two or three miles to where you stand and be- 

 neath you widens out the most glorious kaleidoscope of color you 

 will ever see in nature. The steep slopes dropping on either side 

 a thousand feet and more from the pine-topped levels above are 

 inconceivably carved and fretted by the frost and the erosion of the 

 ages. Sometimes they he in straight lines at easy angles, from which 

 jut high rocky prominences. Sometimes they lie in huge hollows 

 carved from the side walls. Here and there jagged rocky needles 

 rise perpendicularly for hundreds of feet like groups of gothic spires. 



And the whole is colored as brokenly and vividly as the field of a 

 kaleidoscope. The whole is streaked and spotted and stratified in 

 every shade from the deepest orange to the faintest lemon, from deep 



