Yellowstone - Yellowstone Lake

Having left Old Faithful, I trekked along Grand Loop Road until I took another small detour to see the Kepler Cascades. The viewing platform gave me a wonderful aerial view of Firehole River as it tumbled across several drops and plunged 50ft (15m) below to continue on its course.

Back on the road, I skirted the shore of Scaup Lake, crossed several creeks and arrived at my final destination, West Thumb Geyser Basin, on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. The basin is a boardwalk loop, passing several geysers but the most attractive was the Abyss Pool with its greenish-blue colour. The pool is 53ft (16m) deep and its eruption history is quite recent, having exploded for the first time in 1987. Its eruptions were between 30-100ft (9-30m) high but it stopped by 1992 and has since returned to being a quiet hot spring pool. In 1883, a visitor best described the pool as “a great, pure, sparkling sapphire rippling with heat”. The nearby Black Pool has the same beautiful colours.

Another unique and fascinating feature is the Fishing Cone, a geyser on the edge of Yellowstone Lake with its cone protruding out of the water. In the early 20th century, it used to erupt to heights of 40ft (12m) but with the lake’s water level increasing it inundated the cone and cooled it, thereby no longer erupting. It is now considered a hot spring. There was a story of a fisherman in the late 1800s, who caught a trout and tried to fling it ashore but the fish came off the hook and landed into the spring, getting boiled by the searing water. This description was also found in an 1883 tourist manual, “it has often been said that it is possible to catch trout in the Yellowstone Lake and cook them in a boiling spring close behind the angler, without taking them off the hook”. Thankfully thirty years later this practice was banned.

My journey ends on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, the largest body of water in the park and the biggest freshwater lake in North America at 7,000ft (2,100m) above sea level. During winter, the lake’s surface completely freezes and it takes up to six months to fully defrost. With ice as thick as 2ft (60cm), the lake remains cold year-round with temperatures as low as 41°F (5°C). It’s fair to say that swimming is discouraged.

Yellowstone is an incredible national park filled with tall conifer trees, sputtering geysers, colourful pools, meandering rivers and chilly lakes. Its fragile ecosystem deserves to be protected not just for future generations but also for the diverse wildlife that call Yellowstone home.



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