Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill Page B

deeply wooded canyon and stood at the foot of the fall, which drops 230 feet and is one of Yellowstone’s tallest. It was now three in the afternoon, and the sun had cleared the trees on both sides of the narrow canyon. Rainbows danced in the spray at the base of Ouzel Falls.
    Eileen scrambled up some talus to shower in the shifting shards of color. To see a rainbow, you need a light source behind you and water vapor floating on air in front. I moved this way and that, in order to position the sun and spray to enhance the colors floating and shifting at the base of the fall. The map suggested that a great many of the falls on and around the Bechler region faced generally south, which meant the sun would shine directly on them at least part of the day. And that meant that every day in which there was sun, there’d be a rainbow or two or three as well. You could count on them: I thought of the Bechler as the River of Reliable Rainbows.
    Over the next several days we moved up the Bechler and courageously endured the sight of many waterfalls generating many rainbows. Colonnade Falls, for instance, just off the trail, is a two-step affair, with a 35-foot plunge above, a pool, and a 67-foot fall below. The lower fall was enfolded in curving basalt wall. The gray rock had formed itself into consecutive columns more in the Doric tradition than the Corinthian. It had a certain wild nobility, Yellowstone’s own Parthenon, with falls and a fountain.
    Iris Falls, a short distance above Colonnade, tumbles 45 feet into a churning green pool. Above, and parallel to the trail, the river becomes a chute of white water roaring over steep slabs of smooth rock.
    Some hours later the canyon widened, and the trail moved through a meadow where vaguely oval hot pools 10 and 20 and 30 feet across steamed in the sun. In some of the pools there were bits and shards of what appeared to be rusted sheet metal, as if someone had driven a Model T into the water eighty years ago. In fact, the shards were living colonies of microbes.
    “If you cut into them,” Dave Long, the biochemist, said, “you see that the top layer uses the longest visible light, the second layer uses shorter light, and so on, until all the light is used.” I stared at the cooperative colony, and it still looked like chunks of old cars to me.
    We branched off the main trail and followed the Ferris Fork of the Bechler. This little-used path drops down into another narrow meadow, where there are a number of hot springs and pools. Steam rises off the boiling creeks in strange curvilinear patterns. A spectacular terrace of precipitated material stood on the opposite bank of the river, a kind of Mammoth Hot Springs in miniature. Hot water from the pool above ran down the bank of the terrace, which was striated in several colors: wet brown and garish pumpkin and overachieving moss, all interspersed with running channels of steaming water and lined in creamy beige. The north side of the terrace was a Day-Glo green, overlaid with a precipitate of flawless cream. Just at river level the green rock formed a pool perhaps ten feet in diameter, and the surface of this pool was the color of cream as well.
    Features like this exist almost nowhere else on earth and are the reason that there is a Yellowstone Park today.
    Steam poured from the top of the terrace, which consisted of two hot pools fitting together like an hourglass. In the front pool, a constant eruption of bubbles from below made a sound like a jet in the near distance.
    We followed the Ferris Fork up the drainage that led to the Pitchstone Plateau, passing five waterfalls in the space of a couple hours’ walk. The top fall was unnamed—another one not in the
Waterfalls
book—but the bottom four were all on the map: Wahhi, Sluiceway, Gwinna, and Tendoy. All were shadowed in foliage and faced vaguely north, so they were not good rainbow falls. Tom thought they were all awfully pretty. I kept my own counsel. I like rainbows.
    We