Mudpots and Fumaroles: Beaver Dick’s Yellowstone – Video

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Beaver Dick saw what has been going on here since 630 thousand years ago, after the Yellowstone volcano’s last big boom.

Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh, called The West’s last Mountain Man, was a 19th century A-list fur trapper who stalked the wilds around Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone. He looked the part with his scraggly beard and serious stare, posed with his shotgun. In 1871, Beaver Dick’s celebrity status earned him the job of tour guide to geologist Ferdinand Hayden through the otherworld of an earth rumbling and passing gas: clouds of sulphur, geysers, bubbling mudpots, steaming fumaroles, ponds swirling with hellish colors. Hayden’s maps paired with photographer William Henry Jackson’s pictures inspired the US Congress to declare Yellowstone the world’s first national park, the stage for an opera of nature that has awed millions of travelers since.

This is not a travel story (type Yellowstone into AI and you will get 150 years of those) or a made for TV saga of cranky settlers, but a reflection of the awe that Beaver Dick’s geologists, artists and photographers must have experienced at first look. Looking past the queues of selfie snapping tourists, I saw a flowing, spurting, bubbling landscape of colors, sometimes cool and gentle, but often splashed with devilish reds and oranges. Sometimes I felt like I was a bird flying through clouds of sulfur over an alien planet with no place to land. Yes, I photographed that postcard scene of the Upper Falls in Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon and lined up in a phalanx of tourists with lenses as long as baseball bats to photograph whistling elk and a bear, and captured bison butts waddling by the side of the road, but this ever-changing scape of mud, water and minerals, of swirling colors, was what left me inspired.

I wonder what Beaver Dick thought when he first saw this. Or maybe he just had his sights on the bear.

Here is a video of the patterns, colors and movement I saw in Yellowstone. A moment of Zen:

Notes:
We made home base a vacation rental near Island Park, Idaho. We loved the Lakeside Lodge for lunch and dinner. Good vibe, good food and great place to watch a sunset. Lots of places, including the famed Henry’s Fork Lodge and Restaurant close for the season in October.

Yellowstone is easy to explore by car on your own. If you would professional help, we spent a great day with very knowledgeable guide from Tied To Nature, near Island Park outside of West Yellowstone.

Harriman State Park, on the Snake River, is a great place for a hike to take in the scenery.

The Grand Tetons Don’t forget to spend at least one night and two days in Jackson exploring the Grand Tetons . We stayed and the comfortable Wyoming Inn near downtown and dined at their excellent Whistling Grizzly restaurant. Are you ready for elk tartare appetizer? Or how about bison bone marrow?