Yellowstone National Park

High in the Rockies, they said, was a land where the earth boiled under your feet, where spouts of hot water as tall as a flagpole came roaring out of the trembling ground, and whole valleys steamed with sulphurous fumes as if the lid over Hell itself had been shot full of holes.

Boiling springs bubbled by an icy lake, and a man could catch and cook a trout without moving a step or taking the fish off the line. There were mountains of glass and mountains of sulphur and mountains that spoke with growling voices.

A galloping river leaped over a cliff and landed in a gorge a thousand feet deep all lined with yellow stone. Mud volcanoes sputtered and churned, and down a terraced mountainside ran the waters of immense hot springs, scalding at first and cooling as they flowed, so a man could take a bath of any temperature he chose.

Thus ran the tales of the mountain men, long-haired, leather-garbed scouts and trappers such as John Colter, Joe Meek, and Jim Bridger, who ranged westward from St. Louis early in the 19th century.

"Out thar in the Yellowstone," Bridger related, "thar's a river that flows so fast it gets hot on the bottom." Or he told of the "two-ocean river" that ran down into a pass and divided, one branch flowing to the Pacific and the other to the far Atlantic.

Incredible tales indeed! Yet nearly half a million visitors to Yellowstone National Park every year see for themselves that many of the old-timers' yarns were the truth and that there are more wonders in the Yellowstone than even Jim Bridger knew.

Just south of the park in Wyoming is grassy Two Ocean Pass, where Atlantic and Pacific Creeks, a quarter of a mile apart, flow away to merge their waters eventually with oceans on opposite sides of the continent. Isa Lake, in the park, on the Continental Divide, also drains two ways.

You can wade in the river that "gets hot on the bottom"-the Firehole River near Old Faithful. But the heat comes from hot springs in the bed, not from friction of water on rock.

At Fishing Cone beside Yellowstone Lake almost anybody can catch and cook a fish without moving out of his tracks; or, rather, he could if the rangers would let him, for National Park Service rules forbid putting anything into the hot pools.

Glass mountains? There's Obsidian Cliff, of black volcanic glass. There's Sulphur Mountain; and Roaring Mountain, named for the steam vents near its top. And in the awed accounts of the early trappers the present-day visitor recognizes such familiar yet marvelous features as Old Faithful and the great geyser basins, Mammoth Hot Springs, and that colorful, unbelievable canyon "where falls the Yellowstone."

Last summer I went to the Yellowstone, as did exactly 486,935 others. Like every Yellowstone visitor I wanted to (a) see Old Faithful in eruption, (b) see a bear, or a lot of bears, and (c) connect with a few of the famous Yellowstone trout.

Driving up through Wyoming's Jackson Hole country and past the cathedral-like spires of the Tetons, we entered the park by the South Entrance near the rushing Lewis River. All five of the entrance roads penetrate the Yellowstone through the valleys of streams, for otherwise there would be no admittance to this lofty, mountain-guarded world.

At the rustic gate paused cars from many States while the occupants paid the all-season entrance fee of three dollars a car and chatted with National Park Service rangers in neat uniforms of forest green.

"Bears?" said the ranger. "They'll be holding you up before you have gone very far in the park."

As we neared Old Faithful, we found he was right. A black bear and her cinnamon cub were holding up all cars.

"Do not feed the bears," the rangers warn. Yet some heedless visitors feed and even fondle these dangerous wild animals…"