Hiking - Part 30

 Yellowstone

Yellowstone was known to Native Americans for thousands of years, but the first white man to see it was John Colter.  Colter was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803-1806.  He left the expedition in 1806 to return to the Rocky Mountains to do beaver trapping.  In 1807 he traveled through what is now Yellowstone.  Upon his return, his stories of geysers and boiling mud were not believed, and the region was sarcastically called "Colter's Hell."

In 1808, Colter was captured by Blackfoot Indians who, for sport, stripped him naked and made him run for his life pursued by Blackfoot warriors, giving him a short head start, as pictured on the book cover above.

After outrunning all but one of the warriors, Colter suddenly stopped and turned around, and the surprised warrior fell while trying to stop, dropping his spear.  Colter seized the spear and stabbed the warrior, pinning him to the ground, then continued his flight, eventually reaching a trading post 11 days later.

(Above: illustration for the story Bloody Ordeal of Trapper John by Howard O'Hagen in True Western Adventures magazine, 1960.)

In 1872, Congress declared the Yellowstone region to be the world's first national park.  After the construction of railroads across the country, tourists started to arrive, and a hotel was built near Mammoth Hot Springs in the park.  In the woods in back of the hotel was a warm pool called Bath Lake, pictured above by Welsh artist Thomas Henry Thomas who visited it in 1886.  Bathing in the lake was nude, of course.  This incident happened in 1883:

"President Chester A. Arthur’s party arrived along with the European VIPs ... Six sons of prominent Englishmen arrived a week or two ahead of their parents and began irritating the local cowboys with their behavior. On a lark they went for a swim in Bath Lake and looked up to see masked cowboys stealing their clothes. ... They angrily converged, almost naked, on a beleaguered desk clerk, swearing all the while that they would take the case to the highest levels of the U.S. government ... The clerk calmly reached under his desk and handed their clothes back to them."

Yellowstone is a huge park, and it has much more than just geysers and hot springs.  Here's a hiker in the woods in Yellowstone.

Yellowstone has spectacular waterfalls, like the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, above, which is 308 feet high, viewed here by Joey Richards.

Here's Joey at the overlook at the rim of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone.  I can't recommend getting naked there, because it's a very public spot (I've been there).  But I highly recommend visiting Yellowstone, one of the world's great national parks.