Fountain Flat

Look how open this ground is. It wasn't always. A sediment core from Goose Lake shows the Lower Geyser Basin was forested from ten thousand three hundred years ago until about thirty-eight hundred years ago. Then it turned to grassland, and hot soil that lodgepole can't take has kept it that way. That heat shapes the animals. The elk along the Firehole are the only herd that spends both summer and winter inside the park, because thermal ground exposes their food. It costs them. Fluoride and silica in that food damage their teeth, and they generally live thirteen to fifteen years, about five fewer than other Yellowstone elk. Up this road, just short of Fountain Paint Pot, stood the Fountain Hotel, long gone, and in April of nineteen oh three a sleigh carrying President Theodore Roosevelt was headed for it. He jumped out, shielded his hand with his soft hat, and caught a mouse for Doctor Merriam, in case it was a new species. Then he skinned it himself, as neatly as a taxidermist, while the others fished. John Burroughs called it the only game the President took in the park, and he feared some reporter would change the u to an o and make it a moose. One practical note. Firehole Lake Drive, on your left a few miles on, is closed to vehicles. Check at a visitor center before you plan on it. You may hear that Native people feared this country and stayed away. That's a myth, and a stubborn one. The park had counted more than nineteen hundred archeological sites by twenty nineteen. Part of the myth came from a missionary named DeSmet, who never saw Yellowstone and wrote that Indians took the noises for the forging of weapons. The people he meant had no such metalworking tradition. But Jim Bridger, who helped DeSmet with a map, had been a blacksmith's apprentice, so the belief may have been a mountain man's all along. A Nez Perce man named Yellow Wolf answered it in one line. The hot smoking springs and the high-shooting water, he said, were nothing new to us.