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The Lava Flows: Feeling a Little Basalted
The Lava Flows
This is our first official stop; we just finished resting. I walked around with my camera honed in. My thoughts, outside my exhaustion:
All these pillars of stacked stones I saw, the cliffs of crumbling rock, seem to be the same rock, the same process. I’m tempted to make a Hannah Hart pun: There are so many lava rocks here, I feel basalted!
Cracked lava landscape.
The landscape roils and racks. It shows scars from the lava flow and its hardening. It bursts open into the landscape, these scars. There was lava flowing from the same source that heats Yellowstone. We are at the Snake River valley, the flats. It was thousands of years ago, and the landscape hasn’t forgotten it. And yet …
Life in the lava flows.
It’s full of life here. A juxtaposition that makes the life more powerful, the flow of it from the dead things. That the scorching heat would immerse itself in green. That a dead tree can leave the sky open for a pink flower—with bells hanging down, these heated pastels, ringing silently, in technocolor. The dead tree letting the flower devour sunlight.
Life and death in unison.
I think of creation and destruction, of chaos and fire turned to earth and growth. That the earth heals, even from its great scars. That we can go to a place like Yellowstone—walking through the caldera, into a space with such a history of destruction, and be overwhelmed—not by what cannot survive here—but by what flourishes. All the life, flowing over.
It doesn’t mask the destruction. Doesn’t hide it. It co-exists.
Earthquake Lake
Remnants of the Earthquake Lake mountainslide.
At Earthquake Lake we saw the mountain that slid down, cresting like a wave, surfing boulders. It was a campground then, by a river, and many died in the quake. 19 bodies were never recovered. On the side of one boulder they have a monument to those buried by earth at the moment of death. On the side of another they have the names of all those who died.
One of the larger Earthquake Lake boulders.
The lake itself was formed by the quake, which caused a natural dam.
I used the word “inspired” for how I felt there. Not the first word most would use in the face of tragedy, but I mean inspired like how the word was originally: meaning “to breathe into.” The world breathing into me, the earth breathing into me, reminding me how powerful it is, how much bigger than me. It makes the world feel more majestic, more real, than the world of wires and electronics and theories I’m accustomed to at home.
Inspiration at Earthquake Lake.
And the earth was trying to breathe into me in another sense: Blowing fiercely, threatening to topple me, catch any loose strands that could fly away. The wind was fierce. So loud you could hardly hear people talking to you. And I stood there, at the top, looking out over Earthquake Lake for a moment as the wind blew fierce. Then I closed my eyes and just let the wind blow against me, in all its coolness and fury.
The underwater forest at Earthquake Lake.
Check out the next entry:
Tower Falls and Mammoth Hot Springs
The post Yellowstone Adventure Journal: Lava Flows & Earthquake Lake appeared first on Robbie Blair Writes.