Supervolcano: Eruption Read Free

“Welcome to Yellowstone.” That meant Have you paid yet? Colin held up his map and, stapled to it, the pass—good for a week—he’d bought the day before. Nodding, the ranger changed her lines: “Welcome back to Yellowstone.”
    “Thanks.” Colin drove in.
     
    The road up from the south entrance ran pretty straight for twenty miles. Colin held to a steady forty-five even so. A couple of cars and a monstrous SUV zoomed past him. The guidebooks warned that the rangers were fanatical about enforcing the speed limit, especially on this stretch of the Yellowstone highway system. Maybe that was pious bullshit. Or maybe . . .
    He rounded a curve. A rangers’ carith a light bar—now flashing—had pulled over the SUV. The guy behind the wheel looked righteously pissed off. Colin chortled. “Tough luck, sucker,” he said.
    You could still see what the big fires of 1988 had done to the park. Some dead tree trunks went on standing tall. Some lay scattered across the meadows that had replaced some of the old lodgepole-pine forests. And the lodgepoles that had sprouted since the fires ranged from the size of coffee-table Christmas trees up to twenty or twenty-five feet tall: about half the size of the burned ones.
    When the road finally forked, you swung left to go to Old Faithful and the swarm of famous geysers near it. Colin had done that the day before, his first day in the park. He supposed everybody did. They were Yellowstone’s number one attraction, and he had to admit Old Faithful lived up to its billing.
    If you swung right instead, you went to West Thumb, an arm of Yellowstone Lake. There was a geyser basin there, too, and an information station with a bookstore. And there were restrooms. With quite a bit of Bubba’s coffee sloshing around inside him, that mattered to Colin. West Thumb Basin it was.
    He pulled into the parking lot at half past nine. Not many cars in it yet. He’d beaten the rush to Old Faithful, too, but he suspected there was no enormous rush to beat here. The potholes scarring the lot argued that way. Had more people come, they would have kept things in better repair.
    A round hot pool threw up clouds of steam by the entrance to the lot. It didn’t have a sign or anything—just a wooden warning rail around it to keep idiot tourists from cooking themselves. He found a spot near the start of the boardwalk that let visitors go by the geothermal features in reasonable safety—no, the parking lot wasn’t crowded. After he killed the lights and motor, he got out. Locking the car door as soon as he closed it was as automatic as breathing.
    Signs in several languages warned people to stay on the boardwalk. The crust was thin. You could fall through. Right this second, boiling didn’t seem so bad. He shivered despite sweatshirt and jacket; it had to be down in the forties. It had been in the upper eighties when he flew out of LAX. Well, he wasn’t in L.A. any more. That was the point of this exercise, if it had one.
    Blue Funnel Spring was . . . blue. The Thumb Geyser sputtered and blew out steam. The Fishing Cone sat a few feet out into Yellowstone Lake. You couldn’t reach it from the boardwalk. Once upon a time, his guidebook said, people had steamed fresh-caught trout in there. Some of them had hurt themselves trying it. Now the Fishing Cone was off limits to a close approach.
    Farther back from the shore, ice still covered much of the lake. That was just too weird for somebody who’d lived most of his life in Southern California. It made Colin think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . A lot of snow still lay on the ground, too.
    It was beautiful—no two ways about that. The beauty and the snow were reason enough for some people to live in these parts. Colin shook his head. In the forties, the week after Memorial Day? Forget about it!
    He worked his way around the boardwalk. A duck swimming in the unfrozen water close inshore eyed him, decided he was dangerous, and taxied along the surface, wings