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| | Yet at the same time, this place is like nowhere else on Earth. The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, that psychedelic cleft in the land that reduced Charles Cook to jaw-slackened silence, might more convincingly belong in another solar system. At the Sonsinis’ suggestion, I round my trip off with another utterly incomparable experience: Boiling River, the only place in Yellowstone where you’re allowed to swim, and for much of the year the only place you’d want to. A half-mile walk from an anonymous car park follows the frigid Gardner River to its confluence with the aforementioned geothermal spring. Here, an artful arrangement of rocky pens blends the skin-flaying and bone-chilling waters. Each is home to half a dozen lolling bathers, their blissed-out, parboiled faces as red as the setting sun behind. They are at one with the volcanic heritage that secured this park its pioneering protected status and, in doing so, kickstarted the whole concept of environmental stewardship. ‘For the benefit and enjoyment of the people,’ I think, stripping down to my underwear and treading gingerly over the slippery stones to join them. Then I lie back with my head on a smooth boulder, gaze dreamily around at the lumpy brown hillsides and let the sulphurous warmth embalm me, a benevolent gesture from the volcanic gods before they blow us all to kingdom come. ‘I sat there in amazement while my companions came up, and after that, it seemed to me that it was five minutes before anyone spoke.’ So wrote Charles Cook in 1869, recording his expedition’s dumbstruck arrival at the head of a 20-milelong, 350-metre-deep gorge, crowned by a mighty green cataract and flanked with steaming, hissing walls of crimson, mauve and yellow. Cook’s expedition had been despatched to the lonely Montana-Wyoming border after wide-eyed fur trappers and prospectors came back from the region with tall tales of hot waterfalls that rose upwards, of petrified forests and an alien world of fire and brimstone, which trembled underfoot and belched orange gas and boiling mud. Silenced awe became the Cook party’s default mode – it was all true. That such a well-trodden nation, by then already an established global superpower, should have secretly nurtured this extraordinary lost kingdom seemed almost unbelievable. For most, it still was: the US only accepted Cook’s account when a further expedition returned with irrefutable photographic evidence.
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| | Drunken drivers,Michael Kors Outlet, as I said, are a pestilence. The trail of griefand misery they leave is a blight on our culture. |