Martial law will soon come to Teton County, Wyoming. Finally, later on, two television crews will hop the final seventy miles by helicopter to the Central Plateau of Yellowstone, to walk its smoking crust.
This will be at the start of the second summer of their story.
Always, the Army will let them in—only for the day and only with an escort. Sometimes they will fly over to film at night when the cone of the south volcano glows a deep cherry red and the lava spills over the continental divide to ooze down toward the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. The other volcano, the one to the north, the one they are afraid of, has only just broken its summit with a crater. There are two different magmas at work in Yellowstone. They have each built their own volcano.
Apart from the new Volcanoes, soon after the time of this year’s spring snowmelt there began spontaneous events, occurring suddenly all across the Central Plateau. These include phreatic explosions, hurling boulders across the sky. Fountains of lava burst a single time, to next appear somewhere else. Magmas rise. Ancient hidden waters boil. Pressure builds. The crust of Yellowstone stretches to contain it with the weight of four miles thickness.
Professor Bennington guessed right, and that was very lucky for us. I think many scientists have been trying to rewrite his contribution, shrinking it down into just a footnote. He imagined that they would try. He had always worried about the jealous streak of science.
The television producer has chosen only the older reporters and technicians from the station, those who have already had their chance at life—although the young ones, who think they are indestructible, threaten to hike in there alone if he does not include them.
Since the beginning, WNET has flown into Bozeman, Montana—more often during that first summer, then less over the winter. Now events progress without interruption. News bulletins break into scheduled programming. The larger newspapers sell special editions.
The government has used this PBS affiliate station to prepare the American People. The program is Nature. Its 500 episodes are well known to two generations of PBS viewers.
The news must always lag for several days. The director, Alton Picke, has been censored; although in one week, that will end. WNET will then no longer have an escort. Even the army will have pulled out of the park, although they will stay in the Madison Valley—because it is there that we will either win or lose.
Soon, the roadblocks will stand unguarded. The reporters and the foolish will be on their own. The Mount St. Helens eruption showed us that there will be no one left to rescue and nothing left to recover. The die is cast. Both the Americans and the planet were unstoppable. It becomes a question only of who gets there first.
Few scientists remain inside the park. Most choose to remember what happened to those at Mount St. Helens who stayed too long. That girl who discovered the south volcano still has the run of the place. She is sampling escaping gases, trying to predict events. The men down in the tunnels need to know this in order to gage how far to stretch their luck.
Grant Village has been abandoned. There, the big lodge sits empty and shakes several times each day. Much of the news comes from the jobsite, to the north in Madison Valley, east of Earthquake Lake. There, a city has sprouted from bare meadows, and the night has become joint laborer with the day.
Apart from brief bulletins and quick images on the nightly news, these film crews work on the greatest single project television has yet covered. It was inevitable that the news would leak out, but there has been no hysteria yet, only the wary pullback of populations across state lines. This show will confirm the worst fears. The documentary goes by the name Yellowstone Awakens. They assemble pictures of an apocalypse, and it is coming fast.
PBS will broadcast the two-hour special on Independence Day. Alton Picke will drop in the ominous voice of his craggy narrator to overlay the images. There is a kind of resignation in his voice. They will broadcast to an America that waits behind the Mississippi, or across the Canadian border, or beyond the high Sierras, facing the interior of a continent they have fled:
“Yellowstone is empty—for the first time in 70,000 years. The herd animals and major predators have moved south into the Tetons, or north into Gallatin National Forest, or east into the Shoshone. It was a slow migration, not a stampede. And so far, the animals appear to have guessed right.
Now the meadows are empty. The lonely coyotes celebrate their promotion to the top of the food chain. The trout make their spawn unimpeded by bears. Only scientists and roustabouts remain behind to witness.
All of the tourists have been out for fifty-eight weeks. The National Park Service packed up and left a year ago.
The army has set up roadblocks leading into Teton County, Wyoming. Reluctantly, they have let our choppers land. Each morning, we fly over the quiet end of the Park, at the North Entrance, only forty-six miles south of Bozeman.
There, President Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a triumphal arch. The inscription at the top proclaims, with an irony only now understood, that the Yellowstone country shall forever be saved “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
Standing at the Roosevelt Arch, the mountains block your view of the North Volcano, twenty-seven miles to the south. But the new ash column rises to mark its place. In the last year, the volcano’s 475 feet have arisen near the former confluence of the Gibbon and Firehole Rivers.
Here, these streams had, in former days, joined to form the Madison River and the beginnings of the Madison Valley. The valley floor has risen to push aside the Firehole River. Along with Nez Perce Creek, it has reversed direction. It now runs south, to fill the basin of tiny Rush Lake
The North Volcano has added fifty feet last month alone. The pace here is quickening.
Everything began nine miles to the south, when the Earth split with those fissures discovered by the now familiar figure of Claire Cheviot, the newly minted PhD from Purdue University. It was here that the pretty graduate student wrote her doctoral dissertation and fought off attacks by bears and wolves, and from desperadoes, and even from the volcano itself.
By the end of that first day, those cracks had spread, by progress of irregular lines, all over that portion of the park. Such were its beginnings back in the third week of May last year. Claire still wanders these lonely valleys, digging secrets from the mountainsides and measuring primordial gases, formed when the planet was very young, and only now making their way to the surface.
By means of flooding lava flows, the south volcano has added 537 feet of height to the continental divide at Craig’s Pass, at that point where it used to form a box canyon, long familiar to Park Visitors, where the road took that quick jog back and forth above Shoshone Lake. The relentless flow of melted rock has grown into the central cone of a shield volcano. It fills that little valley with cooling stone. The lava flood has begun to spill over the top of the Great Divide. It now runs down the eastern slope on its way to the shore of that part of Yellowstone Lake, which they call West Thumb, itself the collapsed caldera of an earlier blast. The majority opinion is that all of this so far has been only the sideshow.
The main act is yet to come, they say. This will be the gas wall, the pyroclastic flow, and the final ash cloud. Eventually it will blast from the north volcano, that tremendous swelling now stretching the floor of the Central Plateau to the breaking point.
Claire Cheviot has remained behind. Our film crews observe the lovely lady of the Yellowstone tramping around the former national park, followed by her loyal pack of bear dogs, printing the dangerous caldera floor with wary paws. She seeks discoveries by means of instruments and deduction, or, as is said by the workers down in the tunnels, or drinking after work at the Geyser Saloon, by means of divining rod and Ouija board.
Our film crews sometimes encounter thrill seekers. They arrive as lone wolves or they drift back in pairs through the mostly empty states. When observed, they are arrested if they can be caught.
For now, the real show is up in the Madison Valley, where a new city of fifteen thousand people sprouted last year under the auspices of the Unites States Army Corps of Engineers.
The train station in West Yellowstone, Montana, at the south end of the Madison Valley, at the west entrance to the park, has been enlarged greatly. A new rail yard has been assembled, and two sets of new tracks now run two miles east to the jobsite. Some say that it is the greatest construction project since the pyramids, excepting only that the important part is four miles underground. We hope the workers may get out in time.
All of this was the idea of Professor Jim Bennington of Purdue. He knew of the great empty place in the Earth, slumbering next to Yellowstone, far below the surface. He visualized boring tunnels to relieve the pressure. He understood the means that they now use to dig these subterranean riverbeds. Down these tunnels, a flood of molten rock will flow once they join the Madison Valley Abyss with the Yellowstone Magma Chamber, bringing the release of two-thousand centuries of pressure.
This new town in the Madison Valley makes do with the borrowed name and zip code of nearby West Yellowstone, Montana, and yet it has become the largest seat of manufacturing west of Chicago and east of San Francisco. Dozens of companies have built factories there, and all with public money.
To begin this national mobilization, Congress has raised taxes. This is a grim faced patriotism. On Main Street, folks are more likely to complain about the possibility of our becoming part of Canada.
The main eruption, if, ultimately, we find that we are helpless before the brutality of nature, may be 2,500 times worse than the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980. There would be mass extinctions, and we of mankind hope that we are not counted among them—counted by some future race, working with whatever geologist’s pick-hammer might fit their hand.”