Hunched over and arms outstretched, the man shuffled through the opaque mist on his snowshoes, grabbing spruce boughs as they materialized suddenly before his eyes. In the next instant, Jamie felt pressure and the sensation of flying. A steam explosion eighty feet away blasted quartz and gravel shrapnel through the thicket. Particles stabbed into his temple and cheek, left shoulder, arm and hip. The pressure wave of the blast lofted him into the forest.
For several minutes, the biologist lay on his back in a bed of dense sapling evergreens staring blind into the heavens. Sensation did not come to him, although a spray of drizzle and rivulets of blood were soaking through his clothing. Shock was deep and comforting even as facial swelling closed off his sight. Blisters erupted on any exposed skin in response to the drizzle. It was scalding hot. In the womb of shock, the biologist could not know that the precipitate was hot enough to boil flesh.
The old service road into the Lake Butte region was abandoned during the winter, but it was smooth, conditioned by snowmobile groomers opening the terrain for the first time so scientists could reach the newly outfitted Park Point research cabin. The snows in the lane were packed tight by a tide of snowmachine enthusiasts who had discovered the corridor.
Rather than wake someone in the wee hours of the night to borrow a snowmobile, Liz decided she would trust her Forester’s four-wheel drive and chance crawling over the elevated terrain at Lake Butte, slip over the old caldera lip, and descend the several long miles downhill toward Park Point.
At nearly 7,500-feet elevation, Liz nudged the Forester to the height of land on the ridge. The going was good but slow. The car slipped across the flat at the top of the ridgeline and approached the ancient caldera rim and the descent. She stopped the vehicle, opened the door and stepped out onto the snow. Her chin dropped away as she took in the view. At the edge of night, the white ice and snow cover of the vast lake was lost under a sweeping fog blanket that glowed quietly with lunar reflection. At the eastern edge of the lake and marching toward her was a white inferno.
“My word!” said the scientist, blowing the words out into the frosty ether.
Liz stood transfixed, seismic activity wriggling up her legs, generating mild vertigo. The car rocked and squeaked on its springs. The geologist lifted her nose into drifting ice crystals and sniffed in long drafts of air. Sulfur! Just of hint of the common element tiptoed through the night atmosphere.
The woman fell behind the wheel, eased the car over the height of land and descended the long grade toward the valley. She put the rig in the lowest gear to keep her speed turtle slow but constant and steered straight down the wide, groomed snowmobile corridor.
Seismic vibrations channeled up into the chassis every minute or two, causing the car to skitter on the surface. Unease infiltrated Liz’s steady demeanor. Her hands clutched the wheel like Vise-Grip pliers. Her foot on the accelerator shuddered.
A violent tremor kicked the car askew. It hopped, bounced on its tires and shimmied around in the lane, the shaking all-encompassing. Every joint in the car cried out. The car skidded, rotating on an invisible axis until it was sideways in the track.
With a final jolt, the land fell still. A hush clamped down on the forest. Liz loosened her death grip on the wheel. She felt claustrophobic and bolted out into the snow, whirling around, looking at the dark environment, trying to gain some assurance from the straight, strong trunks of the trees and from the quiet snows.
Bang! The car door slapped against her and knocked her to the ground. Another fierce tremor sank its teeth into the forest’s flanks. Liz kicked her boots into the snows in the lane to wrestle herself away from the car. The vehicle bounded and slid about above her.
A shriek knifed through the black followed instantly by a blast furnace glow. Prone on her back, Liz peered south down the lane where the trees were parted on either side of the snowmobile corridor. Her eyes dilated, flaring as wide as nature would permit. Beyond the black spire forms of the spruce and pine, the distant horizon flashed nuclear red. Crimson beams of light raced through the woodlands.
Rolling to her knees, Liz managed to get to her feet. Through the limited field of vision in the lane, she watched the low forest four miles away flare red for a moment, go dark, then flare again in brilliant, hot-pigmented bursts. Along a fissure line running north toward her, fiery light bursts coughed to launch flames dozens of feet into the night air. Jets of fire danced among the fumarole curtains, building a narrow drapery wall, a meandering, ever-lengthening sheet of liquid scarlet.
The scientist studied the pulsing vision with a professional varnish. She had witnessed new vents and lava fountain eruptions on the great island of Hawaii and elsewhere. Fountains were spectacular, particularly at night, but they were rather placid volcanic events. Such eruptions ejected modest amounts of gassy material and lacy streams of lava. Yellowstone, seized by heavy seismic labor pains, seemed to be giving birth to a new lava fountain infant, the first volcanic eruption of any sort on the plateau in 70,000 years.
A child from hell grew rapidly in length before Liz’s eyes. The fire line in the valley marched into the lake and was obscured by a cauldron of steam. The brooding clouds of steam in the lake and the line of steam columns swirled pink, yellow and red with reflected light, as if the aurora borealis had been roped and dragged from the heavens and staked down to earth.
But the flitting fires in the valley exhibited none of the characteristics of volcanic activity she had ever witnessed. Yellowstone’s geology was nothing like Hawaii, so lava fountain eruptions were highly unlikely. No thunderous explosions accompanied the bursts of light below, so some other phenomenon was at work, but what?
The geophysicist slipped back into her car. Carefully, she jimmied the rig back and forth to align it with the snow track. She got it squared up and rolled south, continuing into the valley for a closer look. The odd, jittery light show of flame and steam fired her imagination. Go down and witness the chaos first hand, she admonished herself. Retrieve some air and water samples. And try to find Jamie Hebert in the maelstrom.
Off the ridge, the landscape leveled out. Liz could see less terrain now, caught within the narrow funnel of the snowmobile trail. Ahead the landscape flashed on-off-on with color. The pathway, though, was filling in quickly with fog, a pinkish semi-transparency that whittled images down to blurs.
The Park Point log cabin loomed out of the fog. Liz stopped the car, switched off the lights, and plunged into stroboscopic red soup. Everything about her was bathed in eerie steamy broth. She squinted into the brew. In the lane stretched a narrow bridge just wide enough to permit packhorses to pass. A vapor-choked stream ran beneath. Now to work. Pulling a backpack out of her vehicle, she checked for a compass and fished for her GPS unit in the many pockets and folds. A satellite reading at the hood of the car gave her a base coordinate. She stored the number in the little pocket system’s memory.
Liz took a deep breath, slipped under the pack, and left the wide, groomed snowmobile surface, striding southbound on an old pack path, the Thoroughfare Trail. It exhibited a single narrow snowmobile track in the snow. The forest was all ghosts and no substance. Rivers of heat ran unseen through the trees. For five minutes she walked in March cold, then suddenly entered an invisible channel of eighty-degree air. Seconds later she was back in the chill. Hot, cold, hot, cold.