“Why don’t you drive north?”
“How?” Liz scoffed. “The lake access is covered by mudflow. The junction at Madison looks like this, but this is much worse.”
A single wrenching jolt punched the earth’s surface, causing Liz, Wesley and the park employee to jump. All fell silent for a few seconds, shrouded in clouds of vapor, anticipating more violence.
“Can’t you get through the geyser basins and up to Norris?” the man in the Park Service uniform yelled.
“I’d have to leave the car near Madison Junction.”
“Can you hike through?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s your best bet. There’s no way for you to get through this country here, unless you take your life in your hands. I’ll try to locate someone to help you.”
Liz felt caged. She dreaded running forty miles on crumbling roads all the way back to Madison. Once across the tortured terrain there, that is if she could get through on foot, it was more than a dozen miles just to reach the west entrance of the park. Mammoth was thirty-five miles in the other direction. If no one were able to reach her, she’d be two full days’ hike from assistance. But what choice did she have?
“I’ll make it happen,” Wesley reassured the geophysicist. “I’ll have someone from the YVO waiting for you when you get to Madison.”
“What are you going to do, Wes? How are you going to Mammoth?”
“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. You need to be on your way. Have someone in the office take you up to Bozeman so you can catch your flight. I’ll let them know that’s what I expect of them. Okay? ”
“I feel as though I’m abandoning you,” Liz fretted.
Wesley grinned behind his trim moustache like a friendly grandparent. “This place and I, we can take care of ourselves. We may be old timers, but we’ve got some years left in us.” The grin didn’t leave his face. “Now get yourself to Mammoth and then home to your daughter. She needs you. Get back here as soon as you can.”
“I’ll do that, Wes. You take care of yourself.” She reached for the big man and embraced him. “I mean it.”
“You betcha, Ms. Embree. You best be going.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
At the edge of a jagged fracture in the earth’s crust between the Gibbon River and the loop highway at Madison junction, Liz left her vehicle for good. Crumbling slopes at her feet dropped a dozen feet below grade. There were multiple lacerations in the land ahead of her, but nothing as imposing as the chaos at Lewis Falls. Upstream, clouds of water vapor boiled from the fractures and warm fog bobbed in the channel in lockstep with the river. Sulfur fumes seeped from the cracks and stole through the meadow flats washed with the fresh green and gold pigments of spring.
Liz balked. If a quake rumbled while she was at the bottom of one of the fissures, the sides could slump and entomb her or the gash could close and seal shut. There was nothing to do but leap, to go as hard as humanly possible until she bridged the gaps and reached the highway on the far side. She took a breath and held it.
Bounding jumps brought the scientist to the bottom in seconds. The ground in the pit was uncomfortably hot to the touch. A mad scramble up unstable soils on the opposite bank brought her to the surface again faster than she had estimated. Good! One down, two to go. Sweat burst from her pores. Just another ninety seconds and she’d be clear of the hazards. Holding another breath, she repeated the maneuver in the second trough, its depths as hot as the first. At the edge of the third tortured rip in the landscape Liz arrested her progress. Below, the bottom soils were masked by filthy bubbling water, the surface flashing lively with vapor.
How wide was the leap across the polluted swill below? Six, seven feet? On level ground she should make it easily, but on sliding earth on a steep incline, that was another matter. Along the fracture lip she ran searching for the narrowest possible point to cross. When she found an avenue, she eased down the pitch and descended to the water’s edge. There she couched and brought a fingertip to the surface film. She tapped the fluid, flinched, then relaxed. Like a hot tub, she thought; hot, yes, but not dangerous. It was another sensation—tiny needles in the flesh—that was more troubling.
The fluid in the channel at her feet ran with acid. Some of the thermal features in the region were deadly. Sulfur Caldron up the line and many bubbling mud pots, too, had pH levels only slightly sweeter than battery acid.
No time for dallying. The sulfurous atmosphere in the trench was hellish. Without a moment’s indecision, Liz sprang from the fracture wall and landed true on slick soil on the opposite bank, but the footing gave way beneath her. She plunged down to mid-thigh in the water.
“Damn it.”
Flailing at the bank, the woman clawed and kicked out of the muck. With superhuman effort she slithered up the bank, rolled on the surface, sprang to her feet and sprinted to the drainage where the Gibbon River emptied into the Madison River.
“Aaa-eeee.”
Liz’s high-pitched scream ricocheted along the ancient caldera rim. The Madison, fueled with effluent from the Firehole thermal fields to the south and from the blistering terrain at Norris Geyser Basin to the northeast, usually ran warmer than most Yellowstone streams. The geophysicist splashed into hot shallows that were at the threshold of human tolerance. Knives of liquid heat stabbed into her legs, yet she stood fast in the current up to her hips for a minute letting the river dilute and carry away the sulfuric acid solution that had saturated her pant legs and gnawed at her flesh.
The loop road macadam radiated warmth absorbed from solar radiation flooding into the broad greening meadows and from the earth below. Liz stretched out on the blacktop like a turtle sunning itself on a log afloat in a cool pond. She stripped her pants down, kicked off her boots and examined her legs and feet. The acid and hot water had etched them red; they were a little tender, but serious injury had been averted by the excruciating immersion in the river.
Basking in the road heat, her pants and socks dried within two hours. Still no one had come to assist her. She laced her still-moist boots and stood up dead center in the highway junction. Something was coming westbound along the highway paralleling the Gibbon River, obscured by fog generated by hot vapor rising off the water and mixing with cool spring day air. Liz hoped for a vehicle. It didn’t sound motorized, though. It sounded like living things moving.
A massive black head parted the fog, then another and another, short horns on each. Bison were on the move, plodding with purpose in single file right down the centerline and on a course to knock the human down. Liz inched off the highway and watched enthralled as a long parade of beasts emerged one by one from the vapor curtains. They were unconcerned with the presence of the scientist as they forged ahead through the junction and westward. Dozens of the creatures trudged by. Liz could only imagine they were evacuating Yellowstone National Park, marching toward the west entrance some fourteen miles distant.
Massive black rumps waddled away. Engine noise replaced the buffalo. Liz spun about to see a pickup break from the river fog. A hand the color of coffee waved. Germaine Yardley, the volcano hazard team’s computer graphic modeler, had made the thirty-five-mile run from Mammoth.
Liz bounded to the driver’s window and grabbed the man by the arm. “You made it, Germaine. God, it’s good to see you. I thought no one would get through.”
“Buffalo don’t do the speed limit, Liz,” joked Germaine. “And it takes some doing moving rocks out of the road.”
“Rocks?”
“Come on, get in. We’ve got to make time. It was a real adventure getting down here.”