When the fog pockets cleared, Germaine gunned the truck. Flying around a bend, he spun the wheel trying to maneuver around a coyote darting across the lane. The pickup slammed into the canine’s ribs, crushing them and hurtled the creature twenty feet off the road.
“Oh, no,” wailed Liz, watching the lean body sail into the brush. Germaine brought the truck to a stop. The animal lay still.
“The animals are going crazy,” Germaine moaned. “Fox, coyote, wolves, mule deer, bear—everything. I just missed running over every one of them coming down here.”
“Yellowstone must be driving them mad,” Liz replied.
“It’s not a happy place for them, not any longer.”
On the flats approaching Norris Geyser Basin, both occupants of the truck leaned in toward the windshield. Over the tops of weather-bleached snags burned to match sticks in the great fires of 1988, thunderheads of boiling steam vapor wrestled in the atmosphere. The famous thermal basin shimmied with heat, all of its geysers roaring in steam phase, pumping scalding clouds skyward. Steamboat and Excelsior geysers stood as flashing silver skyscrapers, their majestic gossamer crowns bending to the breeze nearly 400 feet above the terrain.
“I’ve never seen Norris this wild,” said Liz in awe.
“I’ve never seen the road like this,” groaned Germaine.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“The oil is coming out of it.”
Subterranean heat saturated the loop highway. Asphalt aggregate, bound together with oil tar, was so hot it slumped and flowed. The truck tires cut down into the surface and picked up chucks of hot pack; the black mix slapped against the wheel wells and undercarriage. Germaine rammed the accelerator to gain speed so the truck might float over rather than dig into the surface.
As Norris’ roaring thermal monsters receded behind the truck, Liz fought off the desire to retreat into an internal safehouse where she could bask in the illusion of safety. At every turn in the road, Yellowstone sewed a pox upon the land. Twin Lakes boiled furiously, their shores withering from new spring green to dry rattle brown. Roaring Mountain shrieked with the voices of a thousand madmen, the sprawling hillside completely lost in a shapeless caldron of steam. Big hexagonal slabs of black volcanic glass lay in the road beneath Obsidian Cliff. Germaine slowed to a crawl and deftly avoided razor-sharp obsidian shards as bits of falling stone pelted the road. In the forest and meadow patchwork quilt of Willow Park, thousand-pound moose scampered back and forth in the road, unable to decide upon a direction to take.
Neither rider uttered a word as the truck passed directly under the yellow ochre-colored cliff face at Golden Gate. Liz’s mouth dried to tack, her upper lip sticking to her teeth. The narrow curvilinear bridge beneath the two-million-year-old Huckleberry Ridge Tuff formation was littered with rhyolite rubble large and small.
“I had to move rock here on the bridge on the way down,” Germaine confessed. “I couldn’t get through. Know what I was thinking when I was clearing the way?”
Liz glanced at the driver. “No, what?”
“I was thinking that, if I got hit by a rock falling from this cliff, I would be the first and only human being ever killed by tephra fall from the monster Huckleberry Ridge eruption.”
Liz laughed nervously, but nipped it short. “Let’s not tempt fate.”
The pickup cleared the bridge and raced for the hoodoos just south of Mammoth Hot Springs and the park headquarters. Vertical stone pillars, many of them dozens of feet tall, stood in the land, each a petrified goblin. The forms, grotesque and whimsical, had been chiseled over millennia by unrelenting wind, ice and rain.
Among the hoodoos, the roadway heaved with seismic waves as a fresh earthquake rumbled across the plateau. Germaine braked hard to stop the truck on the oscillating asphalt. Fifty seconds of shaking brought down loose rubble into the road, some of it pinging off the truck’s side panels.
The land stopped seizing. The quiet of the vast spaces returned.
“Whew.” Germaine shook his head side to side.
“What’s that?” asked Liz, as the sound of rusted hinges opening surrounded the truck.
Liz and Germaine both focused at the base of a towering hoodoo loitering thirty feet to the north on a steep slope to the left and just off the highway. It appeared to be cleaving in two, one side rigid, the other tilting away from its mate. A gap opened between the columns. It grew wider. At the base, fractured rock crumbled under shifting forces.
“Run,” screamed Liz. In a single motion she was out the door and sprinting back in the direction of Golden Gate. Germaine sat transfixed as the massive split pillar peeled away and exploded in the road directly in front of the truck’s grill. Rock shrapnel blasted the windshield and massive bounding boulders spun like kids’ glass marbles into the gorge below.
“Germaine,” Liz hollered, scrambling back to the truck. Germaine pitched from the truck door, feel on all fours and vomited.
“Are you okay, Germaine? Talk to me.”
“Okay. I’m okay.” He swallowed hard. “Scared me to death.”
“You hurt? You’re bleeding.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve got glass all over me. Must have cut me.”
The truck door slammed with a bang as new earthquake waves swam through the road. Liz grabbed Germaine, yanked him to his feet, and roared in his face. “Let’s go. Go!”
The two bolted as if pursued by predators through the hoodoo debris field, stumbling on ground that shifted and jumped under every footfall. A massive cap rock dislodged from a towering pillar and slammed into the highway two-dozen-yards ahead, punching through the road surface and lodging there to form a titanic roadblock.
The mad dash continued to the edge of the hoodoo forest. Germaine could no longer get his breath, conditioned as he was to run computers, not races. Hands locked together atop her head, Liz walked in circles trying to shake out leg cramps.
Mammoth Hot Springs lay only a few miles to the north—walking distance. Make haste, Liz told herself. She collared Germaine, turned him north and set a fast pace. They walked in silence for a mile, when Germaine found his voice. “You’re leaving tonight?”
“Tomorrow. I’ve got a flight out of Bozeman.”
“I’ll take you up there tonight. My car’s at Mammoth.”
Liz nodded.
“What are you going to do, Germaine?”
“Finish up, pack equipment and get out. We can’t function. The quakes are wreaking havoc with the equipment, the buildings. We have to set up somewhere else. We’ll probably go to the campus at Provo.”
“What do you think is ahead for us?”
“I’d like to think we’re going have a brand spanking new volcano to play with in a few weeks. But I don’t believe my own happy horseshit any longer.”
Liz blinked dust out of her eyes. “What do you believe?”
“Oh, you know West Thumb?” asked Germaine.
“Of course.”
“It’s a crater within a bigger crater, Liz.”
“We all know that.”
“I think Norris goes ballistic, or maybe Brimstone. One of them blows out big, like the shot that created the lake thumb a few hundred thousand years ago.”
Germaine puffed trying to pull down enough oxygen to keep up the pace set by his companion. “And you, what do you think, Liz?”
Liz pondered Germaine’s inquiry as the steaming travertine terraces above Mammoth hove into view in the distance. She was troubled by her own thoughts and did not answer the question for nearly thirty second.
“God, I think Yellowstone is capable of the unthinkable.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine