Frederick Womack, director of the Cascades Volcano Observatory, chartered the Beechcraft out of Calgary in the hopes that, for the first time, a few members of the scientific community could directly observe the shattered geology at Yellowstone. Womack invited several colleagues to join him and, ever mindful of the potential for publicity, extended an invitation to a friend, CNN Pacific Northwest correspondent Brian Oster. Oster brought with him a camera technician to record the trip and to monitor satellite uplink equipment so the news team might beam live footage to geosynchronous communication satellites for live broadcasting.
On the military aircraft, the Air Force ferried senators and congressmen from Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah and the Canadian premiers from Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The U.S. contingent had been in legislative session at the Capitol in D.C. when Yellowstone disintegrated. None had been able to get near the Wyoming high country, so they clawed at the opportunity to board the first flight that would permit civilians into the disaster area to survey lands affected by the catastrophe.
The flight had been delayed for weeks while the CVO awaited word that conditions were safe enough to permit a research observation plane to enter airspace over Yellowstone National Park. The National Weather Service hadn’t lifted its airborne ash advisory for the West, so commercial traffic was still shackled except for a narrow east-west corridor through Texas, central New Mexico and Arizona.
A front that brought several days of soaking rain was exactly what Womack and the Air Force had been waiting for. The precipitation scrubbed the atmosphere so that ash particle levels were low enough for the NWS and NOAA to give the green light for the observation flights.
The flight plan was simple: fly south-southwest from Calgary over southern Alberta, Montana and easternmost Idaho and get as close to the Yellowstone region as possible, staying west of the western boundary of the national park. They would spend a good hour surveying the region as far south as the Grand Teton Range before returning to Calgary.
In the video studio in First Day Hall, Bobcat overheard the word “Yellowstone” spoken by a character dancing on the television monitor screen above him. He looked up to see something he did not recognize at first. On screen, an aerial view of a slate gray mountainous landscape stretched to a digital horizon. In the upper left appeared an amorphous form belching something akin to a monstrous soft ice cream twist of white steam and black smoke. Bobcat stood up and pushed his nose close to the screen, studying the details in the image. In the foreground, the mountain folds seemed to be filled in, as if heavy ground clouds had infiltrated the elevations most of the way up the flanks of the peaks. The summits of the mountains looked queer, and Bobcat couldn’t decide why they appeared as they did. The audio picked up a male voice from someone that Bobcat recognized must not be a reporter. Whoever was talking off-camera was using geological terms freely in his description of the broadcast image. Bobcat listened intently.
“…Gallatin and Absaroka mountain ranges separated by the Paradise Valley. Welded tuff has completely filled in the valley and the drainages of the mountains as high as the 9,000-foot elevation level. It appears the energy release swept away the upper mountain strata, blowing away hundreds of vertical feet of material.”
Bobcat struggled with what he had heard. What earthly spasm could profoundly alter a mountain landscape, could tear whole mountains away and bury an entire environment under hundreds of feet of debris?
In the next instant, the electronics shaman was out the studio door and racing down the stairs to exit the building. He crashed into the outside doors, stumbled down the entrance steps, and fell in a heap on the red granite stone walkway. Abel, on his way over to First Day Hall, spied Bobcat as he exploded from the doorway and fell to the ground. He ran to help the fallen, but Bobcat scrambled to his feet in a flash and recognized Abel coming his way.
“Abel,” Bobcat yelled across the commons, “You’ve got to see this.”
“What have you got, Bobcat?”
Abel received no answer. Bobcat spun around, leaped up the steps he had just fallen down, threw open the door with a bang and disappeared inside the hall at a gallop. Abel quickened his step and found his way to Bobcat’s sanctum, the entire bank of monitors now powered up. He joined Bobcat nose to nose with the screens.
Aboard the Beechcraft King Air, Frederick Womack was trembling. No one on earth, let alone a trained geologist, had ever seen the immediate aftermath of a super eruption. As the aircraft approached what had once been the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park, the plane banked to the east revealing a macabre vista outside the passenger windows. For miles the landscape was utterly sterile and flat. All topography had been erased. The dead plain swept out ahead until it reached what appeared to be the black seething rim of the world. Beyond were the dense ugly clouds of hell punched through with white vapor jets and billowing steam. All were backlit with a radiant red glow cast by pooling magma hidden somewhere far below the earth’s surface but, since the eruption, exposed to the atmosphere.
As far as Womack could see to the east and west, the world was a smoking ruin and the skies above the vast new caldera choked with opaque and lethal gases. The structure of the newborn caldera was impossible to see amid the smoke, but, for Womack, it was enough just to see what he could up close.
He turned to reporter Brian Oster and began to speak. Oster thrust the microphone into his face. “What you are seeing below this aircraft is our first look at a newly-formed volcanic caldera. It’s immense in size.”
In the video studio at Independency, Abel and Bobcat were held hostage by Womack’s voice, backed by the loud background hum of the plane’s twin engines. “Across Montana,” continued the observatory executive, “we’ve been flying over a volcanic tuff desert. No forests withstood the blasts. No structures of any kind are visible. Now, we are within, I’d say, twenty miles of the rim of the caldera, a crater that I’d have to guess is sixty miles across; we can’t see just how wide, as yet. We can’t get a good look into the caldera; there is too much outgassing. The topography that was once above the caldera has disappeared. It has sunk into the caldera basin or has disintegrated and is spread out in all directions for hundreds of miles, burying the surrounding terrain.”
The pilot of the Beechcraft banked the plane again, bringing it around 130 degrees to a western heading. He did not like the angry look of the horizon to the east. It was boiling black with gasses. The flight plan called for keeping well clear of the sinister stew. The pilot banked the plane over the tortured and broken ridges of the Gallatin Range along the Idaho border. He banked the craft again, this time to the left, and flew the craft south. The prevailing winds cleared the smoke from the heavens, so there was a clear view southward toward the Grand Teton Range.
No elevated terrain in the continental United States was held in such high esteem as the Tetons. To legions of city dwellers in the east and to those residing in the teeming California valleys, the Tetons were the quintessential Rockies, the very essence of what it was to be a mountain wonderland. Now, before the camera aboard the Beechcraft, the Tetons were mutilated corpses.
As the Beechcraft droned toward the Teton Range, the reporter on board pulled the microphone to his lips.
“The only way I can think to describe what we are seeing from the windows of this airplane is that the environment looks as if it has been destroyed by atomic weapons. The world below has been laid waste absolutely everywhere we look. We’ve been flying a straight course for nearly two hours, and there is nothing much to see. Everything has been obliterated.