Gobstopper

For days the sun had been missing. Forest fires burning in Oregon, hundreds of miles west of us, had pushed enough smoke over Yellowstone to blot it out completely, and under that lid everything went grey and flat.

Knowing the odds were poor, my brother-in-law and I hiked up to the overlook anyway and waited to see whether the sky would do anything at all.

When the smoke and the cloud above it finally pulled apart, the light came down all at once. Every colour in the spring came up out of the grey — the blue centre, then the green, then the bands of yellow and orange and rust running out to the edge, with steam coming off the whole surface and drifting east.

From up on the hillside you get the thing people miss from the boardwalk, which is the shape of it. It’s a circle. Two hundred and some feet across, ring inside ring inside ring, and from ground level you can’t get that complete picture.

Out past the last band the ground is bare and crusted pale with mineral, and it stays that way for a good distance in every direction before the pines close back in.