excerpts from my new book-
Chapter 7-
Widow Makers-
About 7 years before my backpack trip to Heart Lake, and on the same Continental Divide Trail that leads to Heart Lake Geyser Basin, the intended point of interest was not Heart Lake, but the Witch Creek geothermal area which is about 2 ½ miles before Heart Lake. The Witch Creek geothermal area runs much of the length of Witch Creek. It is one of Yellowstone’s most interesting areas because of its altitude change of four hundred or more feet. If you make it to bottom of the valley the reward is a visible fissure that belongs to a fault line that circumvents the base of Mount Sheridan. Along it, geysers erupt. The features found along the creek correspondently change the geothermal water’s ph levels with the altitude: acidic at the top portion and alkaline near the bottom portion. This change in ph makes for some very interesting features...
...Once you drop of the rim, in top portion in the acidic region, you will find depressions from where the rock has been eroded by the acid leaving basins filled with an almost white to yellowish mud (this is broken down Rhyolite). As this mud pot area become drier, they form mud cones. This area, I call the “Valley of the Cones” because there can be quite many of them. More then I have found anywhere else in the park.
to be continued...
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