Waterfall Junkies

We made it to Artist Point for the grand moment: the ten-minute span of time during which the sun hits the mist at the base of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River to create a prism of light. Slowly, beginning with green on the left and mauve on the right, a play of colors takes place. Yellow, pink, a flash of orange, violet, pale blue, a glint of red, a swirl of purple here and gone. There are hundreds of these images available on the net, but many photographers continue trying their own hands at catching it. I preferred catching the photographers.

As people trickled away, show over, we followed a trail along the canyon rim. We saw red earths (rhyolite) mixed with ochres and golds in triangular streaks, wide at the top, narrow as they plunge toward the river below. Atop the canyon walls, tall lodgepole pines gather, peering over each other's shoulders into the canyon. An osprey wheels in elliptical orbit.

Down at the river again, I followed the camera gaze of a clutch of tourists watching three massive bison climbing out of the Yellowstone River, small waterfalls cascading over their massive shaggy shoulders. A little further on, a lone bison with a limping right front leg wandered as if dazed between long lines of cars and buses. As he passed us, his left eye, the color of caramel, seemed blind. He moved slowly, irregularly toward some distant destination that did not include cars, buses, and gawking humans with brick-like computers held to their faces, gabbling like turkeys about maps, signs, the road ahead and the road behind.