Firehole Canyon Drive

Firehole Canyon Drive is the next right, just ahead. Large RVs, stay straight, it's narrow. Everyone else, it's a one-way side road of about two miles that puts you back on this same road, so it costs you almost no distance. Skipping it is fine, and the tour picks up with you either way. In there, the Firehole has cut down through a lava flow and laid the inside of it open, so the canyon walls show you a flow in cross section. There's a viewing area for forty-foot Firehole Falls. There's also a swimming area, but don't count on it. It usually stays closed until the middle of summer, it can stay closed all season, and the parking is often full. That side road used to be the main road. It became such a bottleneck that a nineteen thirty-eight survey proposed a bypass, with the old road kept for the scenery. That bypass is the road you're on if you stayed straight. The name is older than any of it. To a trapper, a hole meant a sizable valley full of game, and Bonneville's men called this country the Firehole. People were putting this hot water to work long before any road. The Tukudika, the Mountain Shoshone, took their name from eating mountain sheep, though at least half their diet was plants, roots, nuts and berries. The park says they soaked bighorn horns in geothermal water to soften them, then shaped the horns into bows. Those bows pulled about sixty-five pounds, and they were traded across the Rocky Mountains and the Northern Plains. Somebody once looked at that first steam up ahead and saw a workshop.