Gibbon Meadows

Got the legs for one more? Artists Paintpots is on your left in about a quarter mile. It's a one-mile walk, and the trail to the mudpots is steep. There's a vault toilet at the lot. Turn left when you come back out to the road. Scan the open ground along the Gibbon for bison as you go. A little over a mile past that turnoff, Beryl Spring sits right at a long pullout on your right, along the Gibbon River, with a short boardwalk. It's a good quick stop. You've now done something Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka couldn't. In the winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighty-seven Schwatka, already famous for Alaska and the Yukon, set out to ski the park. He took ill at Norris and gave up. The rest of the party, with photographer Frank Haynes, pushed on to the Grand Canyon and back to Mammoth barely alive. Back at Norris, the road you didn't take runs north to Obsidian Cliff, about ninety-eight feet of exposed volcanic glass. People first quarried it for toolmaking more than eleven thousand years ago. Archeologists have studied more than fifty quarries there. Families dug pits on top of the cliff with bison or elk bone shovels, worked the stone with elk antlers, and got two or three arrowheads from a rock the size of a cantaloupe. That stone traveled. It's the most widely dispersed obsidian in the country among hunter-gatherers, found along trade routes from western Canada to the Great Lakes and Ohio. One cache at the Hopewell site in Ohio held about six hundred sixty pounds of it. Either local people moved it east through middlemen, or Hopewell traders came to the quarries themselves on a single trip, and scholars haven't settled it. Six hundred sixty pounds of this country, sitting in Ohio, and no one can tell you who carried it.