by Hunt, Jack
She gave the truck some more gas and rolled forward a few feet before stopping again. It was Thursday, the middle of July, peak season for Yellowstone National Park and the temperatures were hovering in the high seventies. Catherine reached for the AC and cranked it up as a bead of sweat dripped down her temple.
Finally, in the distance she saw the north entrance ranger booth. It was a log-style cabin with a stone foundation. Snagging up her phone she dialed Richard to let him know they’d arrived safely. He was a stickler for making sure she checked in with him while Jordan was with her. It was one of his many traits that niggled her.
“Oh hey, so we’re just approaching the north side. I thought I would call you before we entered as I’m not sure they have much service in the park.”
“Already looked into it. There is coverage for fifty percent of the park. So no reason you can’t be calling me and keeping me in the loop.”
She raised her eyebrows and counted to ten in her head. She hated talking to him as he always made her feel like an idiot.
“How is he?” Richard asked.
Catherine looked at him.
“His usual self.”
Jordan began to stir at the sound of her voice.
“Well I told you not to book it. Kids his age have no interest in hiking.”
“Yeah, well maybe if you’d taken him camping once in a while maybe he would.”
She heard him scoff on the other end of the line. “Back to that, are we? I think if recall rightly, I was the one that took him to his baseball games, I was the one who showed up at his track meet, and I was the one who actually made it to his middle school graduation.”
She narrowed her eyes and felt herself start to overheat. “That’s not fair. You know I tried to get back but the flight was cancelled.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well don’t,” Catherine said.
She pulled up to the gate and brought her window down. A park ranger dressed in a dark green jacket asked her what kind of pass she wanted. She told her she’d already booked in advance for Bridge Bay Campground on the southeast side near Yellowstone Lake but had some complications with booking on the north side for a couple of days.
“Not many spots left. It’s twenty dollars a night.”
While she waited on the ranger for change, Richard continued.
“Please tell me you didn’t wait until the last minute to book?”
“No, I booked in advance, there were just a few complications.”
“Which means you winged it.”
She sighed. “Anything else you wish to point out?”
He sniffed. “Anyway, make sure he’s well fed, and that he stays away from any of the trails with bears.”
“Any other marching orders?”
“Yeah, don’t go filling his head with horror stories about that supervolcano.”
“As if…”
“It’s all you ever used to speak about.”
“It was my job.”
“You didn’t have to bring it home.”
“Well you don’t have to worry about that now, do you?”
“No. No, I don’t. Oh, and make sure he doesn’t go off the boardwalk. I don’t want him falling into any of the hot springs.”
“Could you be any more condescending?”
“Sorry?” the ranger replied, thinking she was talking to her.
Catherine motioned to her cell phone and mouthed the words that she was on the phone. The ranger nodded and handed back her change, along with a handful of maps, road construction details and her pass. The truck crawled forward and she heard the sound of a woman’s voice in the background. “Who’s that, Richard?”
He must have placed his hand over the phone as his voice became muffled. She knew who it was — Victoria. She worked as a police dispatcher. Within a month of her moving out, Vicky, as he liked to call her, moved in, making it pretty obvious that he’d been seeing her prior to their separation.
“Look, I have to go. Phone me tonight,” he said.
“Actually it will be a couple of days.”
“Tonight,” he said in a demanding tone before hanging up.
Such a control freak, she thought. She had a good mind not to bother but that would only lead to another argument and she’d experienced enough of them already. Since leaving a well-paid position with the USGS in California, she’d taken a lower-paid job with the University of Utah, which still allowed her to continue her work monitoring earthquakes and volcanoes, more specifically activity in Yellowstone. Her departure from the USGS was another story entirely, one that Richard would often remind her about.
“Only fifty percent of the park has coverage?” Jordan asked, looking down at his phone as if the world was crumbling in. He’d overheard the conversation.
Catherine smiled. “You won’t need it. Look around you, there’s so much to see.”
“Like bison?” Jordan said before shaking his head. “Next you’ll tell me there is no TV.”
She glanced at him and pursed her lips.
He cocked his head to one side, loaded with teenage attitude. “Oh you have got to be joking? No TV?”
“Barring two suites in Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, or using Fishing Bridge RV Park, there are no full hookups and there is no television.”
“Then what is there to do?”
“Hike, watch the geysers, see wild animals, go rafting, horseback riding, fishing, heck, you name it, this place offers it.”
“Everything?”
She gave a nod. “Yep.”
“TV?”
“Okay, smart-ass.” She leaned over and nudged him. “Anyway, it will do you some good to put that phone down and take in the sights. Can’t be healthy having your face glued to it twenty-four seven.”
“When you lived with us you had your face glued to yours.”
“That was different. It was part of my job.”
“Yeah, I heard that a lot.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like your father.”
She tried to remain upbeat and positive but she couldn’t help get a sinking feeling in her gut that this whole trip was a bad idea. Since divorcing, sharing custody had been tricky. They’d initially been based in Vancouver, Washington so it wasn’t a big deal but landing the job with the University of Utah had created some complications and she had to get the court’s permission to move. All well and good until it came time to work out the logistics of custody. Realistically, Jordan couldn’t spend half of his school year in one state and the rest in another. It would be too difficult, they said. All of which meant a nasty legal battle through the courts before they awarded custody to Richard. Even though she fought them on it, his sway as a police officer and the stability he could offer garnered the favor of the court. She’d considered not taking the job and searching for something in Washington but Jordan had made it pretty clear he wanted to be with his father, and after exiting the USGS, finding something with her specific skill set wasn’t easy. Still, their separation hadn’t stopped her from seeing Jordan for holidays and vacations. Richard might have been a dick with her but when it came to Jordan, he understood the need for a child to have his mother in his life, and there was no doubt about it, he was a good father. She couldn’t fault him on that.
“So we’re staying at the hotel?” Jordan asked.
“No, we’re camping.”
“But you said the hotel has TV.”
“Yeah, and it also charges an arm and a leg.”
He blew out his cheeks and shook his head. Great, this was shaping up to be the week from hell. The whole reason she was taking him out there was to reconnect, to help him to see that he mattered to her, as the past three years when he visited her he would spend all his time watching movies, texting and pretty much ignoring her. She would have been lying to say that it didn’t hurt, and that it hadn’t made her question her career decisions. Was it all worth it?
As the truck wound its way south cutting through the mountain
range, Catherine glanced at the Gardiner River that ran parallel to the road; it glistened and shimmered. Now that he was awake, she was hoping to dig into his life and find out what was new, but watching him stick earbuds into his ears made it clear the conversation had ended. If she thought for one second that he was being rude, she would have yanked it out of his ears but she knew he was struggling with the recent arrangements. Not wishing to annoy him, she tapped the media interface console and hit play for a radio interview she’d been meaning to get to.
Robert Preston, a fellow professor at the university, had been interviewed at great length on the recent swarm of quakes and eruptions of Yellowstone’s largest active geyser. The quakes had surpassed 1,500 with one of them being a magnitude of 4.4. It was making a lot of people nervous and with the summer season in full swing, tourists traveling to the area were demanding answers.
She tapped the screen a few times to skip through some of the small talk until they got down to discussing the recent activity in the park.
“A new warning has been released in an extensive report about the dangers of a massive supervolcano like the kind found in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. And with the recent activity in the park we’ve invited Professor Robert Preston from the University of Utah to discuss the threat. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the questions, we need to put a few things in perspective for our listeners. Now if you’ve never visited the park, let me give you a clearer idea of what we are talking about. First, you have to understand that Rhode Island and Delaware could fit inside Yellowstone National Park. This is a park that covers over 2,000,000 acres, roughly 3,472 square miles. While it’s predominantly in Wyoming, a small area of it stretches into Montana and Idaho. And of course, due to its immense beauty, it attracts over three million tourists a year. That’s a lot of people, folks. But as you know, there can’t be beauty without a beast. So what about the volcano? Well, what you might not know is that Yellowstone isn’t your typical cone-shaped volcano that soars into the clouds. It’s actually referred to as a caldera, meaning it’s all on ground level and the magma reservoir below the earth’s surface is much larger than what was previously thought. In fact, scientists have stated that there is an ocean of molten magma far below the earth that could fill up the Grand Canyon nearly fourteen times over and while scientists believe there is only a 10 percent chance of it erupting — that’s more than enough to have people concerned, especially in light of the recent swarm of earthquakes, one of which was a magnitude of 4.4, and another a 2.5.”
Jordan popped one earbud out of his ear and frowned. Catherine considered switching it off but she thought it would be good for him to understand what kind of work she did, besides, she’d been meaning to catch up with the interview and it was still a ways until they were at Mammoth Campground.
“What?” she asked, throwing him a sideways glance. “A friend of mine is a guest on a show,” she muttered. He eyed her but didn’t say anything. They continued to listen as the interviewer went on.
“So how does this compare to an ordinary volcano? Well let’s take Mount St. Helens for instance. According to scientists the debris from that eruption was up to 0.7 cubic miles in volume. A supervolcano such as Yellowstone would be capable of ejecting a volume of 240 cubic miles. So essentially two thousand times the size. The eruption could last for days, weeks, and even years. Now before you all get worried, the USGS has stated that even if Yellowstone was to erupt, it could just be a small incident and not something that would send the entire planet into a nuclear winter. So today we’re going to dig in and get some answers. Robert Preston joins us now. He’s a research professor of geophysics and geology at the University of Utah, a bestselling author, a former geologist with USGS and is the director of the university’s seismograph stations, which monitor earthquakes in Utah and Yellowstone. He has written hundreds of scientific papers and given presentations around the world. Okay, Robert, if you would like to jump in and give our listeners some idea of what we are discussing here.”
“Thanks, Ted. I appreciate you having me on the show. Okay, so let’s make something very clear here, regardless of what our findings tell us right now, we are talking about a sleeping giant underneath Yellowstone. If it erupts on the scale of a category 8, it could literally tear its way through the United States. So instead of fifty states in existence we could potentially see that number reduced to thirty.”
Ted interjected. “Hold on a second, an eruption could wipe out twenty states? You want to clarify?”
Catherine heard Robert stifle a laugh. Twenty-four years older than her, Robert had been around the block enough times to know how to handle media and blow through the smoke coming from doomsday folks who would have people believe the end of the world was around the corner.
“Look, it’s happened before. There are twenty supervolcanoes in the world today. One of them, Tambora, caused the famous year without summer in 1816, which was a global climate change otherwise known as a volcanic winter. The last three eruptions of Yellowstone happened 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago and we still have the evidence of these giant eruptions with a forty-mile-wide volcanic depression that cradles most of the national park. Now even though those dates are close together we don’t expect it to erupt again in our lifetime,” Robert said.
“I understand but they didn’t expect Mount St. Helens to erupt, now did they?” Ted asked.
“That was in 1980 when we didn’t have the technology that we do today,” Robert replied.
“Okay, well allow me to play devil’s advocate for a second. There were signs leading up to the eruption of Mount St. Helens several months in advance and yet nothing was done. With this latest series of earthquakes in Yellowstone, what’s to say that we are not already beginning to see the precursory signs? And if we are, why hasn’t the media been alerted and the park closed?”
“Ted, that was 1980. The cutting-edge technology that we have today didn’t exist back then. Geologists didn’t have the information to know the range in which Mount St. Helens could react. But it wasn’t just that, there were other factors that came into play, like government officials who didn’t extend the danger zone far enough and allowed people to return to their homes. Also bear in mind that the series of quakes we’ve had in the park over the last ten to twenty years are unlikely to cause an eruption because swarms are common events in Yellowstone. Most aren’t even felt. Think of it as nature’s way of breathing.”
“Right, but it’s a known fact that typical signs prior to an eruption are increased seismicity, changes in surface deformation and changes in the hydrothermal system.”
Robert was quick to jump in before Ted flew off the handle and continued to fuel people with fear. “And Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monitors all of those.”
“Then why didn’t anyone alert the public to the recent 4.4 magnitude earthquake or at least put the surrounding towns on high alert?”
“Because what occurred was not out of the ordinary, and it would only cause panic. Listen, if we only see one of those things you mentioned — for instance, just seismic activity, or just a change in the formation of the landscape, or only a change in the hydrothermal — we aren’t as concerned as we would be to see all three happening at the same time. And, in the event we do, we have alarms within the system that would alert us. Ted, you’ve got to remember that Yellowstone has anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 earthquakes a year and most of those are in a magnitude of zero or lower.”
“So there is nothing to worry about?” Ted asked.
“If there was, you can be sure residents and tourists would know about it by now. From what we can see, these swarms appear to be winding down.”
As they continued to go back and forth, Jordan turned to her and she noticed he’d taken his second earbud out. “Hold on a minute, is he saying this is below where we’re going camping?”
Catherine nodded.
“Huh, great,” he said in a sarcastic manner.
S
he smirked as she tapped the volume a couple of times so she could hear it better.
“Okay, let’s talk worst-case scenario.”
“Ted,” Robert said.
“Hey, you knew I was going to go there, Robert. You might think it’s all smooth sailing now but you’re not the one that will have to field an inbox full of questions tomorrow.”
Both of them laughed.
“Go ahead then,” Robert said.
“I guess we can talk facts all day long but I think what is on everyone’s mind is this… If these swarms of quakes are a precursor to an eruption, how much time would anyone have to get out?”
“That depends on the type of eruption and what category it is. It’s more likely we’ll have an earthquake, or a geyser eruption like the recent one at Steamboat, than something that is volcanic. It’s also worth mentioning that the ground has risen and fallen for thousands of years without an eruption. Does that mean it’s going to erupt? Or is this rising and falling part of the supervolcano’s normal process? There isn’t enough data to make an educated guess but here’s what we do know. I mentioned the big three eruptions but we have had smaller eruptions since then, one of which was 70,000 years ago but that was mostly lava flow. Of course there are hydrothermal explosions, which can affect areas of a few kilometers in diameter. Then of course there was a strong 7.5-magnitude earthquake in 1959 that led to twenty-eight deaths. What I’m saying is the smaller ones, which affect only a few meters across, happen only every few years. So there are a number of factors. The next eruption may be moderate with minimal effects outside of Yellowstone. It’s these smaller ones that we are trying to predict and prepare for because regular eruptions that put out sulfur can affect the earth’s climate.”
“Okay, but you’re still not answering my question. In fact you are skirting around it. I’m talking about the worst-case scenario — a category VEI 8 eruption.”