A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time assembling and publishing historical articles related to Yellowstone National Park. It’s interesting to read first hand accounts of a place I’ve been to quite a few times and will likely visit several times again in the future.
I had heard — or read — anecdotal stories about people cooking fish in some of the hot springs in the park. Today, I came across the following account from the first expedition into the Yellowstone region, the Washburn Expedition of 1870:
Several springs were in the solid rock, within a few feet of the lake-shore. Some of them extended far out underneath the lake; with which, however, they had no connection. The lake water was quite cold, and that of these springs exceedingly hot. They were remarkably clear, and the eye could penetrate a hundred feet into their depths, which to the human vision appeared bottomless. A gentleman was fishing from one of the narrow isthmuses, or shelves of rock, which divided one of these hot springs from the lake, when, in swinging a trout ashore, it accidentally got off the hook and fell into the spring. For a moment it darted about with wonderful rapidity, as if seeking an outlet. Then it came to the top, dead, and literally boiled. It died within a minute of the time it fell into the spring.
The Washburn Yellowstone Expedition, No. 2 by Walter Trumbull; Overland Monthly; June 1871
Comments on “Boiled fish – accidentally”
October 26, 2007
teeni @ 10:06 pm
Poor fish!
