The Yellowstone Traps

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The geological chaos depicted in the pages of this novel is based on scientific research regarding two volcanic super-eruptions of the 1,500-square mile Yellowstone caldera inside Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, one that overwhelmed the continent 2.1 million years ago, and a similar catastrophic event that occurred 640,000 years ago.

Earth’s neighbor swelled as it breached the horizon over Yellowstone Lake. In full phase, the moon saturated the landscape throughout Yellowstone National Park with chalk white. The midnight shine reflecting off the high-elevation lake waters was piercing enough to make a nocturnal mammal squint.

Elizabeth Embree slipped along a game path out to Plover Point, on a southern peninsula jutting into the lake, taking care to scramble over a washboard of fresh shallow fractures in the earth’s surface. At the water’s edge, among otter tracks, she nestled down on the weathered rock and surf rubble and raised her nose to sniff the chilly atmosphere. She pulled long slow drafts of air into her nostrils. Somewhere in the ether she sensed a wisp of stinking hydrogen sulfide. Born female, she could detect smells twice as readily as her male counterparts. She knew that the otter playing and fishing at the water’s edge had an olfactory sense a hundred times more acute than her own. The otter, she suspected, could tell her a thing or two about what was going on somewhere in the moonglow over the grand watery expanse.

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