Cauldron of Intrigue: Perspectives on the Yellowstone Caldera

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyoming - It was a calm, sunny day in June 2008; two men wearing black leather motorcycle vests covered in confederate flag patches and racist slogans passed me on the boardwalk at Grand Prismatic Springs. Their gray hair bristled underneath their flaming ‘do-rags and their boots clunked against the wooden boards.

When we arrived back in the parking lot, one of the men had set a cheese cracker on a picnic table beneath a tree where a raven was perched.

“C’mon, eat it,” he drawled crassly. “Hey, this fella’s gonna eat that cracker. Jus’ watch.”

The raven appeared annoyed, watching but not heeding this man and his game. After a few minutes, the biker gave up. He took his cracker, threw it in a garbage can and cursed the raven.

He and his buddy gunned up their motorcycles and their pipes saturated the area with a steady boom as they accelerated toward the main road.

When they passed the raven, an eerie gust of wind swept through the parking lot and whipped gravel and grit into my mouth and eyes. The breeze continued until the exact moment the two men turned onto the main road.

“Were those the two riders of the apocalypse?” my friend asked.

We agreed we had witnessed something supernatural.

An American Indian in blue jeans and a long sleeved T-shirt says that no one is to gossip or think negative thoughts near the fire. Under the flames rocks are heating for a sweat ceremony that he is about to hold in Curtis Canyon to heal Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Rather, he doesn’t want to heal the park, but he wants to heal the geologic features within them. The fire represents the Yellowstone Caldera, and next to it an arrangement of crystals represent the four Grand Tetons.

Blue Thunder, also known as Bennie Lebeau, is conducting one of many purification ceremonies that he’s conducted since 2004, to cleanse the 10 or so people gathered there, whose prayers will in turn help cleanse the Yellowstone Caldera and Grand Tetons of the impurities that have been dumped into their electromagnetic swirl by the millions of people who bring bitterness and greed into the park.
In the last 15 years or so, parts of Yellowstone Lake’s floor have risen, and then fallen while other sections rise. Park Geologist Hank Heasler says it’s not the kind of bulging that would happen if an eruption were imminent, which would be feet or meters per-year. He says it’s like breathing.

The last eruption of the caldera happened more than 640,000 years ago, emitting about 240 cubic- miles of ash. Ash has been found as far away as the Mississipi River.

The likelihood of that happening in our lifetime are, according to modern science, almost nil.  But, for some reason, people write headlines that imply it’s going to happen.

National Jewel
The Yellowstone Caldera is magnetic.

For a century and a half, the bubbling mud, spewing geysers and brilliantly colored pools have been a cauldron of intrigue for America.

It began in the early 19th Century when mountain men returned from the region with tall tales. After two expeditions later that century gathered first-hand accounts, drawings and pictures, the headlines around the country heralded Yellowstone as America’s natural jewel. The campaign gathered momentum with the help of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and Yellowstone become the world’s first national park.

The most recent press sensation in Yellowstone is the fact that it’s one of the biggest volcanoes in the world. It is a living, breathing volcanic system that swells and subsides and super-heats rock around it, which super-heats water that travels through a network of cracks and fissures that have developed as a result of rising magma and cataclysmic eruptions, as well as the continental stretching that’s associated with mounain ranges around the West.

The hype started in 2000: “We’ve had a lot of interest in the Yellowstone volcano that started with BBC docudrama called Supervolcano,” Heasler, said. “Everyone got very interested in doing their own documentaries of what’s going on in Yellowstone. It became popular to have your documentary or even your drama filmed here.”
Reporters called, and still call, to ask about the end of the world.

When you ask Heasler why so many people call him to ask about the caldera and the eminent end of the world that actually isn’t eminent, he doesn’t answer because, he says, he is not a psychologist.

“You’re a reporter, right? Then, you explain to me,” he said. “Folks got excited about the year 2000 and the Y2K bug. Then there were a bunch of movies about meteor impacts. The latest are the 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar and that maybe Yellowstone is going to go off then. So why do some people want to focus on disaster scenarios? It’s a mystery to me.”

But Heasler said the hype has its upside.

“You couldn’t construct an ad campaign to get as much attention as the docudrama did, and also the documentaries,” he said. “And I think that’s great, its positive to get information out there and make people curious so that they can find out and learn more about the world’s first national park. What is not so positive is when incorrect information about the potential threat is propagated, and then that actually affects people’s lives.”

Last January, when the highest concentration of earthquakes hit the park in decades, headlines popped up all over the world, particularly on the Internet, suggesting that Yellowstone could be about to blow. Some people took it a little too far.

“With this last earthquake swarm we actually had people evacuating the Yellowstone area because an individual faked a USGS Web site and told people to evacutate,” Heasler said. He likened it to going into a crowded theater and yelling “Fire!”

What’s going on, geologically
Jacob Lowenstern, USGS scientist in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano observatory, explained that the “supervolcano” eruptions in Yellowstone - three in the last two million years - are very unlikely. Lowenstern said that lava will flow again.

“There will be volcanic eruptions in Yellowstone in the next few tens of thousands of years, lava will issue from the ground again, but one thing to keep in mind is that since the last supereruption at Yellowstone, there have been up to 80 eruptions - mostly small and non-catastrophic events,” he said. “Just because you get an eruption it doesn’t mean its going to be something that’s globally altering, or burying people down in Jackson. Most likely it would be a lava flow that will cover a few thousand acres in the park, will cause forest fires, might block a road or drainage. It will be a significant nuisance and significant source of news for everybody in the area.”

But it’s probably not going to kill anybody, and it will give lots of warning. It also might not happen for another 10,000 years.

“Sure the system is active, and there could be volcanic eruptions in the future,” Lowenstern said. “But the place hasn’t erupted in 70,0000 years and we’re not seeing signs that it’s going to. So everybody should relax a little bit.”

Lowenstern finds a little humor in the the sea of conspiracy theorists on the Internet that think he and his colleagues, Hessler and Bob Smith at the University of Utah, are hiding information about the caldera, when they and their institution are the ones who told the world over the last few decades that Yellowstone was a real volcano that needed to be monitored.

“To me, its ironic that the USGS, and our university partners, have done virtually all of the science on the history of the Yellowstone area and current activity there, so we brought this story to the world over the past 40 years,” Lowenstern said. “And yet the story has kind of gotten away from us, in that non-scientists have created their own story, and in some cases their own new sets of unsubstantiated facts about how things work. 

“So this is the age of the Internet when everybody has a voice, so there are a lot of people out there looking at the data that we provide, coming up with their own conclusions, and in some cases creating many exaggerated and contradictory stories on what  may or may not be happening.”

So why doubt them?

“Because we’re the government,” Lowenstern said.

So does the Caldera emit magical energy, and is there an electromagnetic field created by the volcano, that makes it a power center?

“Any place that’s famous and is known for being different, for being unique on the globe, is going to attract people,” Lowenstern said. “They’re going to be mentally attracted by it, and think that it’s a special place, they’re going to be drawn to it for that reason... beyond that I don’t have anything to say.”

Vortex of energy
I’Maya is an energy healer who lives in Jackson. She started The One Center, and directs the nonprofit organization Journey to Soul.
She is one of dozens of people in the small town of Jackson who works with energy to heal people.

She said she sees auroras and energy vortexes. In Yellowstone, she says, the energy is similar to the aurora borealis, but rises vertically from the ground.
The recent flush of earthquakes in Yellowstone created new energy vortexes, she said – places where the four elements; earth, wind, water and fire interact to swirl energy.

She said that if Yellowstone were marketed in the ways that Sedona, Ariz. or Mt. Shasta, Calif., are, then it too would be more of a destination for New Age energy healers, and those who wish to be healed.

“There is a force in the caldera that could in truth, if it erupted as it did hundreds of thousands of years ago, obliterate life,” she said. “Thats quite a force, and when you’re around that force, that sort of gives you an idea of the magnitude of the power and energy that you get bathed in, because its not really dormant, its just not explosive.”

She said that Yellowsone is one of the major energy centers of the planet. And like we have energy centers in our bodies, labeled by eastern philosophy as shakras, then Yellowstone is like a shakra of the earth.

But there are countless mystical and scientific experiences and beliefs with the Yellowstone caldera.

It might have the cure to diseases and the cure to climate change growing in its pools; microbes that feed off of chemicals instead of sunlight, called “extremophiles,” that have unique characteristics. Some can break down heavy metals or thrive without oxygen. Most of those in Yellowstone like extremely hot water. Many that have been discovered have applications in research and industrial purposes all over the world.

It’s in these zones of intense energy that some of the world’s most promising organisms dwell.

Teton Artlab has put on two shows titled “It Came from the Supervolcano,” which are an overview of the art made by people who live in the shadow of the supervolcano. Artlab’s director Travis Walker said that the name comes from a theory he has that people living in Jackson Hole have a unique set of energetic output because they live near a place that could someday blow up.

“You find people with more energy in those places where the earth below you is alive,” Walker said. 

In naming an Art Show “It Came From the Supervolcano,” just gives credit where it’s due for some of the ideas produced locally; they come from the supervolcano.

A sacred place
The caldera is a sacred place for indigenous people, Blue Thunder says. According to him, it swirls with the energy of the Tetons and emits an electromagnetic energy outwards for 600 miles along 19 different lines to places like Lake Tahoe and the San Francisco volcanic field. For LeBeau, the caldera is the heartbeat of the region, coursing life outwards to most of the Western United States.

But those places shave been polluted, he said, and the energy diluted. Roads and boardwalks allow people from all over the world to come and dump their bad energy at the caldera, he said. For the Eastern Shoshone, water is sacred and these impure thoughts seep with it into the ground of Yellowstone, and into the fire below. For Blue Thunder and other American Indians, there are sacred spaces in Yellowstone that only those with pure hearts, who practice peace, should walk.
But people like the riders of the apocalypse also come, so too families in minivans who are mad at each other after 10 hours in the car.

Blue Thunder thinks if the bad energy is not healed, then a great eruption could occur.

The sacred area has been polluted by negative thoughts for decades, he said, which explains the land reacting with fires, more powerful geyser eruptions, an earthquake swarm and general unrest deep in its fractured belly, where superheated water exists in barely liquid form at very high pressures.

There will be an explosion, he said, but not the massive one.

It came to him in a dream, a story told by three grandmothers. They gave Blue Thunder a vision – Yellowstone Lake sank down into the hot rock beneath it.
When an impure rock is placed in the middle of a sweat lodge and doused with water, it shatters and sends its shards throughout the lodge. Likewise, he said, there will be a huge eruption of steam and rock shards in Yellowstone.

Scientists call that a steam explosion.

Blue Thunder predicts it will wipe national park service offices from the land.
But Blue Thunder’s message isn’t violence, it is peace. He’s learned to control his anger towards those who are harming the crater, he said.

Beyond science
For I’Maya, vortexes such as Yellowstone heal anyone who enters without them even knowing.

For Hank Heasler, these geologic features are wondrous even if they can be explained by science. That’s why the idea for the world’s first national park was born from them, which is considered by many to be one of the world’s best ideas. A documentary by Ken Burns calls it America’s best idea. And that’s why they continue to pique the interest of scientists and armageddon believers all over the world.

I heard that there was a lady who paddled out into the lake with a rope and measured the rising floor of the lake with the rope, checking to see if the volcano was going to blow.

“I don’t know about anyone out there measuring the lake depth with a rope,” Heasler said.

“But that doesn’t mean somebody’s not doing it.” JHW

Cover illustration by Mike Weber



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