One of the deeper hot springs in the park, Abyss Pool descends to 53 feet (16 meters). It varies from turquoise blue to emerald green to various shades of brown. In 1883, a park visitor described it as "a great, pure, sparkling sapphire rippling with heat." In 1935, Chief Park ...

DeLacy Creek flows south from DeLacy Lakes to Shoshone Lake. Park Superintendent P.W. Norris named the creek in 1881 for Walter Washington DeLacy (1819-1892), the leader of a prospecting expedition that passed through the Yellowstone region in 1863. DeLacy, a surveyor and engineer, compiled the first accurate map of ...

Lying in the Snake River watershed west of Lewis Lake and south of Yellowstone Lake, Heart Lake was named sometime before 1871 for Hart Hunney, an early hunter. The name does not refer to the heart-like shape of the lake. During the 1890s, historian Hiram Chittenden learned from Richard ...

Hiram Chittenden of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers claimed to have discovered this lake on the Continental Divide at Craig Pass in 1891. Chittenden, who built many early roads in Yellowstone, was searching for a practicable route to locate his new road between Old Faithful and West Thumb. ...

Shoshone Lake, the park's second largest lake, is located at the head of the Lewis River southwest of West Thumb. It is possible that fur trapper Jim Bridger visited this lake in 1833, and fellow trapper Osborne Russell certainly reached the lake in 1839. According to James Gemmell, he ...

Members of the 1870 Washburn party noted that Yellowstone Lake was shaped like "a human hand with the fingers extended and spread apart as much as possible," with the large west bay representing the thumb. In 1878, however, the Hayden Survey used the name "West Arm" for the bay; ...

Yellowstone Lake, located in the southeastern corner of the park, offers boating, canoeing, hiking, camping, biking, fishing and horseback riding. Yellowstone Lake is North America's largest mountain lake. Over geological time it has drained into the Pacific Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean via Hudson Bay. It now drains into the ...