The thundering falls send up a wide spray of mist that curls over the parking lot; every exposed centimeter of my skin is frigid but I don’t care.

It is the third day of creation, nothing in the world but light and water and bare earth around us. No plants, no animals, nothing that teems in the water or crawls on the earth, not even a sun above to warm the firmament.

I continue, marveling at the brave/idiotic souls who are attempting this terrain in mere hiking boots. They are, by turns, slipping, sliding, creeping, crouching, scrambling, and in one case lying flat on the ground in a state of bemused acquiescence.

The swirls and swoops, the bunched ridges, the long cracks where a swell couldn’t hold, it all looks as if someone whipped up egg whites and then inverted the image, white to black.

Stack overflow, mind blown, brain swirling with thoughts and ideas instead of taking it all in. It occurred to me: I need to restart my meditation practice. Not for the calm, but so I can hold more. So I can stay wide open to all of this. High intensity interval training for the sense of wonder.

We step into a wide bog of terracotta mud that leads from the hot springs higher up the slope down to the main area at the base of the hill. Red water pools in the constellations of bootprints, and mud slurps at our boots as we pick our way across.

As we proceed, it's much more Natural History Museum than Mad Magazine, with specimens taken from animals ranging from field mice to black bears, seals to sperm whales. There is a clear prejudice in favor of mammals, so there's little insight into the reproductive organs of birds or fish.