Maybe it’s just me.
Or maybe it’s anybody who, like me, grew up feasting on the likes of Heinlein, Burroughs, Verne, Lovecraft, Howard and their fellows.
Those of us who cut our teeth on sci-fi pulps and classics alike simply cannot wander through the geyser fields, past the boiling springs and amid the bubbling mud of Yellowstone National Park…
…and not imagine that we have, at long last, set foot down upon exactly the sort of alien landscape that we read about, time and again, throughout our fantasy-besotted youth.
We who galloped across desolate badlands with Conan The Barbarian.
And braved primordial forces in The Land That Time Forgot.
And followed John Carter to Mars.
And Carson Napier to Venus.
We who knew where giant desert worms could not go.
Seriously, are the living bacterial mats and ancient microbe communities of Yellowstone….
…any less alien than the sinister beings that haunt Tolken’s marsh of the dead?
All I’m saying is that those of us who continued to read by flashlight, under the covers, long after bedtime….
…recognize very well the ultimate mesage to be deciphered amid Yellowstone’s steaming and explosions and boilings and fire and desolation.
It is simply this.
Abandon hope all ye who enter.
FreeGNV 