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Death Gulch

A Natural Bear Trap

Ravine on Cache Creek in Yellowstone NP, Rocky Mountains near Silver Gate, WY

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In 1888, USGS geologist Walter Harvey Weed found the remains of 6 grizzly bears, an elk, squirrels, rabbits, and many butterflies and insects near Wahb Springs, a small hot spring in Yellowstone’s Death Gulch. Weed concluded that accumulated carbon dioxide or poisonous hydrogen sulfide asphyxiated the animals in the ravine.

On July 22,1897, almost a decade later, T. A. Jagger and Dr. Francis P. King both of the USGS found 8 asphyxiated grizzly bears in Death Gulch. One bear had “a few drops of thick, dark-red blood [that] stained his nostrils and the ground beneath”. Jaggar concluded:

The gas is probably generated by the action of the acid water on the ancient limestones that here underlie the lavas at no great depth; outcrops of these limestones occur only a few miles away at the mouth of Soda Butte Creek. This gas must emanate from fissures in the rock just above the bears, and on still nights it may accumulate to a depth of two or three feet in the ravine, settling in a heavy, wavy stratum, and probably rolling slowly down the bed of the rill into the valley below. The accompanying photographs were made during our visit.

— Jaggar 1889, 475-81

Wahb Springs

In 1899, Ernest Thompson Seton, a founding member of the Boy Scouts of America and also the modern school of animal fiction, wrote the children’s book The Biography of a Grizzly. Although the illustrated story is fiction, actual places and events shaped the tale of a grizzly named Wahb.

Seaton stayed at Yancey’s Hotel in the Yellowstone area, that includes Death Gulch during his visit in 1897. Here the silvertip mountain monarch’s tale ends quietly 20 years later, in a small ravine with a hot spring laced with lethal amounts of hydrogen sulfide or carbon dioxide gas. Today, the locals know that hot spring as Wahb Springs. (Christiansen 2007, 17; Edgar 1978, 40-41; Pickett 1913, 220-21; Jaggar; Johnston; Seaton 1889, 147; Traphagen 1904, 632-34; Whittlesey 2006, 82)

Sources

Christiansen, R. L., Lowenstern, J. B., Smith, R. B., Heasler, H., Morgan, L. A., Nathenson, M., Mastin, L. G.,

Muffler, L. J. P., and Robinson, J. E., 2007, “Preliminary assessment of volcanic and hydrothermal hazards in

Yellowstone National Park and vicinity”: U.S. Geological Survey Open-file Report 2007-1071, 94 p.

Edgar, Bob, and Jack Turnell. Brand of a Legend. Centennial Edition. Basin, WY: Basin Republican Rustler Printing, 1978.

Jaggar, T. A. “Death Gulch, a Natural Bear-Trap.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 54, February 1899. Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_54/February_1899/Death_Gulch,_a_Natural_Bear-Trap.

Johnston, Jeremy, and Burt Bradley. “On the Trail of a Bear Named Wahb: Two Professors on a Bear Hunt.” Points West, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, August 13, 2015. https://centerofthewest.org/2015/08/12/points-west-on-the-trail-of-a-bear-named-wahb/.

Pickett, William D. Hunting at High Altitudes: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club. Edited by George Bird Grinnell. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. The Biography of a Grizzly. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1889. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25023/25023-h/25023-h.htm.

Traphagen, F. W. “Death Gulch.” Science 19, no. 485 (1904): 632–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1630870.

Whittlesey, L.H. Yellowstone Place Names. Second. Wonderland Publishing Company, 2006.