PART 2:
At 6:02 in the morning, the temperature at the Mammoth Hot Springs weather station read 41° F.
By the time Daniel Aldrich Voss stepped out of cabin 7 at the Roosevelt Lodge, pulled the door shut behind him, and stopped to breathe the morning in, it had climbed to 44.
He would remember that cold, that particular quality of summer cold that only the northern Rockies could produce [music] even in August for the rest of his life.
Or so he planned to, standing there at the edge of the wooden porch with a tin mug of instant coffee steaming against his chest, watching the steam rise from his own mouth and merge with the vapor rising from the mug.
Daniel was 26 years old. He stood 5′ 11″ in tall and weighed 162 lb.
A lean, angular young man with a narrow jaw, closecropped dark brown hair that had started to grow out in the weeks he’d been traveling, and green eyes that the people who knew him best said were always looking slightly past whatever they appeared to be fixed on, as if he were cataloging the thing behind the obvious thing, storing it away.
He was a third-year graduate student in the department of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Though he had taken the summer as personal leave, neither formally enrolled nor formally disconnected.
The trip to Yellowstone was his own initiative, funded by savings from two years of teaching assistant stipens and a modest inheritance from his maternal grandfather, a retired machinist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had spent every spare dollar on National Geographic subscriptions, and had pressed the entire run from 1948 onward into Daniel’s hands before his death in 1971.
There’s more truth in photographs, the old man had told him, than in anything a professor will say to you…
He Vanished in Yellowstone in 1974. Yesterday, His Camera Returned With THIS Footage…
