Another person’s hand extended toward the camera from the right edge of the frame. The fingers were curled, the palm was open.
The investigation that followed the film recovery operated on two parallel tracks from the beginning.
The first track was geological, identifying the precise location in which the camera had been used, using the three recovered images as spatial reference data.
The second track was investigative, identifying the owner of the hand in the third recovered frame.
Dr. Reev coordinated the geological analysis with the USGS’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, specifically with a senior geothermal geologist named Dr.
Kenneth Hartley, 63, a bearded, unhurried man from Bosezeman who had spent 37 years mapping the park’s subsurface thermal activity and who had, he said, been waiting most of his professional life for an excuse to look systematically at the secondary vent structures [music] in the Tower Creek drainage.
The thermal stain in the second recovered image was, in Dr. For Hartley’s expert assessment characteristic of a specific type of diffuse vent, not a geyser or a hotring, but a steam vent, a few of the kind that could exist in the rocky terrain south of Tower Junction in areas that received no regular visitor traffic and had not been systematically mapped.
