Yellowstone National Park
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Today was Yellowstone Day. We worked hard for it, we earned it. And we made the most of it. We headed into the park via the North entrance again, stopped at the Post Office to mail postcards and headed down the west side of the park. We saw bison and elk galore. We stopped at Sheepeaters Cliffs (named for sheepeater Indians), then obsidian cliff, which supposedly was made of obsidian, but it didn’t look like it.
Next stop was Gibbon Falls. The falls are nice but not spectacular. There are chipmunks running all over the place. There are signs everywhere saying not to feed them. It makes them tame and dependent on tourists, makes them sick, makes them vote Republican, all kinds of bad stuff. So of course, a woman from Texas was giving them bread crumbs so she could take their picture. She asked me if I wanted her to give them some more so I could take their picture. I resisted the urge to tell her off and just said no thank you (then got a picture anyway, the old fashioned way).
The next stop was Norris geyser basin. This was our first real experience with a geyser basin and you have to see it to believe it. It’s any view of hell you might have dreamed up. The ground is yellow or orange or green. Through any number of holes in the ground there is smoke billowing out. There are bubbling pools of water or mud. Very weird.
We headed down into Porcelain Basin first. Lots of interesting stuff to see but no geysers going off. Then we headed to the Back Basin. We passed Steamboat geyser, which has the tallest recorded eruption in the world at close to 400 feet I think. But, not while we were there. We walked on to Echusin(?) geyser. A guy said it was going to go, so we waited. It did (how did he know?). It was pretty spectacular. Water shot up 30 feet or so. We were maybe 10 feet from it. In fact, we almost got hit with the spray. That’s the first geyser I’ve ever seen spouting. We walked around the rest of the way. Lots of hot pools, vents, and geysers. It was very other worldly. It’s interesting to think these holes go all the way to the middle of the earth. There’s lots of primordial goo here.
In fact, somewhere along the way, we read something that said there are only four places in the world with this sort of thermal activity: Yellowstone, Iceland, New Zealand and Siberia. But Yellowstone has more individual features than the other three combined!
We turned off on a road called Firehole Canyon. A very pretty river flowed through it, with waterfalls, rapids, the whole thing. At one end is a swimming area that might be nice on days when it’s not 40 degrees.
Next stop the Paint Pots. These are hot springs in mud instead of water. Instead of bubbling they kind of go BLOP. There was a geyser here called Caldera(?) that continuously spewed water. And off in the distance was another one, shooting water into the air probably 30 feet continuously. We called that one Fire Hose. As we were watching that, Jet geyser went off. This was just a little guy. So now we were up to 4 geyser eruptions we’d seen.
Our next stop was Firehole Lake Road. A big geyser called Great Fountain geyser was down there. It had a whole array of terraces covering maybe a 20 square yard area. The guide says it goes off every 12 hours or so. You can tell because it fills its crater about an hour before blowing. The crater looked pretty full but we didn’t want to wait an hour. We decided to continue down the road and come back.
As we headed down the road, White Dome went off for geyser number five. We drove around the loop past Fire Lake and some more thermal stuff, then came back around. Great Fountain was going off. It shot up probably 50 feet in the air. We felt pretty pleased with ourselves for having caught it.
It was now getting late and since the weather was doing okay we decided to camp. We wanted to be at the southern end so we could do the east side (we had been on the west side) in the morning. We drove down past Old Faithful and Midway Geyser basin resisting the urge to stop and got a campsite at Grant Village (elevation 7770 ft.!).
I was beginning to have second thoughts but it was too late. The campsites were pretty damp but we found a reasonably dry spot. Les cooked macaroni and cheese with burger in it which was pretty good and we prepared for a cold night. I’ve got basically every piece of warm clothing I brought with me (including gloves) in the tent so I think I’m prepared.
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