Yellowstone

My weekend started out on an up note...on Friday. My friends Eric and Sean were heading down to Yellowstone National Park. They just wanted to go to drive around and take pictures. Both of them are avid amatuer photographers. One thing that they didn't have, was a National Parks Pass. Guess who does? That's right, me.

So Eric asked if I had any interest in going down. Though I'm sure he asked me not because of the pass, but because they enjoy my company and thought that I might want to come. The problem lay in the fact that I had work on Friday. This was easily remedied by deciding to take a "mental health day" (my time card says sick leave) and head down to the Park with my friends and take some pictures.

On our way out of town it was pouring, we were hopeful that the rain would abate by the time we were an hour and a half south of Bozeman. For the first hour (down the Gallatin Canyon) our hopes were not realized. Luckily Sean (and indeed Eric and I as well) had driven the canyon 100s of times and was not nervous driving the twisty route on a rain slicked road. By about the time we reached West Yellowstone, the rain had subsided, which made the outlook on the day much brighter (though not literally, the sky was still pretty overcast).

We reached the park maybe around 10am and started on our way. We decided that we had three priorities. Eric wanted to see the thermal area around Old Faithful, most specifically Morning Glory Pool. Sean wanted to reach Lamar Valley near dusk to look for bears. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone again.

Heading in from the West Entrance we headed East and then South to Old Faithful. Along the way we drove down the Firehole Canyon and saw the Firehole Falls, it was a nice little detour. When we arrived at the Old Faithful Inn we headed for the trail. They have a paved trail and boardwalk there that take you near lots of hot springs and geysers. We saw many thing I hadn't seen before. We didn't even stick around to see Old Faithful, which we had all seen before. At pretty much the end of the trail they had laid out we came to Eric's addition to our trip, Morning Glory Pool. Wow, it was really impressive. I'll post a picture tonight, but I'll try to explain it. It is a deep pool of pretty clear water and the sides of the pool like a solid rainbow all the way to the bottom. The very edge of the pool has some orangish spots and then the majority of the wall is a bright yellow, fading to green and then blue to a deeper blue way down in the pool. Eric said that it is most impressive on a really sunny day, which we got glimpses of when the sun poked through the clouds for 3 seconds at a time, and he was right, it was very pretty.

We did get to see Castle Geyser go off for about 20 minutes. It started while we were way out on the boardwalk and we'd walk a little further and look over and it was still going. Pretty cool.

Sean and Eric took a bunch of pictures of various things. Sean had a medium format camera with black and white film and set up a few times to create interesting compositions. A medium format camera is not like a normal 35mm camera and takes much more set up and adjustment to make sure that the picture will come out. Each set up probably took over 10 minutes. I took lots of pictures with my point and shoot digital.

After our walk we chowed down on some food, it was already 1pm by the time we reached our car. Then off we went to the Canyon. Eric had a suggestion for a view of the Lower Falls, which is much bigger and more impressive than the Upper Falls. There is a trail called Uncle Tom's Trail, which basically climbs down the side of the canyon right near the falls. Neither Sean nor I had been on it or even heard of the trail before, so off we went. The trail down consisted of 328 stairs going down about 500 feet into the canyon. It was quite a view from the bottom. The falls was huge. A sign on the trail indicated that the trail used to be just dirt, stone, and rope ladders! At present day it is all metal stairs bolted into the rock. After taking a few pictures of the falls we headed back up the stairs. Up up up.

We then headed toward the Lamar valley, a place known for lots of wildlife coming out of the wilderness to eat and drink. Sean has had much bad luck seeing Grizzly Bears over the years, convinced that they can hear/see/smell him coming and then run for the hills. As we got to the valley the sun started to get low in the sky and we weren't seeing anything. Eric had brought a 20x spotting scope which he used to look at a few black spots out in the distance to no avail. Sean was sure the curse was still active.

After a while we drove up on a huge group of people up on a little bump near the road looking out into the valley. We figured that there was no way this many people would be stopped and looking at nothing. We got out and sure enough there were two groups of three grizzlies. The furthest was maybe 4 miles away. A few people had scopes set up and were nice enough to let us look through. The far group was a couple of spots below some trees on a hillside. They moved nearly inperceptibly and we couldn't believe that they had been spotted. The onlookers assured us that they had been doing this a long time and it was known that bears would come up on that hill side and one just needed to scan it for moving dots. The closer group was much more satisfying. A mama and two cubs were snacking heartily on something down in the field. We could see the movement with the naked eye and we got a pretty cool look through any scope. It was really neat to see them moving around and eating together. The best views were when the mama reared her huge head while chewing on food. It was something else. Big, cute, potentially deadly teddy bears.

After that we headed out of the park through the north entrance and Gardiner, MT. We had been planning to eat at this burger joint that Eric had been talking up but when we got there (nearly 8pm) it was closed. We started heading out of town and saw a pizza place and decided to stop there. Sean ordered a salad, Eric some soup and we ordered a large pizza and breadsticks to share. After a long, long time we still didn't have our breadsticks and I began to look for our server to ask what was going on but she never came out to the eating area (and I was too lazy to get up). Finally she came out with breadsticks telling us that the order had been screwed up and not put in so this was on the house. Alright! I love when things go wrong that don't really have bad effects, they always get fixed to better than before. Then, she comes out with two medium pizzas instead of one large because they couldn't fix a large one! I don't know what the reason was, but I didn't care, we got a lot of pizza for free. We had almost gone to the Chinese place across the parking lot but were happy with our dinner choice.

We left Gardiner and got back to Bozeman around 10:30. It was a long day but a good day. Certainly much better than work.