Happy Birthday Baby Brother

A quick shout out to my baby brother Dave to say Happy Birthday!!! May every wish you wish for come true. So happy you are able to spend this birthday with Mom there in Missouri with you.

Yellowstone – Day 2

What a great morning, sun is shining, cool air, and we are going to finish the 1st loop in Yellowstone that we started yesterday.

We took a 6 mile gravel road up to Blacktail Plateau. There was a big forest fire there back in 1988 and remnants of the fire still here today, but lots of new growth has reemerged and has come from the natural reseeding process.

A lone petrified tree still stands after 50 million years.              There were two others but souvenir seekers chipped away at them till there wasn’t anything left. This is why a fence was erected to save the last one.

Male Buffalo sometimes travel alone and we saw several singles at different places. We were wondering where the ladies were and then found a heard in the Lamar Valley. See the black dots in the valley,  it’s the heard.    We are trying to figure out what this critter is. Seems to big for a fox, looks too small for a wolf, we think it must be a coyote.         

More buffalo were causing traffic back ups just west of Soda Butte which was formed more than a century ago by a hot spring. Now only a small amount of hydrogen sulfide gas and hydrothermal water flow from this formation now.

We detoured and took the Beartooth Byway out of Yellowstone and found Clarks Fork over look – Wow! what a view. It was worth the drive.

We saw a dirt road, of course  we had to take Hooptie baha-ing. This road kept climbing and climbing and we saw a lone cloud in this big blue magnificent sky. This twisting turning road led us to this wonderful lake.    We think the lake is called Lily Lake. There were a few campers way back in here and it is free camping if you dare go up there with a camper or RV.

We got a glimpse of some Antelopes.  This must be the girls day out since there were no boys at this party.

Calcite Springs overlook brought us to the cliffs edge to see the bleached white cliffs and clear green water of the Yellowstone River.   

Near by Tower Falls were pretty, the water from Tower Creek will meet up with the Yellowstone River.

Can anyone say BIG? This is the view from 10,243 feet atop Mt Washburn. Awesome!   Welcome to Wyoming and welcome to Yellowstone.

Yellowstone Here We Come

Yellowstone here we come. I have said forever, since I was a preteen, that I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, Alaska, and Yellowstone, always in that order. And that is the order in which I have been able to see them. It wasn’t fully planned that way, but it is how our trip worked out. Funny how things work out just they way they are suppose to. I cannot explain to you how excited I am to see Yellowstone but I am busting at the seems excited.  We will be here about a week and over the next several days I hope there will be some good photos for you to see.

When you go into Yellowstone you cross under this huge arch that welcomes you. What a great start.  

Mammoth Hot Springs was our first stop after we got the camp set up. When I first heard of Mammoth Hot Spring I thought of pools of hot mineral water to soak in. Nope, these are not like that at all. This is an area where boiling water comes up from under ground, constantly laying new material, adding to the terraced formations. Some of the new sediment looked like dripping candle wax and others looked like layers and layers of lace.  The colors ranged from gold to crisp white to varying shades of gray. This is Liberty Cap, a dormant hot spring cone.      And yes the sky really is this blue. Low humidity leaves the sky haze free.  

Fascinating to me how we were in an area of these hot springs and, in almost a blink of an eye, be in a place where there are these gigantic  boulders the size of houses      and then come up on forested areas, then open fields where Elk were roaming   and Buffalo were taking a rest.  All of these changes were in just a few miles. Oh Yellowstone is so beautiful and we are only at the beginning!

Roaring Mountain looked like a concrete mountain but is the microscopic organisms hard at work breaking down the volcanic rock, turning it into clay, accelerating erosion. These are organisms, thermophiles, thrive in these caustic conditions, consuming hydrogen sulfide gas converting it into sulfuric acid. The fumaroles, or steam vents, are the hottest hydrothermal features in the park.     

We pulled over to take a look at the South Twin Lake and what is it the pull out? A Buffalo. I took a picture with the car door in it to show how close he was. We said a quick hello and we were out of there.

Nymph Lake was so inviting but it was surrounded by thermal channels so it’s only pretty to look at. Some of the pools of water we came up on were actually boiling and the smell of sulfuric acid was so strong I could only stay long enough to click off 2 shots.

We took the 1.5 mile trail around the Norris Geyser Basin which is on the edge of the Yellowstone Volcano, one of the largest volcanoes on earth. This was such a strange place. It made you feel like you were on another planet with terrain that I have never seen before. There were areas that were stark and white as snow, areas that had some trees , and other areas had plenty of shade. The ground looked like ash from a campfire to me. I had no idea there were so many geysers.    I always heard of Old Faithful but have you heard of Pork Chop, Pearl, Monarch , and Green Dragon geysers and springs? These are just a few of the many that are here.  At times the steam that came up from the fumaroles would blow in your direction and would take your breath away. Not only from the smell but from the heat. And there were so many colors – greens, blues, reds.  After we finished the trail, we decided to head back to the RV for dinner and a campfire. A buffalo decided to create a traffic back up,  so it took a bit longer than we thought to get back to the RV. He would not leave the road. Slowly people started to go around him, but he wanted to be a road hog. See our side view mirror – that’s how close we were passing him.  

Yellowstone is very big and we did not even finish the first loop today.  So much to see and we are fortunate enough, and blessed, to have the time to see it. 

Good Bye Great Falls, But We Have New Friends

It has been a very low key week here in Great Falls, MT but a much needed rest from all of the go, go, go.

Joy and DeWayne were a delight to meet and I can see connecting with them again in the future on their full timing RV travels. They will be coming East to Georgia in the beginning of 2011. Hopefully their rig will turn in our direction and we can show them what the Chesapeake Bay is all about. If it’s warm weather, a weekend on the water in our boat, The Hole, should be a good time.

We are heading toward Yellowstone and passed through a town named Tracy.             If you blinked your eyes you were through it, but is was still fun seeing a town “named after” me.

The drive toward Wyoming is beautiful. I am in love with the West. Mountains, rolling hills, dry air, and lakes. This is me and I love it.