So, Yellowstone. While the area is huge and beautiful, most of it is inaccessible by car. Hiking is one way to get a more in depth interaction with the area, but since I had a day to cover as much as I could, I decided to do the touristy car loop. It's very difficult to write about the experience, because Yellowstone is all about the experience. It's about standing in a spot and being surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells and feels of a very special place. When you're looking down into a bubbling, rainbow pool of sulfuric water, and the cool breeze is mingling with the hot steam against your skin, and you can taste the sulfur on your tongue, and a buffalo is rolling in the dirt nearby, and the vents are growling with the sound of thermal energy straining against the rock, you realize there's no medium that can really do justice to it all. But I'll try a little.
Old Faithful may be the most famous geyser in the park, but that's probably just because it's the most predictable and has a short enough interval for people to guarantee a sighting. There are other, nicer geysers that you can get closer to. I preferred Solitary Geyser myself, for a number of reasons. For one, it takes a bit of hike up a hillside to get to, which means instead of being one of a hundred people on Independence Day weekend crowding around the more popular geysers I found myself alone in a very nice outcropping. I also saw a pika on my way up.
This isn't my photo. The pika I saw moved too fast for me to get a shot of, but I doubt I will see one of these critters again. They only live in high elevation, and to be honest, I'm not sure if what I saw was a pika. I got a good look at it, and it certainly wasn't a rodent I had ever seen before, but there might be some cousin I'm unfamiliar with or something. It looked a lot like the little guy above though.
You can also get much closer to Solitary Geyser. I'm pretty sure this is it, but all these pools and geysers tend to look the same after the first dozen or so. It eruption is puny in comparison to its siblings, only four feet or so, but it erupts every 10 minutes with an angry little burble. It also has managed to kill most of the forest down hill from it, which is an impressive feat imo.
The other nice thing about Solitary Geyser is that just to the left of where this picture is taken you have a bird's eye view of most of the geysers in the area. I got to watch another geyser, one with a very impressive height, go off in the distance, whereas you can't see all that much once you climb back down to the boardwalk.
Everywhere there are signs warning you to stay on the path, not to drop things into the features, and so on and so forth. I found it interesting that the warning signs were in eight different languages, all western save for Japanese, and yet hands down the most common language I heard while I was at the park was Mandarin. Sometimes I heard more Mandarin than English. If I were to list the languages I heard in their order of frequency, it would go: Mandarin, some South Asian Language (not familiar enough with India to pin point it), French, and then Texan. At times I understood more Mandarin than Texan.
And yet there's no literature in Mandarin or Punjabi or whatever. Obviously all the signage was created prior to the huge wave of Chinese tourism that we're now experiencing. I'd say that a quarter of the people in some of the areas I visited at least were Chinese or of direct Chinese decent.
Anyway, back to the tour. There was wildlife of course. At one point a large herd of elk was spotted traveling across a plains area, which caused quite a traffic buildup as everyone veered off the road to watch, but most of the time the rockstars of the large mammal world were the buffalo.
Here we have a buffalo standing around, doing nothing more than holding up traffic forever. He wasn't moving, or really bothering to care about the cars trying to get around him. He just stood there and seemed pleased with himself. The rest of his herd was being more reasonable on either side of the road. People are, in general, really stupid when it comes to their tourism. There were cars that would stop right at his face and someone would hang out the window to take a picture. The white car you see stopped behind him had gotten around, stopped, and the lady in the passenger seat got out and started shooting. It took quite a while for the cars on the other side of the road to decide it was time to let me through, and even when I was trying to get around the stupid white car in front of me insisted on taking more pictures before moving on.
This was the closest I came to any buffalo, but it wasn't the most interesting encounter. There's a patch of road a few miles before you even hit the park where a herd likes to hang out in the mornings. I've passed them twice now, and both times you slow to a crawl as you navigate around these beasts going back and forth from the street. The cool part about that herd are the baby calves they have right now. They're only about the size of a large dog, and are caramel colored and nothing but leg. I didn't see any calves in the park, only outside of it.
On occasion there were buffalo at the springs. I don't think the rangers appreciate this much, because when you're trying to tell people that stepping off the board walk will result in falling through a weak crust to your boiling doom, having a ton of animal chilling right next to the water does not properly illustrate that concept.
The majority of the spots carved out for tourists were around hotsprings and 'paint pots.' I couldn't figure out how to take pictures of the paint pots to give a really good sense of them, because a large part of their charm is the fact that they are boiling mud, and I didn't manage to get a good shot of any bubbles bursting, so all it looks like is interesting colored mud. The spectrum of color represented in the paint pots is impressive though. They go from red, to blue, from black to white. The photo above isn't a paint pot. It's a hot spring. I think it's abyss hotspring but I don't quite remember. The colors were much more vivid in person, but you get some sense of what the stiller waters looked like.
On the return loop I ended up encountering snow. There were some large drifts about 3 feet deep on the sides of some of the larger hills, and this pile was blocking the path to this waterfall...
In order to get to it you had to clime up the drift into the forested area and then back down once things cleared up. I ended up with snow in my sneakers in July.
That's pretty much it. I left at 6AM and didn't get back home until 10pm. After I was done with the park I drove to Signal Mountain, where I was told one could get the best view of the sunset over the Tetons. This was true, but here is where my most ridiculous encounter with mosquitoes until this morning happened. I got to the top about an hour before sunset, assuming that there would be no parking and it would be crammed with people, but when I stopped there was almost no one, and the people who were there were leaving. I didn't realize what was going on until I was making my way to the over look and passed a guy who was wildly waving his hands in front of his face. Even though Signal Mountain give one amazing view across all of Jackson hole and Teton National Park, the mosquitoes up there are vicious. I tried hiding in the car but couldn't get in fast enough to prevent a few dozen mosquitoes from following me. It was the top of a mountain, so there wasn't anywhere to flee from them either.
I was determined that I'd wait it out though. A number of people came, got to the overlook, and then retreated, but by the time the sun set only about ten people had maintained the will for the payoff, though the photographers were complaining that there were so many mosquitoes that their shots were being ruined.
I managed to kill two mosquitoes at once just by slapping at a random place on my leg. They were really nasty. But I did see a nice sunset.
No comments:
Post a Comment