Thursday 16 June 2016

American adventure part 4: Yellowstone road trip


The start of part 4 - our road trip - was great!  It involved a fortunate Cinnebon stop between Indy and Chicago which made all of us very happy.  Arriving in Chicago airport was pretty good too with our holiday's first moving walkways, an unexpected dinosaur, and a surfeit of escalators.  The next 7 hours weren't great, but we got to Jackson Hole in the end, to pick up our car and drive to the Grand Teton national park in the dark.  Surprising how hard it is to know where exactlky the road is when it's that dark.

Car number plate included to break the narrative.  We liked the Wyoming plates.


Waking up in our little log cabin and seeing the incredible mountains for the first time was pretty cool however.  I went for a run, perhaps unsensibly, and here I am.


Shortly after this photo I heard a little movement behind be on the gravel beach and saw a grizzly bear and its cub emerging from the lake.  The baby gave a little wet dog shake and then asked where its porridge was.  The mummy bear then turned its head to look at me, as I backed cautiously and noisily away.  Thankfully it didn't move towards me or take much more interest in me apart from the staring contest, but I was rather scared.  Amazing experience, but a scary one, and the following two days seemed full of good bear encounter advice, none of which involved finding yourself 20 yards from a grizzly and its cub while out running on your own without bear spray.

I don't think I really manged to do justice to the scenery, which I found absolutely spectacular first thing in the morning, but here's the view from the lake.



Attractions of Yellowstone are geothermality and wildlife.  I have scores of pictures of each.

The hot springs, bubbling mud pots, and geysers are so unlike anything we've ever seen before.  I thought it was absolutely brilliant, crazy landscapes, with a whole load of variety.  In 2 days passing up through Yellowstone and back again we probably saw the main bits and pieces but I could have spent much longer watching it all.  Without excitable/tired children, that is.

You can see much more impressive photos of this stuff online  but this is what I liked in particular.

Our first geothermals at West Thumb (Marisca says this was her favourite place).  Hot springs by the lake with different colours due to different temperatures and different algae and organisms that like the different temperatures.



The white dome geyser.  Probably our favourite geyser - down a side road, where we were fortunate to be there when it was erupting.  We watched old faithful but although big and on time it was a little unimpressive relative to the hype.  We also saw a bunch in the mid basin that all randomly went off at different times with coughs and splurts, which were good but less photogenic.


This is the stunning grand prismatic spring.  It was quite steamy and only visible from the side, but so interesting to see the prismatic colours and the swirls of the runoff rivers.  And particularly to remember that all of the colours are different microorganisms enjoying their own particular biological niche.

And at the same location, I loved the hot spring water running down the bare rock through its bright orange channel and steaming as it hit the cold mountain stream.


The hot springs at Mammoth - actually not that hot in the grand scheme of springs - were completely different again.  Here there's much more water flow and cooler water, which leads to a massive set of calcite deposits.  The same idea as stalactites but a bit bigger and quicker to form.  Flows and torrents rather than drips.



No pictures of mud pots.  They were bubbling mischievous witchy things but not very picturesque.

My last pre-wildlife picture is geological rather than geothermal.  We stopped by the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, clearly a rivery canyony type thing.  It was pretty amazing too.


I'd probably say that our wildlife spotting was less successful than our immovable objects spotting.  After my bear experience we did see a pair of black bears across the valley on the first few miles of our trip - which was cool but the last time we saw bears.  We saw bison in ones and twos but not herds.  We saw a few elk but sadly no moose.  We saw lots of chipmunks.

Marisca proved herself to be an ace birdspotter, including this bluejay and some northern cardinals.


This cheeky bird was easy to spot as it stole half of Tom's biscuit.  Later in the holiday Tom had another bird-stealing-food incident and I suspect he is rapidly learning that birds are not to be trusted.


You can't wash your hands in a buffalo.


Chipmunk.  Cute.


'Our' elk.  We caused a traffic jam by being the first folk to spot this one by the roadside.  We were told that elk in this season don't have antlers, so I like to think of this as an unfashionable out-of-season elk.


The antler of a different elk.  Surprisingly heavy.


And here are my two.  The keen eyed will spot that they are proudly wearing their junior ranger badges, having done a bunch of activities in their junior ranger book while we sat enjoying very good pizza in a bar in Gardiner, and then having survived a testing exam and quite scarily serious pledge giving.  Marisca overachieved and acquired a grizzly badge, Tom also overachieved and cuted his way to a volcano (geyser) badge.  They were brilliant.


Those were probably the two best non-wedding days of my holiday.

Having done all that we decided to go to the rodeo in Jackson.  Rather fun.




We then had two more days to cross Wyoming, cut the corner of Utah, and cross the Rockies to reach stage 5 in Boulder.  I was a bit concerned that they'd be tedious 300 mile days, but both were really interesting to see the changing scenery.  

For day 1 we were headed to the Dinosaur national monument.  The landscape started hilly, got flat and prairieish, then got windy and sedimentary, a bit red and plateaud, and then rocky.  Neither my words nor the few photos I took really help.  It was cool though to watch the huge landscape pass by.



Lastly - and this post feels almost as long as the car journey - we arrived at Dinosaur.  It's another fascinating place, with a huge open quarry face stuffed with a variety of fossils.  Pictured probably 10% of the size of the place, with convenient insect-boring-checking-paleontologist for scale.


Marisca and Tom really got their fill of dinosaurs this holiday - a few museums and two at airports, but this was the chockablockiest of places.  So this, naturally, is where they picked up most dinosaur information (skulls are very scarce because they're so delicate, not because there were loads of headless dinosaurs).  So much so that they achieved junior ranger status here too.  The keen eyed (or fast learners) amongst you will already have spotted that.


I'll talk about cross country day 2 tomorrow!

No comments:

Post a Comment