Sunday, June 3, 2018
By the Way; A prior “Back-Note” on day 1 at Yellowstone National Park…did you think that we missed a day? No we missed two days… just a lack of Wi-Fi with no time to catch up.
We spent a very comfortable evening in the Adler home. The core of the home is its family room that features a wonderful fireplace, comfy furniture and built in book cases. The Adler’s were very good friends of my parents and I could easily picture the four of them enjoying each other’s company in that room. It was nice imagining them together. The rest of the house consists primarily of a nice sized kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms and a laundry area. It sits beside a creek that happened to be flowing very forcefully because of snow melt.
Back 40 years ago when they built their home, Jesse Adler said that the Big Sky area was rustic. It is a beautiful place surrounded by mountains and is becoming more popular with the ski crowd. In fact, it was rather quiet this time of year. Now million-dollar homes are being built across the street and on either side of Jesse’s house. I’ll have to ask her what she thinks about all of this new development.
The town of Big Sky is also “new.” Imagine a shopping area like Legacy being Big Sky’s business area. It certainly wasn’t how I imagined it to be. We became fans of a little grocery store, /sandwich shop called The Hungry Moose. We stopped there for breakfast, picked up sandwiches for lunch and headed to Yellowstone National Park about a 1-hour drive away.
The ride to West Yellowstone and the West entrance to Yellowstone National Park followed the raging Gallatin River. The river flowed through a canyon that was worth seeing on its own. The town of West Yellowstone is a 100% tourist area, and we will be switching to a hotel there tomorrow to cut back on our driving time.
Entering the Park did not take that long, however, there is a about a 19-mile drive to Madison, the point at which you can select which direction you want to go that day. The road followed the Madison River with lovely open green areas with buffalo grazing. We were traveling at a decent clip until the buffalo turned up on the side of the road. Then we were crawling along, since people were stopping in the road to take pictures.
We finally made it to our first stop which was Gibbon Falls, one of the Park’s prettiest falls according to our Lonely Planet tour book. The water falls 84 feet into the Yellowstone Caldera. Beryl Spring was next. Here is where the buffalo got even more annoying. On our way to Beryl Spring they decided to walk down the middle of the road bringing the traffic to a standstill. Oy Vey Iz Mir! The Spring is blue green in appearance due to the escaping gases. It runs between 189 – 192 degrees F and is one of the hottest springs in Yellowstone.
Artists Paint Pots was a large area that first introduced us to the boardwalks that you had to stay on in order to view the thermal activity throughout the Park. It is a hydrothermal area and included Blood Geyser. The high concentration of iron oxide in the water stains the surrounding rocks a red color. The area also included lots of mud pots. The acidity in the water essentially dissolves the rock into mud and escaping steam and gas makes the mud appear to be boiling.
As we approached the Norris Geyser Basin, one of the main attractions at Yellowstone, the entry was blocked supposedly because the area was full. Not to be deterred from entering a place we had traveled days to see, Dan ignored the signs, went around the barrier, and had no problem finding parking. It is North America’s most volatile and oldest continually active geothermal areas. It was a large area that smelled strongly of Sulphur and where steam was escaping all over the place. It looked like Hell on Earth. In fact, instruments recorded as temperatures as high as 459 degrees. It included Steamboat Geyser the world’s tallest active geyser with eruptions up to 300 feet. We saw it steaming but didn’t get to see it fully erupt. This is where we first saw people known as geyser watchers (many of whom were geezers) who set up chairs and simply wait for geysers to erupt. We also saw Emerald Spring which was a pool of water that was a “striking” blue-green color because it reflects blue light with yellow sulfur deposits.
One random observation was that since it was often very windy people kept losing their hats. Throughout the Park we saw hats of all kinds sitting in the middle of non-approachable areas. I was tempted to create a photo album entitled, “Hats of Yellowstone”.
The Roaring Mountain is a large bleached hillside pockmarked with hissing/roaring fumaroles. Those are steam vents that give off carbon dioxide and some hydrogen sulfide (for that nice rotten egg smell) along with a hissing sound. Billions upon billions of rock eating bacteria called thermophiles are slowly eroding the mountain. Close to Roaring Mountain we passed a cliff made from Obsidian, a black stone used for tools and arrowheads. This stone was traded by various Indian tribes and was found in the Indian mounds located in Marietta, Ohio.
Sheepeaters Cliff is where we found a picnic area for our lunch. The cliffs are made from hexagonal basalt columns similar but smaller in scale to Devil’s Tower. The area was named for the Shoshone Indians who relied on the use of bighorn sheep.
The last stop for the day was Mammoth Hot Springs. This area is known for its geothermal terraces and the Gallatin Mountain Range to the NW. Supposedly it is a popular wintering area for wildlife, but we didn’t see any animals of interest. There was both an upper and lower terrace that involved at least an hour’s worth of boardwalk and stair walking. Large areas were moon-like and barren with oddly colored rock and unusually colored pools of water. You could see where the bacteria were eating away at the stone.
On our way back to West Yellowstone we drove through the snow-covered mountains that were part of North Yellowstone. We didn’t stop because we planned to visit this area more thoroughly in the next few days. It took about 2 hours to get back to town. Before driving an hour back to Big Sky, we stopped at a West Yellowstone restaurant called Canyon Street Grill. Not very good, but to be fair they didn’t charge me for my dinner.
We were exhausted just like the thousands of other seniors (geezers) we had seen at the Park today watching and seeking geysers. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones that had Yellowstone on their bucket list. Tomorrow is another day exploring Yellowstone.
BY THE WAY WITH WENDY & DAN 