Breakfast—a culinary adventure to begin the day. This
morning several of us started on a variety of breakfasty foods: sweet breads, eggs,
chicken, beef, avocado, rice—when it suddenly occurred to me . . . all we were
missing was tortillas. Breakfast burritos! With all that leftover meat and
cheese and sauces from Miguel’s night to cook. The perfect start to a long
journey north into Yellowstone National Park. Those were some good breakfast
burritos. (Excuse my grammar and sentence structure, please and thank you; most of my typing was in the van ;)
In total, our entourage included three vehicles. Our vanload
decided to head out a bit ahead of the other two, but we all had similar
itineraries for the park. Buck suggested we nab those national park sign
pictures that we’d skipped the days before. I soon found out the other cars
were doing the same, not far behind us. In fact, with absolutely no ability to
communicate via cell phone (even texting!) due to a mutual lack of cell phone
service, we managed to bump into each other at the best spots in the park.
First up, Old Faithful! Buck downloaded a geyser app to his
phone . . . which was rendered useless by the lack of mobile connectivity in
the heart of the park. Graysen was so close to finishing his Jr. Ranger booklet
that we arrived ahead of schedule at the Old Faithful visitor center intending to complete this task before the big show. The rangers told him they weren’t really running programs
(the final piece to his puzzle), but he could do a scavenger hunt through the
exhibits and that would qualify. It was not an easy hunt, and we kept a wary
eye on the visitor center’s back yard. Yup, Old Faithful is accessible by a
sidewalk, surrounded by benches, and right outside the big glass doors of the
ranger station.
After an intense scavenging for information, Graysen
completed his book! No pin-on badges at this park though; rather he received a
patch, which he wasn’t thrilled about—but it has a bear on it, so that’s cool
(also, I think this was the park where you had to buy the booklet to participate; usually they are free). Anyway, he received a bunch of additional goodies, like
stickers, a bookmark, and such from the ranger.
Directly afterwards, we caught up with Buck
who was shaking his head in disbelief. While he and the other kids were watching a
wildlife safety video in one of the ranger station displays, a lady pushed in
front of Caelan and videotaped the video with her cell phone! The screen in the
display was no bigger than an Ipad, so it’s not like this lady digitally
filming (is that an oxymoron?) wasn’t being intrusive. And, the video was on a
loop. Another 30 seconds and she could have had it all to herself. Oh, and
there were also two little boys who’d been largely unsupervised in the children’s
discovery room, now out in the grand lobby, carefully rearranging the flip
numbers that told all the other visitors what time Old Faithful was expected to
blow! I wonder now if they maybe belonged to the cell phone lady. Surely there
are better things to use your phone battery for in a national park, like maybe
taking pictures of what your children are doing in the lobby, lol!
Outside the big glass doors, we noticed a small, brown sign
that said, “Old Faithful Geyser.” Of course we had to take a picture! Just as we did
so, we noticed our traveling friends settling onto the benches to await the
same geyser eruption we’d come to see. All that time in the visitor center, all
those texts we’d been trying to send and receive, all that space to explore in
the park, and we ended up enjoying the same show from Old Faithful.
At first it just kind of spit a little steam and water out
of the hole. We watched as a much more impressive geyser erupted on the
horizon. Not willing to give up on the most famous of all geysers, we decide to
keep our seats a little longer. Another spurt, some more steam! Then nothing.
Okaaaay. Finally, the geyser kept its old, faithful promise to shoot steaming
hot water high into the sky before our wondering eyes! Go Faithful, go Faithful
:)
As busloads of tourists ebbed and flowed around us, we
noticed 1. the amazing Old Faithful Lodge—the largest log cabin structure in
the world and 2. rescue helicopters. We never did find out what happened, but
if we had to guess, one member of the busloads of people walked in front of a
car (while taking selfies with parking lot landscaping; we saw this a lot) or perhaps
there was some other such medical emergency. I tell you what, the people were
more dangerous on the roads than the animals we were all there to see.
For lunch, Buck, the kids, and I made pb&j sandwiches in
the van. Then we set out for the main reason I wanted to come to Yellowstone
in the first place—the rainbow lake! Grand Prismatic. I’ve seen pictures of
this amazing phenomenon for years. Okay, it is colorful bacteria growing in the hot waters of the spring, but how amazing
that it appears in rainbow rings? We kind of accidentally (again) found the
pull-out to the hiking trail which would give us a distant, aerial view of the
Grand Prismatic. The trail was steep, and there were lots of people crowded into
the railed-off viewing area at the top. Buck got super annoyed with the foreign
tourists taking pictures of themselves as cats while blocking the railings for
up front views :) During our brief turn at the front, I took as many pictures
as I could, hoping one would turn out as beautiful as the sight we now got to
see with our own eyes.
I put a small color boost on the middle pic, to show more vibrantly the colors we could see when we were looking at Grand Prismatic in person. The overcast day and distance from our camera just didn't do the beauty justice! Pictured below (on our walk back to the van from the overlook)--the giant crows that boldly walk around the park like feathered t-rexes, the depth of some of the pools (in many of them, the temperature is hot enough to boil alive anything that might fall in!), and more non-sign readers trying to get good photos of the crazy bison hanging out closer than the posted human to animal ratios allow--I guess the bison isn't a sign reader either ;)
Next, we decided to drive down to the boardwalk access for a nearsighted
viewing of Grand Prismatic. We’d been told you couldn’t see the colors when you were up close, but
I still really wanted to walk the “shores” of the rainbow lake. Of course we
first needed to find parking—it was insane! You would have thought it was the
middle of summer, not the start of October. We waited in long parking lot lines
as others waited for a hundred parked cars to back out of the spaces they
wanted. Not able to move forwards or backwards, we debated trying to park at
all. I left it in God’s hands. He knew how much I wanted to see the lake, but
if I wasn’t supposed to that day, that was fine; I’d seen the aerial view
already. Then a big ole SUV filled with grown men raced around the waiting line
of cars, into oncoming traffic, got far enough ahead of the line (everyone in
front of us was waiting for someone else to back out, except for us, but we
couldn’t progress forward until all these others had exchanged places) to take
the only open parking space available (which would have been ours). Ugh. But,
as we watched them pull in half of a “bus parking only” spot, two more white
tail lights lit up nearby. Yes! Parking! Thanks God :)
By now, after lunch, a short hike and a drive, several of us
needed to use the restrooms. I’m sure you’ve experienced toilets like these,
right? Cement outhouses where there is more pee on the floor than in the nasty
hole to grossness they expect people to sit on? For foreign guests, signs
demanded they not stand on the toilet seats and squat, but the mess was so
overwhelming it really didn’t matter much what people did in there. It couldn’t
get much worse. Nasty.
As we waited for one of our kids to finish up (praying
against infectious disease, at least that’s what I was doing), a nice-looking
lady and her daughter walked up. She asked if all the restrooms (they should
have been called poop huts) were being used. I said, “Yes, but they are
anything but pleasant. If you have any other options, you might rather drive
than wait.” They decided to wait, and we got to chatting. Soon her very tall
husband walked up, and with a smile and a grand British accent asked, “Did you
make friends in the potty line (een the pawh-tea lyne)? Ahh, that’s my girl.”
They seemed like a nice family, and his cheerfulness in the face of all the
nastiness and tourist crush around us was a needed comic relief.
After parting ways with our new “friends,” we ventured out
onto the boardwalks sunk, railingless, into the strange land formation we were
about to experience. Graysen noted all the hats that had blown off of
people’s heads into the “fragile preservation area” above which we walked. There
were receipts and such in the shallow waters too. It made me want to jump in and clean up, where's my shop vac when I need it?!
And, it was true that you
couldn’t see the rainbows from nearby; the steaming sulfur made the pools all
but invisible. But the strange formations under an inch, maybe, of water were
certainly enough to make you feel like you’d stepped onto a different planet.
Fodder for imagination as far as the eye could see.
I think the above picture is the closest to being able to see the color changes from the boardwalk--large ring of rust color, then yellow on the edge, followed by green, then blue in the middle.
Can you see the animal tracks under the surface of the water? They congregate in these warm spots when winter snows arrive (and tourists leave :)
Close-up of the tracks, probably elk and bison
We later discovered the D’s had also tried to find parking
at the lake, but simply couldn’t in the swarm. They set out to find bears at
the same time we decided to take the Firelake Loop. We saw more geysers and the
largest geyser spout in the park (there are either pools geysers pop out of or
spouts like the White Dome Geyser pictured below). Everything natural was just so pretty. The
variety of landscapes, colors, land formations, fields of steaming geyser pools
. . . beyond description! We grew “bored” with seeing bison (okay, not really,
but it was like that, because there were just so many, so close!) Reluctantly,
we turned our headlights toward home, feeling we’d done a commendable job of
seeing as much of the park as we possibly could with the amount of time we had available.
Who hasn't spanked a bison in a national park? Lol :) We also stopped by the continental divide on our way south through Yellowstone (we passed several signs, because it is not exactly a straight line :) But this is the coolest one because the little lake next to the crew is the only one in the world that runs toward both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean at the same time. You'd think it would be empty by now, hee hee :)
We drove near Jenny Lake at sunset, so peaceful and pretty!
Also, it was our night to provide dinner for everyone, and
we’d agreed ahead of time to get pizzas on the way home from the park. Again,
it was like 8 PM and we were all still en route back to the house with varying
arrival times. I finally got enough signal to text plans to Jenn, collected
their pizza order via text, and then I called in to one of the most popular
pizza places in Jackson Hole. The conversation was extremely rushed, on her
end. I was wondering if I’d ordered anything at all. She asked for the name on
the order and I said, “Buck. B-U-C-K.” I figured they would think it was a
crank call for a lot of pizza. But sure enough, back in Jackson, Buck and
Graysen threaded their way into Pinky G’s and retrieved our pizzas under the
name . . . FOX :) Lol, and I thought *Buck* sounded unbelievable!
Interesting side note about
Jackson: there are way too many cars in a very ped-mall feeling setting. So, I
suppose to help tourists survive the street crossings, they have orange flags
on sticks posted at the crosswalks. If there is no signal to help a person
cross the road, the person grabs a flag from one bucket and carries it across the road
with them, waving it to draw attention to themselves. Safely across, they drop
it in a different bucket for someone else to make the return journey. I don’t
know what happens if your bucket happens to be empty when you reach the corner—either
you turn around and pick a different route—or run for your life :)
Pizza in hand, we wound our way to our hilltop abode, using our high beam
headlights to find our way. And would you believe . . . after an entire day
scouring Yellowstone National Park for the elusive moosen . . . our two
neighbor moose were right there in the next driveway! Buck drove past and I
said, “Go back! I think I see the moose!!” He popped the van into reverse and
sure enough, the bull moose was laying down in the tall grasses and the lady
moose (we think they might have been siblings) stood eating nearby. How
exciting!
By the way, the pizza was delicious . . . and they were
right, Buck is a fox ;)
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