Day 7

Today was still a long day, even though we did relatively little traveling. We got up earlier than normal to try to get into Yellowstone early, so we could in turn get out earlier and actually see Grand Teton while it was still light. That didn't happen, but... turns out it didn't matter much.

When we first entered the park, they warned us there was a 1-2 hour delay due to "wildlife management." Sure enough, comparing this morning's trip time going in to last night's coming out, we had just over an extra hour of delay thanks to said management. Basically, a large herd of bison decided they were going to walk up the road rather than splash through the river, and I guess there was some concern that they were going to block traffic too much, so there were several park rangers playing cowboy to direct them.

Once we got to the park, we started down the south loop. The first drive we took was through Firehole Canyon, part of the volcano caldera with falls and I think some steam vents/geysers/springs/whatevers. (I hadn't realized until a couple months ago that all of the geysers and such were due to Yellowstone floating on top of an active volcano.) We saw some kind of animal that looked kind of like an otter, but we couldn't figure out what an otter would be doing up there.

Afterwards, we made our way down to the Fountain Paint Pot trail, which includes a couple of the large springs as well as the bubbling paint pots--basically rather than water geysers, they shoot up little spurts of mud balls. Those were all pretty neat to see, and it was incredible how loud some of the vents were. We also drove through one of the geyser areas, maybe the Firehole Lake loop. None of them erupted while we were there, but we did get some decent pictures of steaming springs.

One of the things I was most interested in seeing in Yellowstone was the Grand Prismatic Spring, so that was next on our path. Grand Prismatic Spring is HUGE, and it was pretty steadily covered by the steam coming off of it. (I should point out here that all of the springs had varying degrees of sulfur smell, but Grand Prismatic's was pretty weak and it was actually pleasant to stand in the steam compared to the chilly air.) It was pretty neat to see the light reflecting off of the multicolored areas of the pool give the steam a prismatic color too.

We also got to see Old Faithful erupt. While we waited for the eruption, we climbed up a trail to an observation point where you could see a large amount of the geyser field. On the way up, we encountered a coyote, and then at the top we saw a couple blackbirds or ravens or somesuch. We got back down from the hill just in time for the eruption, which was pretty neat, although it would've been nice to also see one of the taller geysers. (We saw another one erupting from fairly far away as we drove past, which was disappointing because we had been parked at that one about 15 minutes before and decided to keep driving.)

Unfortunately, around that time I started feeling sick, so we did the rest of the south loop and Karolina did most of the sightseeing for us. I think she saw the Dragon's Mouth, which was basically a hot spring in a cave so all you could see was steam constantly pouring out, and the Mud Volcano, which was basically one giant paint pot. Hopefully her pictures and videos will come out well. We also ran back up to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone to do the North Rim loop, and then came back across the middle part and down the west side of the south loop again. Somewhere in there we saw multiple herds of mule deer (or maybe it was the same herd that was grazing in the same place, right on the road, for about 2 hours).

We then left Yellowstone and headed down toward Jackson, WY. The main road from Yellowstone to Jackson goes through Grand Teton National Park, although pretty much all there was for us to do there was take a few pictures of the mountain range and Jackson Lake. It was right around dusk so we'd been hoping to get some good sunset pictures, but there was a bit too much cloud cover. Instead, it basically turned into a game of dodge the deer for 60 miles.

Tomorrow: somewhere in Nevada, and then Friday, Santa Clara! Hopefully I'll be able to get my internet set up reasonably soon so I can a) reacquire the software I need to process my panoramas and HDRs, and b) upload everything worth uploading. I just checked, and between my camera, Kar's camera, and our video cam, we have just over 7GB of pictures and movies.