More Yellowstone…

Day 42

          Our last day in Yellowstone was a huge success even though we picked the slowest lane at the Entry Gate of the Park. This was our third time driving into the Park and each of the previous days we were able to drive right up to the Ranger, show our Old Guys Forever-Pass, exchange pleasantries, and be on our way.  This time was different and maybe it had something to do with the improving weather situation. I guess folks decided to press the GO button and take advantage of the somewhat warmer and sunnier forecast. We thought that we were in trouble and that there was going to be the proverbial wall-to-wall stands of multitudes of shuffling tourons taking selfies, clogging up the works.

          We were wrong.

          This place is so immense that the amount of people flowing into the Park at this time of year gets easily swallowed up by all of the places (and vast distances between them) that it hardly registered as anything but a minor delay when we went to take our selfies!

          Our goals for the day were to finish up with our visits to the remaining places in the Park that were open at this time of year. There are still a few roads and destinations that will not be open for a few weeks. Elevation plays a key role here when it comes to snow cover and how long it hangs around. We already started at over 6000’ of elevation back in West Yellowstone and this slyly gets shifted to the background as the roads in the Park gradually got us up to over 8000’ above sea level.

          And we were still relatively flat!

          We were not on top of a mountain!

          But all of the evidence of what lies below here, the hot springs, thermal vents, and geysers, were still all around us and were constantly a reminder that the Volcano could blow its stack at any minute!

          Mind you, a minute in Geological Time is equal to several hundred thousand years of our time  😊

          One of the more awe-inspiring views in the Park (or anywhere for that matter) is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. It’s too bad that the nomenclature of “Grand Canyon” gets used here. To us, this canyon deserved its own identity as no matter where you looked, upstream or downstream, the view was nothing short of magnificent all in its own right. But someone before us named this geological formation, so that’s what we’re stuck with.

          But it is a canyon, and it is grand, and it is the Yellowstone River, so…..

          Anyway, there are two falls in this section, and I think that the same guy with no imagination named these also. We have here, for your inspection, some fine photographic examples of …….

          The Upper Falls and the Lower Falls. (Sigh)

          Someone needs to take a class in Creative Marketing!

          After spending a lot of time going back and forth across the River to get to all of the Vantage Points on the map (and never being disappointed) we left the Falls area and went about forty miles north to get to Mammoth Hot Springs. This area is not named for some woolly elephant-like creature that may have roamed here; it is named this because that adjective aptly describes what we encountered here.

          A series of hot springs so tall that it rises several hundred feet above the floor of the valley in which it is situated. It required a labyrinth of stairs, steps, ramps, and railings, that wound around and through the steaming and bubbling watercourses. The colors were vivid and the steps and terraces that have been formed over the millennia rival the most magnificent fountains found in any palace, anywhere!

          The last place we visited was the Norris Basin Geysers. This area is constantly shifting and the geysers within it, (there are well over fifty) wax and wane with no regularity whatsoever. They are completely dependent on the ebb and flow of ground water and the underground thermal features of the moment. The most active one shown here sounded like the roar of a jet engine as it spewed its boiling, steamy water out of a narrow slit of a crevasse which only heightened the pressure behind it, creating that distinctive sound.

          On the way back to West Yellowstone (about fifty miles away) we were thankful that this end of the Park did not have the amount of Bison that were encountered the previous two days. It felt rather odd not wanting to cross paths (literally) with these furry beasts. I don’t want to say, “Seen one, seen ’em all”, but they do tend to cause massive traffic jams on the roads here. I know that its better than a Construction Delay, but when you are trying to fit far-flung destinations into a finite time period, well, I hope that you get my drift.

          But we did come upon a slowdown caused by an unknown spottage of something as yet to be determined. Yielding to that Touron Behavior lurking just beneath our skins, we promptly pulled over and investigated. Apparently there was a Mom Black Bear and a cub or two safely screened by trees on the far side of a stream. Unfortunately, it was not even worth a photo as they could barely (pun intended!) be seen. Back to the car we went.

          Paula has done all of the driving in the Park as I am constantly on the lookout for nice places to pull over at, jump out, and snap a few pics. That, and I tend to nod off in the afternoon and with no guardrails and those million-foot-high precipices to be hurled off of, we prudently decided that Paula would be the DD.

          We did see a couple of those road-clogging fuzz balls on our way out and we did slow up to take  a pic or two,

          Guilty as charged!