Yours, Mine, Ours and Then Some: Yellowstone

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Yellowstone

Tons of pictures but Yellowstone is just so beautiful!

We stayed at a cabin next to the Old Faithful lodge. It was the last weekend that anything in Yellowstone is open for the fall. Somethings open in the winter but you can only get to them by snow mobile. I had a little anxiety as we were driving up, what if NONE of the restaurants are open because I only brought snacks. There was one restaurant open in the lodge. They were open for breakfast and dinner and you could buy box lunches. There was a gas station where you could pay with credit card and that was it. Everything else was closed! On Sunday the Old Faithful Lodge and cabins closed too.

It was freezing at night, in the teens. Our cabin was nice and toasty. It was so quiet I had to turn the bathroom fan on so Alika could sleep. The days were pretty nice, warm (upper 40's) for about two hours then it dipped back in the 30's. We did a lot of hiking.

Old Faithful gets all the credit yet she is one of three to five hundred geysers in Yellowstone and she's not even faithful. The sign said her decreasing eruptions may be due to people throwing stuff in her crater or changes in the earth from earthquakes. She erupts about every 90 minutes give or take ten. There are about 1000 geysers in the world and half of those are in Yellowstone. It looks like the mountains are on fire because steam is coming up everywhere. Sean learned a lot about steam and clouds. There are gyesers and then lots of hot springs in Yellowstone.

Waiting for Old Faithful. It was cold!

There she blows!

For dinner Alika ate buffalo ribs. Taste like chicken. No, not really. It taste more like roast beef. It didn't taste like the ribs we are used to.

Not a great picture of Sean because the sun was in his eyes. We were at Biscuit Basin. I thought it was cute because I've always called Sean my little Biscuit.

Alika worked in Yellowstone a couple of summers ago so she knows the area well. She took us to some her favorite "color pots." Depending on the algae make up the pots are different colors. There is an entire ecosystem living in just an inch or two of algae. The algae on the top photosynthesize and provide energy to the ones on the bottom. The ones on the bottom decay and provide energy to the ones on the top. You could earn a Master's degree just on what goes on in the environment in Yellowstone. I learned lots just reading the signs. I wonder what the Indians thought when they first saw Yellowstone.

Again, the pictures don't do justice. This pot was emerald green.

We hiked up to a water fall, I don't remember what it was called it was a two mile hike and Sean and Alika would run ahead of us and hide. We kept looking for bears but didn't see any, just buffalo.

Cute little poser.

Cute big poser.

We are standing at the Excelsior Geyser in front of a HUGE crater that last erupted in 1985. When it did erupt it went off for 47 hours. Hmm, glad it didn't decide to erupt while we were standing in front of it. The Internet says it's impossible to predict when it will erupt again. I would think they'd have someway to measure the pressure and activity inside of the crater. They say when it goes it pumps out 4000 gallons of boiling water a minute that then flows into the Fire hole river. (Unless you are standing next to it then I speculate some of that 4000 gallons flows over you.)

These pictures of Alika and Sean are all as they walk towards the Grand Prismatic Spring. It's a slick area that water covers across thermophiles. It's red, brown and orange but you can't really see that in the picture. It looks and feels like you would think another planet feels.