Mountains

The Tetons impress me more than any other mountains I have seen. The wide meadows and reflecting lakes at the foot of the mountain range provide scenic views of power and beauty.


Grand Teton mountain lit by the first rays of the rising sun. It's the tallest of the peaks, so the sunlight reaches it first.


More early morning sunlight on the mountains.


The Tetons and Jackson Lake, seen from Signal Hill. This is high above the plain with panoramic views of the horizon in all directions. The road winds around Signal Hill several times as you ascend. The last part is a bit hair-raising, as it goes across a little spine. I don't know what signals they used when they chose the name, but obviously now, there's a huge cell-phone tower near the top.


View across Jenny Lake. After stopping at this viewpoint, we drove to the visitor center and took a boat across the lake to a hiking trail.


From the hiking trail, we saw the mountains from a number of perspectives, one more beautiful than the next!


View from a turnout along the road.


We also enjoyed our view of the California coastal mountains from our Santa Barbara apartment. This shows our deck.


Santa Barbara view at sunset.

Columnar Basalt at Yellowstone

Yellowstone is full of volcanic features, including this columnar basalt at Sheepeater Cliff (named for Shoshone Indians who raised bighorn sheep and who sometimes used this area). The columns formed during the cataclysmic volcanic activity of around half a million years ago, which created many of the distinctive features of the park. Yellowstone has several such basalt formations.



Marmots live among the columns:



Columnar basalt is extremely fascinating -- we saw perhaps the most spectacular example a couple of years ago at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, where the tops of the columns form what appears to be a tiled pavement made by giants:

Geysers

The main event at Yellowstone is geyser eruptions. Old Faithful is of course best known, as it's large and has a schedule almost like clockwork. We watched 5 eruptions in the three days we were in the park, the last being at sunset as we returned from a walk around the Old Faithful Geyser Basin. The setting sun was turning the steam clouds a beautiful shade of pink.




Old Faithful attracts a crowd at almost every eruption; private cars, group vehicles, and tour buses pour into the parking lot shortly before the expected moment. I found it interesting that the famously predictable schedule has slowly changed during the approximately 100 years  of the park's existence. Now 90 minutes, in the early days it was closer to an hour between eruptions.

The Old Faithful Geyser Basin is the largest grouping of geysers in the world. Some erupt from little pools; others have formed cones or irregular shapes as a result of the accumulated mineral deposits. The basin also includes a number of springs and pools, a boiling pool with steam bubbles seething at the surface, and beautiful surrounding woods and streams.

Across the river and the fields, the historic Old Faithful Inn, which opened in 1904, has become a feature of the landscape as well. (We stayed there, but weren't really that happy about it, as our room was neither historic nor well-maintained -- it was in a mid-20th-century cheap addition. Peeling paint and rotten plaster? No chairs to sit on? Please! But I digress. Our other night near Old Faithful was at Snow Lodge, which met all our expectations, and lived up to our experiences in other historic buildings in national parks.)


Old Faithful Inn from the Geyser Basin





Geysers vary enormously, from tiny ones (as above) up to the erratic Steamboat Geyser with a steam jet as high as 380 feet. Steamboat, around 30 minutes drive from Old Faithful in the Norris Geyser Basin, was active for a few years beginning in around 2000: its last big eruption was in May, 2005. When we walked there, it was emitting a small but still impressive series of steam puffs.


Steamboat Geyser as we saw it.

I found that each thermal basin has its own interesting look and characteristics. Norris, which is larger and has the thermal features more spread out, seemed especially barren. The high acidity of the springs that well up, erupt, and bubble through the landscape kill trees and plants. Within the basin, however, I noticed one small patch of grassy vegetation covered with steamy condensation that glistened in the sunlight. I didn't succeed in capturing its fairy-land-like look in a photo.

Yellowstone Hotsprings

Yellowstone Park's thermal activities are the best-known and most popular features of its vast landscape. Who would not be curious to see the gigantic, rare and violent eruption of Steamboat Geyser? The cataclysmic earthquakes that have happened once or twice in recent history fascinate everyone, despite the obvious dangers of actually being caught in one.

The punctual eruptions of Old Faithful are tamer, with crowded bleacher seats in front of the National Park Information Center as everyone waits for the steam and hot water to begin to spout. The dozens of smaller but equally extraordinary geysers in the nearby geyser field require around a 90 minute walk along carefully designed boardwalks. I know the timing, because Old Faithful was just erupting when we began our walk, and we saw it go off again as we were returning.

Hot springs, boiling pools, colorful heat-tolerant algae, accretions of limestone from hard water gushing out of the ground, and many other thermal features are abundant throughout the park. At the end of Yellowstone Lake, there's even a geyser just under the surface of the water, and many just beside the shore. Scrubby wildflowers and grasses grow right in the running hot water, and elk and other animals graze near steaming pools. It's all fascinating.

If you want a geology lesson, I'm afraid you won't get it here, though I learned a great deal in 3 days of exploring various hot spring and geyser basins and reading the useful labels and explanations supplied by the Park Service.

The following hot spring photos I've selected just because I like the way they look.


Fishing Cone: the underwater geyser near Yellowstone Lake

















Mammouth Hot Springs Limestone Formations

Tomorrow: the geysers.

Waterfalls

Mountains, canyons, and waterfalls -- breathtaking scenery in Yellowstone and Grand Teton Park. The waterfalls in Yellowstone Canyon are the largest and most famous. Also amazing is the serenity of the river in the wide grassy valley before it gets to the canyon. We drove into that valley before turning off towards the canyon.

Here's a photo of the lower falls from Artist's Point, around a mile from the falls. The upper falls are to the right of the upper falls -- you can only see them from a viewpoint facing them at a different parking area.



After our view of the upper falls, we decided to hike down 328 steps to look up the canyon at the lower falls. The stairway is remarkable, with very long stretches of metal stairs separated by landings with benches for the weary. The top of the stairs is already quite a bit downhill from the parking area.





Finally, we reached the bottom. The walk back up the stairs and trail was brutal!



A couple of days later in Grand Teton Park, we took a boat across Jenny Lake and hiked up to a much smaller waterfall called Hidden Falls. The trail goes alongside the rapids below the falls. Note: it's much better to go up first. But you don't always have a choice!



The falls are very appealing, though the trail is rather crowded. Cool air rushes down with the mountain stream, a relief on a quite warm and somewhat dusty hike. We continued up from the falls for a while -- the chipmunks that liked my feet were at a viewpoint where we overlooked the lake.





Soon I'll post more pictures, including a photo of the boat on Jenny Lake.

Animals in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park

We've been back for over a week, and I'm ready to document some of the high points of our recent trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park. Big and small animals in the wild, impressive mountains, and unearthly volcanic landscapes are the major attractions of these parks. While we were not lucky enough to see a moose, we did spot one grizzly bear from a quite far distance. People were talking about spectacular kills of an elk and a buffalo calf by bears and wolves, but we weren't in the right place at the right time. However, we enjoyed seeing quite a few elk, buffalo, and smaller animals.



The buffalo often cause a traffic jam, sometimes by standing beside the road, sometimes by trying to get across the road in traffic. We also saw a very peaceful buffalo down a hill from the roadside, resting in what appeared to be a patch in the grass that he had worn bare by circling around to get comfortable:



In Grand Teton Park, we saw this huge herd of buffalo -- we saw a similar herd in Yellowstone also.



Len took this beautiful picture of an elk near one of the big hot springs areas in Yellowstone.



I took a picture of Len photographing the elk.



At dusk, we saw several elk grazing around the hot springs at the south end of Yellowstone Lake.



We caught sight of a coyote, running through the woods not far from Yellowstone's Grand Canyon.



Near Steamboat Geyser, we saw a bunny nibbling on grass.


And of course the chipmunks scurried all around me while I was sitting on a rock near Jenny Lake in the Tetons.



Addendum: We also saw marmots capering on the columnar basal formations in Yellowstone, beavers swimming and even giving a tail-splash in an oxbow lake in the Tetons, and a sleek reddish otter beside a stream near Jenny Lake.

Chipmunk kisses my feet

Chipmunks explored my feet while I rested on a rock just above Hidden Falls at Jenny Lake, Grand Teton National Park. We have just returned to Ann Arbor after 8 days making our way from Santa Barbara via Yellowstone and Grand Teton. I'll now do a series of blog posts about our trip.