Our 100 Day Trek through the US of A, Part 5

July 14, 2013

Not the Faithful, but only 100 yards
away one that is not so regular

This is the real one

Oh glorious Yellowstone, never to be rivaled by any other park, with of course Old Faithful spewing, gawked at by hundreds of people every 90 minutes or so. After the Glacier National Park, one expects never to see anything more majestic and maybe that is or will be the case.

Pool after pool in color

However, although Yellowstone might not be a jaw dropper, one can drive around here for days without ever loosing that feeling of wonder, that man is overcome with, when viewing the miracle of being on top of a very thin crust of earth, that might erupt anytime all around you, swallowing you up in seconds as megatons of earth's inner boiling molten lava spew to the surface. (Editor's note: wasn't allowed to fix the punctuation in the above run-on sentence because the author would not allow me to monkey around with his "prose")

A yellow
version of the same 1932 car

The boiling waters show colorful
life forms

Berlynne, our guide tells us, that we should not expect that to happen, as seismic monitoring equipment does not forecast this to happen anytime soon, but at the same time they warn us to stay on the boardwalk, because the surrounding ground is so thin you could fall through and be burned.

A few years ago two friends and their dog visited and unfortunately when opening their vehicle's door the dog escaped and dove in the hot water and started yelping as he sensed the boiling water. The friend, not the dog owner, dived in to help and when pulled out stated: "that was stupid". He did not survive his burns. I could not resist to bend over on one of the pool's walkways and touch the water. It was definitely not bath temperature, and I touched it about 50 feet from the hole where the water emerged and the water was inches deep where I submerged my finger and Sandee was not around to screech at me. (I am not even allowed to be within 10 yards from the rim of any height, that draws me to peek downwards.) It is not so much the geysers and their spouting, that made me want to stay longer, it was the landscape, the soil colors, the out of this world like formations that dot the area.

Clear blue hot geyser hole

All these colors are below the surface

Could not get enough of it

This not lava but a stream of hot water gushing
down

Plant life under the hot surface
moving in the streaming water

I left Sandee in a parking lot for about an hour (something that almost never happens. As most of you know: if you see Sandee, you see me or vice versa.) But I needed to make the undignified scramble up an ash covered mountain side grappling fallen down trees as if they were mountain hooks and scale upwards 200 feet at a 60 degree angle alongside other "enthusiasts" to get the picture of the Grand Prismatic Pool. The even more undignified descent dirtied me so much, that I almost was not allowed to enter our Range Rover "Hansie" for the return trip out of the park.

The picture after a 200 ft scramble
Grand Prismatic Pool

The three Girls in French vernacular:
les Grandes Tetons

The Grand Tetons were nice and I can understand that people like to build homes that look out at those peaks, but a drive-by taking pictures of them suffices. And those French trappers that named those "tits" must have really been for months without female companionship to visualize them as such.

We stayed for two nights in a cabin about a 1 1/2 hour drive from the Yellowstone entrance, but lack of cell service and Internet drove us away early. The owner was kind enough to let us go without penalty. We relocated to a house about the same distance from the park in Big Sky, a ski resort that was nearly deserted but for some permanent residents. It made us realize, that despite our lack of knowledge on how to fully utilize the electronic equipment we have surrounded ourselves with, that not having the ability to reach out or to be found through them is an inalienable requirement (or is it unforfeitable?) in this century, that disqualifies us from the so called "simple lifestyle" we encountered in the hamlets in Wyoming, Montana and Nevada to just name a few places where thousands of people live without these amenities.
Well at least this way we can now shower you with our tales of fortitude.
Off to Yosemite we go. Lets see if Yosemite tops them all.