July 30- Aug 1st Yellowstone National Park
Home of the Bizarre, the Odd, the Awe Inspiring, the Strange and the Amazing!
As you follow the road from Jackson Hole towards Yellowstone Park, you pass the Grand Tetons. They are a fantastically jagged mountain range.
My sister Tabea met up with us in Jackson Hole so we had a vehicle to tour the park in for a few days....what a treat!
Since we had no bike rack for the car we had to stow all our camping gear, our panniers, three days worth of food for three people, two bikes and all three of us into Tabea's car.
Hmm.....will it all fit???????
We DID IT!
I sat in the back most of the time so the picture below was basically my view of Yellowstone Park. Well, no it was not quite so bad. Haha. I cannot believe we got everything in! Tabea's car is just incredible and so is she for letting us do this to her four wheeled "Mountain Goat".
Look, I can still type on a keyboard because I did not feed the bears in Yellowstone!
This is a dead hot spring in Yellowstone Lake next to several still active ones.
A huge, steamy hot spring. As far as I remember, this one did not smell too bad of rotten eggs like some others. Isn't it gorgeous!? Just a deep hole in the earth out of which clear blue, hot water gets forced to the surface and runs down towards the lake in colourful rivulets.
Old Faithful Geyser!!! It erupts about every 90 minutes and each eruption lasts about 1-2 minutes. When you first get there all you see is a tiny bit of steam being released from a shallow cone (below). Not very exciting at all!
Suddenly the cone starts to sputter and spit!!!.....
....hot water and steam shoot up in the air.....
....and within a few seconds you find yourself sitting in front of a 30m high water fountain. What amazed me is how quiet the whole show was. All you heard was the gentle sound of spraying water...and a minute or so later the fountain dies and is reduced to the insignificant plume of steam you saw in the first picture. WOW!
Another huge hot spring. It is actually a geyser which erupts every who knows how many years.
If you have ever dreamed of hiking in a sauna, Yellowstone is the place for you!!!
Amazing photo ops everywhere! This is one of the rivulets running off from one of the hot springs. The orange colours are due to extremophile bacteria colonies which feel quite at home in Yellowstone's various harsh, sulfurous environments.
Interesting crystal formation around the edge of a smaller hot spring.
Later in the evening we spotted a small herd of bison in a meadow. They are so huge!!! and the bulls look so impressively grumpy. Don't wanna mess with them.
More amazing natural bizonders (my newly coined word for a wonderful bizarre "thing")
Frothing mud. So tempting to stick my toe in it.
This cave was one of my favourite sites in the park. It was called Dragons Mouth or something like that. You could hear it roaring and hissing from quite a distance. Water pours out in gushes accompanied with lots of steam and throaty gurgling, growling and sputtering sounds from inside the cave. Supposedly those sounds are generated by the steam forcing its way through the water from deep down inside the earth. (I hate to say it but mother earth has terrible breath)
An acidic, churning pool of smelliness.
The famous Lower Falls of Yellowstone Park.
The "Grand Canyon" of Yellowstone. Quite spectacular.
At one point we were driving along the road when traffic suddenly slowed down and eventually stopped moving.....in the middle of nowhere. What the heck is going on? After a while Mr. Bison came strolling up the opposite lane. He clearly knows this is his park and any vehicle has to yield to his whims. It looked like he had no intentions of leaving this nicely paved path, also known as a highway, any time soon. Funny.
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