Yellowstone

By Jim & Ginny.

“However orderly your excursions or aimless, again and again amid the calmest, stillest scenery you will be brought to a standstill hushed and awe-stricken before phenomena wholly new to you. Boiling springs and huge deep pools of purest green and azure water, thousands of them, are splashing and heaving in these high, cool mountains as if a fierce furnace fire were burning beneath each one of them; and a hundred geysers, white torrents of boiling water and steam, like inverted waterfalls, are ever and anon rushing up out of the hot, black underworld.”  John Muir, 1898.

Every word is still true, 120 years later.

Everyone has heard of Old Faithful, but there are 465 active geysers in Yellowstone National Park in an average year, plus an estimated 10,000 geothermal “features.”

As we discovered, you can be driving through a green-treed forest along a clear stream… and, suddenly, there’s a “feature” – such as a formation of steaming, bubbling rocks and pools, in colors that look like a bad science fiction movie.

Monday, we explored (and marveled at) Porcelain Basin…

…which includes our favorite moment of the day, seeing a drab, fetid, bubbling cauldron of mud named “Congress Pool.”

Then there was  Mammoth Hot Springs…

which are only a couple of blocks from the town of Mammoth Springs, where we saw elk chilling on the village green.

Our last stop Monday was at the Artist Paint Pots (where we arrived after being in a traffic jam caused by a bison ambling down the road).

Tuesday, we discovered the other-worldly Midway Geyser Basin…

on our way to see Old Faithful,

and the Old Faithful Inn (that’s the clock that Dick Dysart helped restore, on the right!).

We also went to the north end of the park to Lake Yellowstone, where we saw not only a 136 square-mile lake… but a variety of geothermal pools emptying into it and percolating underneath it.

Then we had a big scenery shift, visiting the magnificent Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.  

That day, we also crossed the Continental Divide for the fifth time of our trip, but for the first time when we had enough warning to get a picture of it.  It’s the principal hydrological divide of the Americas, running from the Bering Strait to the Strait of Magellan.  To its west, watersheds drain into the Pacific Ocean; to its east, they drain into the Atlantic.  

Animals are an exciting part of sightseeing in Yellowstone.  Bison and elk are commonplace…

bears are seen occasionally (you have to look really hard here)

and wolves are rare.  No scarcity problems with mosquitos – they’re all over (as are their bites).  

Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Yellowstone and to Gwen and Coley on Wednesday.

Our trip to Yellowstone coincided with news that the Trump regime is going to allow mining of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.  It’s the largest “reversal” – i.e., rape – of national monument protections in U.S. history.  Trump previously announced, with characteristic dishonesty and disingenuousness, that this action would return control of the land “to the people, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States.”  In fact, the mining rights to Grand Staircase-Escalante were acquired by Glacier Lake Resources Inc. – a CANADIAN company.

Our national parks and natural monuments are part of America’s soul.  They are beloved – every park we’ve visited is teeming with visitors.  If you haven’t been to one, go.  If you’ve been to one, go to two more.  You will see the magnificent landscape and feel  an emotion that’s hard to describe.  The experience will change you.

Trump has made it clear by his words and deeds that he has no respect for the environment.  We must resist him and his steam shovel cronies with all our might.

Donate to the National Parks Foundation (www.nationalparks.org), or the Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org/giving).  There are even things to do that are both fun and productive (https://www.backpacker.com/stories/10-ways-to-support-the-national-parks).

Most of all, VOTE this fall for candidates who will PROTECT our natural treasures.