Geyser city

Until I started to educate myself about Yellowstone, its primary claim to fame was as the home of Old Faithful, and that was the initial reason to come here, as we check off the iconic American landmarks one by one. So on our first full day in the park, that was where I felt we must go. We got up at a reasonable hour this morning, had the buffet breakfast at the Canyon Village restaurant, got 10 gallons of gas at $4.45 a gallon (youch!) and were off to retrace our route from yesterday evening, this time in broad daylight without a cloud in the sky.

While there are several potentially interesting things to check out along the way, we passed them all in a beeline for Old Faithful Village, arriving there about 10:30 or so. The visitors center is under construction (as of right now it’s just a few girders sticking up into the air behind a chain link fence), but the temporary visitors center had the times for all the major geysers and we were within 20 minutes or so of seeing Old Faithful, so we just hung around until it went off, at the far end of the predicted time scale. There were lots of people around, but it wasn’t mobbed or anything, everything in the village has been designed a hundred years ago around the geyser, so it is certainly accessible, and its kind of funny to watch the build-up around the occasional spurt of water for a good 10 minutes before the real eruption begins, stringing you along as though the real show were imminent long before it really becomes so. When a geyser does go off, people ooh and ahh like they’re watching fireworks, and the resulting spray is impressive if not spectacular, as its very monochromatic and all over in a couple of minutes.

Having dispatched Old Faithful (which is neither the tallest, most frequent nor most predictable geyser, just the most famous), we took a walk around the southern end of the upper geyser basin, which took about 90 minutes and covered the popular Castle Geyser (which has a huge blocky cone that might have looked like a castle once), Plume Geyser, Anemone Geyser and a bunch of others. Any or all of these might go off at any moment, most of them are spewing out small amounts of steam all the time, or contain burbling or even boiling water. The walkways around the basin are mostly boardwalks that keep you on a proscribed path and presumably out of harms way. Surrounding the geysers is a blasted mostly treeless moonscape with bright rust colored channels running here and there. From the far side of Geyser Hill, we could sit and watch Old Faithful go off a second time in relative solitude, then made our way back to the Old Faithful Lodge for lunch in the ubiquitous Xanterra cafeteria, food service concessionaire for the National Park Service.

After that it was back on the trail, but wouldn’t you know it Old Faithful was due to erupt again, so we hung around long enough to see it a third time, from a slightly different angle than the first and a bit further back. Starting again at Castle Geyser but this time continuing north towards Morning Glory Pool. We passed a smallish crowd at Grand Geyser, which was some where between 0 and 2 hours from erupting, and move on towards the spectacular Beauty Pool, one of the more significant thermal pools that contain rings of brightly colored bacteria but with water so clear you can see down several feet. Before we got much further we could hear more of that oohing and ahhing from behind us, and sure enough the Grand Geyser had just gone off, we were still close enough to observe for a few minutes. It is the largest predictable geyser in the world, and only erupts a couple of times a day, so that was the rarest one we saw in action, from a couple hundred yards away.

Passing by Giant Geyser we met up with the main path around the time that Daisy Geyser was expected to go off, so we detoured a short distance over there and sat down to wait, and within a few minutes it started erupting, with only a few other people around. It’s not nearly as big as some of the others, but its on a particularly windy stretch and the water coming out occasionally got blown in our direction and gave a brief shower. Just because the water way under the ground is so hot that it causes the geyser to erupt, most of the water coming out of these geysers is not hot at all, so there was no concern there. The guidebook warned about being “kissed” by this geyser because of the windy conditions, but we decided it was more like being sneezed on. We kept going west on this side trail to Punch Bowl Spring and Black Sand Pool before doubling back to the main route. Much is made in the literature about the sulfuric “rotten eggs” smell coming from the geyser basin (you see kids trying to get their pictures taken next to a geyser or pool while holding their noses) but it’s really not that strong or that prevalent unless you’re getting a direct blast. The Black Sand Pool, which you could see from a platform 10 feet above, probably had the most noticeable smell because the wind kept blowing it right at you and you could feel the heat from the steam also.

We continued north a short distance past the Mortar and Spiteful geysers to Morning Glory Pool, which was just as spectacular as Beauty Pool if not quite as colorful. Then it was a mile-plus walk back to the village, during this time Beth and the kids had to switch shoes because Justin was having problems walking. He was wearing out fast after doing great most of the day, and we barely got him back to the Inn where we could hang out for a while and figure out dinner. Chloe on the other hand, after starting off slow before breakfast, was generally agreeable the entire day, so go figure. Beth had her pedometer, but it was way off on the estimated miles, I should have brought my running watch, but based on the map I guessed we walked about five miles over 7 hours including a long lunch break, three stops to wait for Old Faithful, and numerous other rest periods along the way.

The exterior of the Old Faithful Inn is still being worked on, they were painting and replacing some windows and redoing the roof, although its supposed to be done by the fall. We looked inside the five story 100-year old atrium, which isn’t as expansive as you’d think, but still quite a sight, and could sit in a few padded rocking chairs while we made dinner plans. We opted for the Snow Lodge across the street and its Obsidian restaurant, where I got prime rib and the kids got mac & cheese with French fries and Beth got some odd baked pasta thing, and we split a couple of desserts and tried to figure out who had the most sunburn.

Since the road between Fishing Bridge and Canyon Village is still closed, we had to go back the same way we came, but we took a short detour along Firehole Lake drive to see the Great Fountain geyser, which is a large series of terraced pools that looks like a geyser designed by a landscape architect. On the other side of the road was a short trail leading up to the Fountain paint pots, a large pit of whitish mud that constantly boils up in big bubbles. The sun was low in the sky for these which made picture taking more of a challenge, but we didn’t want to wait too long and get stuck driving in the dark again, so we made it back to our cabin by 8:45 or so and the kids were asleep in no time.

While there are many more geysers we could see in other areas, I think we saw plenty today, and saw more active eruptions that I would have expected, so we can now move on to some of the other areas of geologic interest, and maybe tomorrow try not to walk quite so much to give everybody a break.

Grand Tour of Yellowstone

Today was another long day in the saddle as they say in bike racing, longer than it should have been as we were expecting to do about 320 miles and ended up around 400. This was not the fault of Google Maps or myself, as I’ll get to in a minute.

After travelling so much yesterday, we were still able to get up and going reasonably early this morning, and had our complimentary breakfast (featuring the welcome return of the waffle maker) and were on the road by 9 am. Gassing up the minivan indicated that we were doing a little over 20 mpg, and cheap Casper gas was $3.79 a gallon (for 85 octane, which I don’t even think you can get in Mass). Once through Casper, we were off the highway for the next several days and on the long slow climb to Yellowstone.

The first stretch takes you up US-20 to Shoshoni, a stretch of about 80 miles with absolutely nothing remarkable to distinguish it. Then it’s a right turn to make the second leg up to Thermopolis, which we reached around 11. Since it was too early for lunch and would take too long to get to the next (and last) point of civilization in Cody, we stopped for a while at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, mostly to kill time till noon, but it turned out to be a good sized museum, built to contain a 106-foot long Supersaurus that was excavated right in Wyoming, and including quite a few complete skeletons of several other types of dinosaurs as well, mostly from the local surroundings. They also had a decent sized gift shop with a wide variety of different fossils and polished stones for sale. If we wanted to hang around even longer there was a tour of an excavation site you could also take for an additional fee, but we didn’t want to hang around that long.

Thermopolis, which should really just be a wide space in the road, has some claim to fame for being near the Hot Springs State Park, which is something of a minor resort area, with a water park and everything. The downtown is not huge, but we managed to find a decent restaurant that served a variety of different things, we mostly opted for sandwiches and salads but they also had crepes and homemade desserts. After lunch we took a few extra minutes to walk around the block to the post office and pick up some stamps, then hopped back in the car and took a short unplanned detour heading out of town into the state park, just to get some pictures and a look up close at the Tepee fountain, where the locals have created an enormous travertine dome by having the mineral water from the springs burble up out of a pipe and gradually create its own sedimentary formation. Started in 1903, its now probably 12 or 15 feet high (there’s another smaller one outside the park entrance that doesn’t look like its still operating, we speculated that it was there as a backup).

From Thermopolis you head northwest up state route 120 to Cody, another 80 miles with not much going on. After driving through the spectacular scenery of Wind River Gorge coming up from the south towards Thermopolis, anything less would have been a letdown, and while the rt 120 section was not as desolate as the road coming west out of Casper, it didn’t live up to its indication on the map as a scenic route. We made a pitstop about half way along in Meeteetse, another wide space in the road, and were in Cody by 3pm or so. We took some time there to stop at Dairy Queen, then walked through their main street area taking pictures of some painted fiberglass bears that are decorating the downtown area, much like the painted buffalos we saw in Custer, South Dakota back in ’05. A few people had recommended the Buffalo Bill museums, but it is actually several different museums in one, and priced as an all-day event, so we gave it a pass.

So now there were no more diversions, we were heading towards Yellowstone by 4pm or so and hoping to get to Canyon Village by 6:30. As soon as you leave Cody heading west you’re into the Absaroka mountains and winding along the valley parallel to the Buffalo Bill reservoir. The kids were watching movies in the backseat while Beth was trying to identify hoodoos, these distinctive rock formations that jut up out of the sides of the mountains, and I was trying to stay on the road while taking it all in. We found the goose hoodoo and the elephant hoodoo, never did see the laughing pig hoodoo. There were some odd colored yellowish clouds off to the north that were looming low against the mountains, but when we pulled over to take a picture we could smell smoke, and sure enough those clouds were coming from a fire somewhere northwest of where we were. At our last hoodoo stop at Chimney Rock there were a couple of official looking guys there in a pickup truck, so Beth asked what was going on, they said there was a fire nearby that had been burning since Saturday, and another one inside Yellowstone itself.

A few miles later we were at the eastern entrance of Yellowstone, where we paid the admission fee and the ranger told us not only was there a fire, but that the road between Fishing Bridge and Canyon Village was closed as a result. Come to find out a tree had fallen onto a power line and that started the fire. This meant that last stretch of 16 miles once we got a ways into the park would now require us to go all the way around the south loop of the Great Loop Road, which was more like 80 miles. If we’d known this ahead of time, we could’ve taken an alternate route from Cody that takes you out of your way to the north and in through the northeast entrance to Yellowstone, but the fire had only started earlier this afternoon. The ranger said, “they won’t finish putting it out anytime soon”, so there was nothing to be done but keep going and do the loop within the park.

We stopped at several scenic spots along the road to Fishing Bridge, since this was one stretch of the park we aren’t planning on retracing. We could see smoke from the fire off to the northwest again, but it wasn’t blowing near us and didn’t affect the views, mostly to the south. There were a few overlooks that we stopped for as we went up over Sylvan Pass and down towards Yellowstone Lake. One area had a few cars parked along the side, but everyone was sitting in their cars talking on their cell phones. This close to the entrance apparently you could still get some coverage, there must be some system by which people know where to go within the park to make those all-important calls.

By the time we were at Fishing Bridge and saw the closed road, it was already 6 o’clock, so we decided to stop the Lake Hotel just a mile or so down the road and try to eat there. Both the restaurant and the hotel are considered the best in the park, and normally to eat there you have to make reservations in advance, but the fire was screwing up everyone’s itinerary, and the place was more than half empty, so they took us right in. We skipped the pricier dishes like antelope, or prime rib of bison, and had a nice dinner with nice views of the lake out the window. We spent a few minutes in the gift shop afterwards and took some pictures, and were back in the car by 7:30. It took another two hours to drive around from there to West Thumb to Old Faithful to Norris junction and finally Canyon Village. It still wasn’t completely dark by the time we got to our room, but it was pretty close. Even at 8:40 Beth was still taking pictures of the sun setting over the Midway Basin. Saw a bad accident too where a little car had skidded off the road into the woods, recent enough that there were still police lights flashing. Traffic around the loop wasn’t too bad this time of day, there were still plenty of people out and about, fishing or checking out the geyser basins even as the sun was going down. The kids were trashed by the time we checked in and we weren’t far behind. I was half thinking that just my luck they opened the road five minutes after we turned south, but it was still closed when we got here, hopefully everything is under control, though. We’re staying in cabin P21, just one of zillions of little buildings containing four units each. Tomorrow I may let Beth drive some, since we’ll need to retrace our steps back to Old Faithful and see if we can catch ourselves a geyser.

Hello from Wyoming

So here we are back in Wyoming, a mere three years after our last trip out this way. Last time we covered the eastern half on our way to and from South Dakota, this time we tour the western half, starting here in scenic Casper (after a four hour drive from Denver last night), and heading towards Yellowstone. We'll spend a few days up there, then back down the western side through Jackson and Kemmerer with a short dip into Idaho in between, just to say we've been in Idaho, then back to Denver next week for this year's Worldcon.

The flights from Providence to Chicago to Denver were all on time and completely unremarkable. This was our first time flying on Southwest, and I had failed to appreciate the nature of their every man for himself boarding policy (i.e. no assigned seats), but it worked out ok, the kids could sit by themselves way up in the front of the plane on the first leg while we sat towards the back. For the second half we put right in front of us (which means nobody leaning their seat way back into my knees the second the plane is in the air). Once in Denver we talked to an older bleached blonde lady at the Alamo rental counter who was so friendly you couldn't help but think it was a diversionary tactic to rip us off, but we ended up with a Chrysler Town and Country that has satellite radio and a dvd player, so that should help ease the transition to Yellowstone.

Still right on schedule, we headed north to Cheyenne, where we had dinner at Los Amigos, a Mexican place we'd tried to check out last time but managed to hit on the day they were closed. This time we could get enchiladas and tacos, all very tasty, with $2.75 margaritas, which were served in a plastic tumbler, but hey, they're $2.75 margaritas, what can you complain about? It would have been nice to stop right in Cheyenne for the evening, but there was still another 8 or 9 hours of driving to Yellowstone, so we pushed on through the vast wasteland that is southeastern Wyoming for another 2.5 hours to Casper. There wasn't much traffic, and by the time we got here to the "Sleep Inn" in Evansville around 9:30 or so the sky had just gone completely dark. Still a certain amount of scenery through that stretch, highlighted by the sun setting.

So today is another 6 hours of driving to get to Canyon Village by way of Thermopolis and Cody, which promises to be much more scenic. But there's no internet in the park, so there won't be any more updates until at least Sunday night. We've got the cameras ready though!