Yellowstone, Day 2

I was not surprised, nor especially disappointed, to learn that the internet at Canyon Village in Yellowstone was (as we had been told by folks at the front desk) “spotty.”  I discovered that it was good enough for me, especially very early in the morning, like 4:30 a.m. when I awoke on Wednesday morning.  The early time was not as inconvenient as it may seem, since we were still basically on Eastern Time, which would have been 6:30 a.m.  The reason for the early start to the day was because Martha had scheduled a “Yellowstone in a Day” tour which started at 8:00 a.m. at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, almost an hour away.

 

It felt like a race morning to both of us.  How many times have we awakened, prepared ourselves, and gotten on the road for a race?  I can recall setting the alarm for as early as 3:30 a.m. for big races (e.g., the Boston Marathon in 2011), and that was Eastern Time.  It was 41 degrees and the roads were deserted at that hour.  There was a pearly, rosy kind of light in the morning sky as we drove west and then north toward the Hotel, and we saw billows of steam rising up all around us from the hot springs along the road.  It was a very beautiful and otherworldly sensation.

 

We arrived in plenty of time for this small group tour – there were a dozen of us – and our Tour Guide showed up promptly on time.  His name was Jack, and he seemed to be a little befuddled at first (mostly due to his lame Jokes – “Nobody ever says hi to me in an airport!”) but he soon proved to be very knowledgeable, with a wealth of information on history, flora and fauna, and geology.  He had grown up coming to Yellowstone as a young boy, and he was quick to tell us that a person could never, of course, see all of Yellowstone in a single day.  It was a good overview of the Park, though, getting us oriented and revealing some of the highlights of this 2.2-million acre treasure, the nation’s first National Park. 

 

"National Parks are the best idea we ever had.  Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." — Wallace Stegner

 

It occurred to me somewhere along this road trip – our own journey to go “look for America,” in the words of that Paul Simon song (see post of August 4) – that there are two things especially good about America:  our constitution and our National and State Parks, our best rather than our worst, and both under constant attack these days. This land is just awesome, and I was thankful that there are no homes owned by millionaires perched on the hills above us or thronging the shores of Yellowstone Lake, that wise men had the idea of preserving this land. 

 

My first question to Jack, my first of many, was why the Park was named Yellowstone.  The answer, he explained, is that it is named after the Yellowstone River, which begins in Wyoming and flows through here.  It, in turn (my thanks to Wikipedia for the clarifying details), comes from a name given the river by the Minnetaree tribe, who lived in modern Montana.  In the 1800s, French-Canadian trappers asked them the name of the river, and they responded “Mi tse a-da-zi,” which translates literally as “Rock Yellow River.”  There is little of this Yellow Rock here, but a wealth of other geological treasures.

 

Our first stop along the Grand Loop Road, which we had driven earlier, was the steaming terrain we had passed this morning on our way to the Hotel, the Mammoth Hot Springs from which its name is derived and the unusual calcium deposits thrown up from the springs, which looks for all the world like ice.

 

Jack told us that the basin we were driving through was a caldera (a crater formed by the inward collapse of a volcano) formed by the explosion of a supervolcano that erupted 70,000 years ago.  When it exploded, it had sent trees into the sky, traces of which were found as far away as Canada and the Gulf of Mexico.  The area is still volcanic, and the heat is not very far below the surface.  (We would discover the next day that Yellowstone Lake has some hot water in its depths).  He pointed out the rim of the crater all around, which we could now see was roughly circular in shape although very large.

 

We stopped again and again to look at some of these volcanic features – Beryl Springs (which under certain light glows blue-green like the gemstone beryl), the Fountain Paint Pots, Red Spouter.  Jack carried a remote thermometer, the kind a chef might use, which he hovered above some of the pools along the walkways – walkways which visitors were forbidden to leave, as many cautionary signs along the way told us – and the water was often just below boiling.

 

He told us a tragic story about one particular hot spring (I cannot remember which one).  Two men and a dog owned by one of the men got out of their car, and the dog excitedly ran ahead and leapt into one of the pools, which can look like clear, cool water to both dog and human.  He quickly started to succumb, and one of the men dove in to rescue him.   The dog died almost immediately, and the man who had tried to save him survived his burns, was airlifted to a nearby burn center, but lived only a day longer before dying as well.  We stayed on the walkways.

 

We stopped at so many steaming springs and waterfalls that I could not keep up with them as I jotted down notes on my phone, to be transferred later to my little travel notebook.  A particular beautiful example was Firehole River Falls, right by the road, in a river where some fishermen were casting lines.  Among the many other things Jack told us along the way was that most of the trees we were seeing were not Douglas fir, as I had mistakenly believed, but lodgepole pine, used in the construction of many of the buildings we had been seeing in the Park including our own lodge.  It comprised 80% of the climax forest around us.  One of the more spectacular buildings constructed from lodgepole pine, its tall ceiling held up by huge columns with clusters of burls, was Old Faithful Inn, built in 1903-1904 with local logs and stone and one of the largest log structures in the world.  We walked through the lobby, and standing high on the balcony above, a young man was playing beautiful classical music (a Bach minuet I think) on a violin, as unexpected and beautiful a moment as any on this road trip.

 

 

The Inn was immediately adjacent to the most well-known geyser in the world, its faithful schedule so accurate that we were told it would be erupting at 1:25 p.m.  Jack had conveniently arrived at the Inn an hour before then so that we all had time for lunch (which was very good), accompanied by an excellent IPA (I wasn’t driving).  We decided that the outside terrace overlooking Old Faithful would be as good a place as any to watch the geyser at the appointed time, and we were not disappointed as it made its scheduled appearance and shot steam 140 feet into the air. 

 

Another interesting place we stopped was Isa Lake, a weed-choked seepage lake right on the continental divide (8,262 feet).  Interestingly, by a quirk of geology, its eastern end drains into the Pacific and its western end drains into the Mississippi.  Jack told us that the men who first discovered the lake could not decide whether it was a pond or a lake.  One of them claimed that he had listened carefully and heard the lake itself whispering the words: “I’s a lake.”  An example of his corny jokes.

 

We continued around the Grand Loop Road and stopped at the Lake Hotel, situated picturesquely on the shores of Yellowstone Lake.  Built in 1891 (and extensively remodeled over the years) it is the oldest operating hotel in the park, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2015. We would be seeing the hotel from the perspective of the lake the next day.

 

Sometime after we left the Lake Hotel – again, I could not keep up with the information in my little journal nor recollect the exact place – we encountered a long line of cars stopped in the road, our first bison traffic jam.  It is not an unusual occurrence in the park, and the bison themselves seem to enjoy bringing to a standstill the shutter-clicking visitors driving by.  They walk right onto the road, then stroll nonchalantly down the middle, holding up traffic for long stretches of time.  We heard some employees say that they are often cited as a reason for being late for work.

 

Our next stop was one of the most spectacular sights we had seen thus far, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with its Lower Falls and Upper Falls at either end.  To us, it was as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon.

 
Driving counterclockwise around the Grand Loop Road, we passed Canyon Village and continued north, climbing up toward Mount Washburn (10,219 feet).  There were patches of snow here and there at this elevation, and the climb was beautiful, one which we would be driving in our Mini in a couple of days.  As we came down the other side, sharp-eyed Jack spotted a movement ahead and said, “Look, a coyote!”  He pulled off at an overlook and said he thought it had run into a culvert under the road, and sure enough it appeared on the other side down in the sagebrush and prairie grass, eyeing us warily.
 

While we were stopped, another car pulled up behind us, and I was shocked to see (I suppose I should no longer be shocked by anything Trump-related) that the entire front hood was covered in a portrait (enhanced to make him look like a handsome movie star) of the man himself, with the slogan, TRUMP – STILL MY PRESIDENT written in bold letters.  Please.  Here we are in this beautiful place, and the MAGA cult still raises its ugly head insistently in our faces.

 

We arrived back at the Mammoth Hot Spring Hotel at 6:30 p.m., ten-and-a-half hours after we had left, a long day for us.  It was just starting to get dark, and we decided to have a glass of wine and some appetizers in one of the dining rooms at the Terrace Grill.  It was a nice time to recover a bit from the whirlwind activities of Yellowstone in a Day, but it proved a little disastrous, mostly because your humble blogger missed a turn in the dark on the way back to Canyon Village, finally persuaded by his wife that we were going in the wrong direction.  At one point, we were trapped in another bison traffic jam, but this one was a little scarier in our little convertible, the great beasts all around us right by the road in the fading light calling out long, threatening challenges to one another (it was rutting season).  We were relieved to finally get on the right road and make our way back to the Lodge in darkness, our path illuminated dimly by the light on my cellphone.