Yellowstone, Reprise

Grand Teton to Yellowstone (9/19):

Another day of beautiful hiking and camping. Today we hiked around Yellowstone Canyon, which is a couple of really incredible waterfalls leading to a beautiful blue river surrounded by white lava-y rock walls. We meant to do both the North and South rims, but after hiking the North rim for a few hours, we felt satisfied with our efforts and called it a day. We saw lots more bison today, which are quickly becoming my favorite form of wildlife. They're kind of like cows, except dopier and hairier, and they're just kind of silly. They play around in the mud and flop over in dust patches, and I couldn't be happier (though this didn't stop me from eating a bison burger for dinner). Much of Yellowstone park sits inside the caldera of a still active volcano. This volcano used to be one of the largest and most active in the world. There's still a lot of magma beneath the surface, which explains much of the features of Yellowstone such as all the geysers, hot springs, and boiling pits of sulphur. I thought it was really crazy to look at these giant expanses of boiling earth that sit right beside pretty grassy hills with animals grazing on them, because it seems like those things shouldn't exist right beside each other. But then it turns out that a lot of these hills have formed because there is actually magma beneath them pushing them upwards, which fascinates me even more.

Yellowstone is full of beautiful scenery and crazy geological acts of nature, I could stare at just the skies all day--they're filled with the most beautiful cotton ball clouds, and I must have taken a zillion pictures that were some variant of golden grassland, rich green pine forest, and brilliant blue skies with fluffy white clouds. The wildlife is phenomenal--we've seen mule deer, pronghorns, white-tail deer, hundreds of buffalo, and even the head of a moose from a distance.

That said, I'm happy to be moving on from Yellowstone. It's pretty crowded with people (I can't even imagine what the summer is like when you have to make lodging reservations a year in advance). Also, the park is GIANT, and it takes forever to drive between places, which is time I'd rather spend outdoors. There are still other things I'd love to see, but we hit the highlights, and we'd need years to see everything else.

We're camping again tonight, this time in Tower campground in northern Yellowstone. Our guidebook cheerfully informed us that Tower is smack dab in the epicenter of grizzly activity in Yellowstone. Also, entering the campground, you pass a crushed RV that was the victim of a falling tree on Monday night. Our tent is directly beneath a couple of very large trees, and we are watching lightning storms surrounding our campsite. So if this posts ends up on the internet, it means we survived the trees and grizzlies and made it to Montana, where we will be visiting Glacier National Park in the coming days.

Speaking of campsites, having visited several over the past few days, I've noticed the number of tent sites at a campsite is directly proportional to the number of campers wearing headlamps.
-M