Yellowstone!

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Yellowstone! Land of yellow...stone..., grizzley bears (as well as black bears and a lot of buffalo and deer), and stinky, stinky geysers. Haha!

We didn't get to see any bears...I doubt we woke up anywhere near early enough for proper bear viewing, and even if we did, they like to stay far away from the roads. They aren't as pesky as Yosemite bears and don't like to search people for food, so...no bear.

We did get to see Old Faithful though! It's their most famous geyser because of its predictability and volume. It looks like a lot of smoke in the photos because of how much steam it puts out. All of the hot springs, geysers, and paintpots in the park (of which there are thousands) are caused by the lavaflows underground. The eruptions, streams, steam and bubbles are gasses and heat escaping to the surface, either gradually or in the form of buildup that causes geysers like Old Faithful. The only drawback to all of this beautiful and intersting stuff? Sulfer. By the end of our days there I'm not sure we could sense the rotten egg smell anymore because it was permenantly stuck in our noses. All of the hot water features put out large amounts of sulfer. Whew!

Yellowstone was also just breathtakingly beautiful, from the buffalo that roamed right next to teh roads that followed awesome rivers to the grand canyon of the yellowstone (actually the only yellow stone in the park, for which it was named). There's also an enormous lake that seems to skirt the very northernmost tip of the rockies. It was beautiful.

Funny, but instead of going through the rockies we skirted around them, seeing the southernmost tip from Mesa Verde, Colorado, to Yellowstone, Wyoming. Oh, and as a sidenote, we're officially been through 11 states so far!

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Comments

[Ellen]

Geezers
When we visited Iceland, we were surprised to hear geysers called geezers. At first, we thought people were referring to US! Love you!