Yellowstone - 31 years later

Upper Falls, Yellowstone

Today found us traveling through much of Yellowstone Park, a place we had visited only one other time, quite long ago, when I was pregnant with Rosie. On that visit, which we did in our little red Fiat 128 Spyder, I almost fainted at the site of Old Faithful after eating too quickly, sampling a beer, and being at high altitude. This time I didn't faint, but it was unrelentingly sunny and the altitude still was high. Yellowstone is just a stunning and unbelievable place. The scale on which it is fabricated is so huge that it is hard to comprehend. You drive for miles and miles around a caldera that blew up not all that long ago, only 600,000 thousand years, and it still seems like the ground below is angry and ready to spew again. The smell of sulfur is strong in many places; fumaroles are steaming, mud ponds are bubbling, and boiling water is oozing out of rocks. It is wild. The alpine meadows go on for as far as you can see and evidence of a huge forest fire, that happened in 1988, is apparent in almost every corner of the park. In many ways it does not detract from the beauty. Stark, blackened tree trunks look quite elegant against the vast backdrops of rock walls and pine forests, and in many areas the burned out forest has re-seeded itself with thousands of young and hopeful pines. Wildflowers carpet the hillsides. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River has to be one of the most dramatic and impressive sights a person could ever see, and this followed a run-up from Sheridan, Wyoming which we did on US Route 14. Our track took us via the Bighorn Mountains to to the east entrance to Yellowstone. Our mouths were agape as we carefully maneuvered the trusty Versa up the curving road that literally marched us through every geological period via this incredible engineering job on multiple road cuts.

Mammoth Hot Springs, Upper Terrace Drive, Yellowstone

Now that our road trip is drawing to a close, after almost a full month, and close to 9,000 miles, I have to think about how it has felt.  There were many days when the driving seemed way too much and I wondered what we were thinking, but we have gotten to see so many things, many of them unexpected and therefore even more special than what we thought we knew or expected. This last stretch along the banks of the Mississippi; the Devils Tower; Spearfish Canyon and through the heart of Wyoming today; all are places we could never have seen or experienced without putting in those sometimes hard and boring miles to get there.

It has been fun to briefly and randomly encounter other people along the way. Sometimes in restaurants, or at overlooks. These are mini-visits into another person's life and then you get to jump back into your car, and drive away and never see them again. It is another form of sight seeing.
      
Andrea