India (2014)

We have had to postpone our India trip from this coming fall to the autumn of next year.

One Last Walk and Home

On Friday, June 7th, we had a nice breakfast in the Inn on the Creek's sunny breakfast room.  Then we checked out and drove through town to the Thrifty lot, to make sure that they had gotten the change that we had requested by a message left at a Salt Lake City phone number.  We were not happy with Thrifty: they ended up charging us more than they had projected when we made our reservation, without any reason given other than an unexplained surcharge.

We went on, out the road to Teton Village, going past that ski resort and onto the Moose-Wilson Road.  For several miles, this is a gravel road, but it wasn't bad.  The asphalt paving reappeared near the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, which we had briefly visited on Sunday.  Since we needed to get the car back in time for the 11 a.m. airport shuttle, we had could only take a short walk, partway out to Phelps Lake.  On the trail, there are spots to sit and meditate in the presence of nature.

We went back down the road, caught the shuttle (which started late, because we had to wait for someone else) and eventually caught our plane to Denver, and then back home.

Canyon, Lake and Jackson

On Thursday, June 6th, we got up early and I found Nancy in the kitchen.  I told her that we had changed our plans, deciding to get an early start in order to get to the Canyon area in time to take the 10 a.m. ranger walk.  She was kind enough to get together a breakfast for us at that short notice.  So we ate and said goodbye to her and Richard and headed back to Yellowstone, backtracking the way we had come on Tuesday, until Norris Junction, where we turned east toward Canyon Village, instead of continuing south toward Old Faithful.

After a toilet stop at Canyon Village, we got to the Uncle Tom's Trail parking area in time to join a group of people around Ranger Mary,

who was accompanied by Ranger Brian.  She mentioned that she was the same age (25) as many of the trees in the park.  However, the petite ranger added, they were a lot taller than she was.  We had noticed how many of the thousands upon thousands of lodgepole pines that covered most of the park were relatively young.  They had grown from seeds dropped at the time of the extremely massive fires that had swept Yellowstone in 1988.  The Old Faithful Inn had been saved only by setting up a defensive ring around it and keeping it doused with water.

Lodgepole pines, by the way, are less massive than the ponderosa pines found around Grand Canyon National Park.  They get  their name from the fact that, straight as ramrods, they were used by the Indians to support their dwellings.

Ranger Mary took us on a walk along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, explaining to us that the river was able to cut so easily through the rock here because it was weakened by geothermal activity.  She also talked about the forests and the animals.  She carried a can of bear spray and pointed out where bears had clawed the trees,

also showing where bison had rubbed off bark.  Along the way, we had views of the Upper Falls (109 feet high)

and the Lower Falls (308 feet).

She ended with an impassioned plea for the continued protection of this area, so that just as for the past 97 years the National Park Service has been providing here for the "enjoyment and  benefit" of our grandparents, parents and selves, so may it continue to do so for the next 97 years, for our children and grandchildren.

After giving her a hearty round of applause, Mary Joy and I continued walking to Artist Point.  The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is certainly grand and awesome, with its golden color, thousand-foot depth and spectacular waterfalls, as the artist Thomas Moran (after whom Mt. Moran in the Tetons is named) showed in his famous 1872 painting of the Canyon and Lower Falls as viewed from Artist Point or its proximity, a painting that helped persuade people back east that the Yellowstone country was something very special.

 But compared to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is about as grand and awesome as a farm drainage ditch.  That is not the fault of the Yellowstone.  It is just because the "real" Grand Canyon is so huge and spectacular as to be practically beyond belief.

We walked back from Artist Point to our car, then drove to another parking lot, and from there made the short walk to the brink of the Upper Falls.

 Above the Falls there is a cascade, leading to a sharp right turn, then the river makes the hundred-foot leap over Upper Falls.  Impressive.

We drove south, stopping for a snack at the Otter Creek picnic area, a pleasant spot beside the Yellowstone River.

We then came to the Hayden Valley, a wide, wet area across which the Yellowstone meanders on its way from Yellowstone Lake to the falls.  This valley is as almost as famous for wildlife viewing as the Lamar Valley.  However, we weren't nearly as lucky in our animal watching here as there.  Certainly, there weren't nearly as many bison, and most of those we did see were isolated bulls.

After leaving the Hayden Valley, we stopped to see Dragon's Mouth Spring and Mud Volcano.  Dragon's Mouth is more fun than most of the park's geothermal features.

 It's a dark cave, emitting clouds of steam and a constant loud thumping noise.  Every few minutes, it sends out a wave of water.  Mud Volcano is a big pot of bubbling gray mud.

Finally, we arrived at Yellowstone Lake, the largest alpine lake in North America, with a shoreline of 141 miles.  We stopped for lunch at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel, a large, yellow, colonial-style building, built in 1891, then revised and added to in the following years.

 The dining room was pleasant and the food not bad--again, I don't remember what we had.

Then we headed west along the north shore of the lake.  We stopped at one or two places around West Thumb, to look at and across the large lake.

 By now we were in something of a hurry, because we wanted to get to Jackson in time to check in before our dinner reservation.  So we came to West Thumb Junction and headed toward the South Entrance along the road where we had come into the park on Tuesday morning.

There was still road repair, slowing us up a little between Colter Bay and the Jackson Lake Lodge.  Once we had gotten past that, we pulled off at the Willow Flats overlook,

for another gorgeous view of the Tetons.

On Teton Park Road again, south of the dam, we stopped to take a look at the Log Chapel of the Sacred Heart,

which is a functioning Catholic Church.  It is, as you would expect, rustic and woodsy.  As we went in, someone was playing the piano.  It turned out to be a British or Australian tourist.

We continued on the now-familiar road, out the Moose entrance.  As we crossed the Snake River by Dornan's, we saw cars lined up at the side of the road and people taking pictures.  I caught a glimpse of something big and brown, probably a moose.  We didn't bother to stop.

We drove on into Jackson, to our wonderful B&B, the Inn on the Creek.

We checked into the Heron Room, a delightfully comfortable room with a balcony looking along the creek.

We then walked the two blocks to the Blue Lion for dinner.  As Lonely Planet says: "In a precious cornflower-blue house, the Blue Lion offers outdoor dining under grand old trees on the deck."  We had to settle for a pleasant-enough inside table.  The food was good, but not great, and Mary Joy had the disappointment of not having their signature dish, the rack of lamb.  She doesn't eat New Zealand lamb, since there are much better local sources that haven't sent their meat halfway around the world.  Surely a classy restaurant in a place like Jackson could find a local or relatively local (say, Colorado) source of lamb.  Apparently not: New Zealand lamb it was, so Mary Joy had something else.

We walked around downtown for a while, but were not impressed.  Then we went back to our Heron Room and ended our day there.

Lamar Valley and Mammoth Hot Springs

On Wednesday, June 5th, we went up to a very nice breakfast (what, I don't exactly remember) with Nancy's husband, Richard, an Indian-American couple and a Spanish couple from Madrid.  We had been thinking of spending this day doing the northern half of the Grand Loop, via Tower Fall, with most of the time spent in the Canyon area, doing a ranger walk.  But we already knew that the road between Tower-Roosevelt Junction and Canyon Village was torn up and under repair, and Richard said that the best time to see all the colors of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was in the morning, rather than the afternoon.  Instead, he suggested that we drive through the Lamar Valley to Cooke City, Montana, have lunch there and see Mammoth Hot Springs on the way back.

Though Mary Joy didn't consider herself to be much interested in wildlife (the Lamar Valley has been called "the American Serengeti," for its large herds of bison and elk and the wolf packs and grizzly bears that prey on them), we decided to follow Richard's advice.  It turned out to be the most interesting of our three days in Yellowstone.

We drove up the Gardiner River Canyon to Mammoth Hot Springs.  The North Entrance at Gardiner was originally the main entrance to the park, since the Great Northern Railroad had a station there, the nearest railroad approach to Yellowstone.  That is why the park's monumental gateway, the Roosevelt Arch, was built there in 1903.

 The inscription at the top was taken from the 1872 act of Congress that created Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park: "For the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

At Mammoth Hot Springs was Fort Yellowstone, the headquarters of the U.S. Army when it was charged with patrolling the park, before the National Park Service, with its rangers, was created in 1916.  The fort's buildings are now the visitor center and other buildings relating to administration of the park: Mammoth Hot Springs is the headquarters for Yellowstone National Park.

From Mammoth Junction we headed east, out of town, and four miles later came to Undine Falls.

 After a short stop there, we went on, and shortly before Tower-Roosevelt Junction, we turned onto the short side road to the Petrified Tree.  Originally, there were many petrified trees standing on the hillside there, California redwoods caught in a massive volcanic eruption fifty million years ago and slowly turned into stone, before the surrounding volcanic rock was eroded away.  All but one of these trees were chipped away by souvenir hunters.  The remaining one is surrounded by a massive iron gate.

At Tower-Roosevelt Junction, although, as we already knew, the road south to Dunraven Pass was torn up and under repair, we still decided to go the two-and-a-half miles to Tower Fall.  It was stop-and-go, with flagmen and lots of dust, but we eventually came to the large parking lot by a large store.  We parked and headed up a short trail to the overlook, where you can best see a very impressive waterfall: tall and full and surrounded by rocky towers.  It is, unlike the other waterfalls in the park, named "Tower Fall," instead of "Tower Falls."  Why?  No one seems to know.

We returned to the Junction, and there turned east again, off the Grand Loop Road and onto the road toward the Northeast Entrance and Cooke City.  This road goes over a bridge across the Yellowstone River, then up over a ridge and back down into the valley of the Lamar River, a tributary of the Yellowstone.  In the winter, the great elk herds (there are 20,000 to 30,000 elk in the park) come down into the valley from their summer feeding grounds, and they are followed by many of Yellowstone's 300 wolves and 200 grizzly bears.  During the summer, however, the Lamar Valley is left primarily to its year-round inhabitants, the largest population (there are around 3,000 in the park as a whole) of free-ranging American bison left on earth.

They have no fear of people or of cars--many a traffic jam is caused by one or more bison deciding to cross the road.

This time of year, in early June, the large concentrations consist of a dozen or more mothers with their month-old calves, the latter probably weighing more than I do.  Driving along, you see individual bison here and there.  These are the males, who spend most of the year on their own, antisocial.

 In another month or two that would change.  A ranger later told us that her favorite time to watch bison is during the July-August rut.  She said that the Hayden Valley (Yellowstone's other major wildlife-viewing area) is then full of bison running frantically back and forth, with bulls violently challenging one another and trying to gather harems.  The elk rut, as we had discovered in Colorado, is later, September-October, after they've come down to their winter feeding grounds.

Here is how touring the Lamar Valley works: you drive along the road, passing by or through bison herds, until you see a group of people parked on one side of the road, looking at something through their binoculars, or, if they are really serious animal watchers, through a telescope on a tripod.

"Hi," you say, "what do you see?"

"Black bear.  Four of them.  There's a lone one up in that clearing, probably a male, and a mother with two cubs, one black and one cinnamon-colored, over by that patch of trees."

You get out your small, pocket binoculars, and look in the directions indicated.  You see a little black smudge moving across the distant clearing, and near those barely-visible trees you see another tiny smudge, followed by two even tinier dots, one black and one cinnamon.  At that point you wish that instead of bringing the pocket binoculars you had tried harder to cram the big Bushnells into your luggage.

"Wow!" says your wife, who has taken the telescope-owner's proud offer to show what his equipment can do.  You follow her to take a look and, yes, those are really bears.

Further down the road, someone has his telescope focused on an osprey's nest.  Others are watching a coyote den, with pups.  One couple excitedly tells of having, two minutes earlier, seen a pronghorn give birth.  It was a lot of fun.

The road left the Lamar River and headed northeast, up Soda Butte Creek.  Soda Butte is the cone from a defunct hot spring, a big white clump that looks very odd sitting by the side of the road without other geysers, fumaroles, mud pots or hot springs to keep it company.

Twenty-nine miles from Mammoth Hot Springs, having crossed back into Montana, we came to the Northeast Entrance of the park.  Just outside of the park is the village of Silver Gate, where we stopped for lunch at a Lonely Planet recommendation, the Log Cabin Cafe.

 Mary Joy had been looking for trout, and there she found it.  Again, Lonely Planet proved infallible where restaurants are concerned: it was a very nice lunch.

Then, we turned around and headed back.  We stopped where a couple from Idaho was watching mountain goats on Barronette Peak.  Then a larger group of people was looking at something near where Soda Butte Creek flowed into the Lamar.  "Grizzly," said one man.  Indeed, down by the water there was a cinnamon-colored bear, much more visible than the black bears we had seen that morning.  But as it got closer, one woman said "No, it's a black bear.  No hump."  While most grizzly bears are cinnamon-colored and most black bears actually are black, that is not always the case--that morning we had seen a not-black black bear cub.  What is distinctive about the grizzly, besides its size, is its shoulder hump.  This bear, besides seeming smaller than a grizzly should be, had no such hump.

Many years ago, the now long-dead British humor magazine, Punch, did a takeoff on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.  At one point, Hiawatha asks his mentor the exact same question at issue here: how do you tell a grizzly bear from a black bear.  The mentor replies that you take a stick and whack the bear over the nose.  If it runs away and climbs a tree, it's a black bear.  If you run away and climb a tree, it's a grizzly.  I would not recommend trying this method.  If you did it with a black bear, you would, at very least, end up in the hospital.  If you tried it with a grizzly, you wouldn't get far enough to climb a tree (he can run a lot faster than you can, and would assume that since you are running away from him, you are prey).  Both you and the bear would end up dead, the bear not because of anything you did to protect yourself, but because other human beings do not look kindly on bears who kill people, even if by doing so they substantially increase the average IQ of the human race.

The National Park Service expends a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that visitors to Yellowstone and Grand Teton are "Bear Aware."  They provide a good deal of information on how to behave in bear country, so as to avoid (or at least survive) nasty encounters.  If you are hiking where there are known to be bears, you should go in groups of four or more, making lots of noise, carrying cans of bear spray (a kind of pepper spray shown to stop grizzlies in full charge).  Don't run away, don't make eye contact.  If necessary, drop to the ground face-down, with your arms covering your neck.

At breakfast, Richard had told us of a couple who were hiking in the woods, turned a corner in the trail and suddenly found themselves face-to-face with a grizzly cub.  Before they could think of what to do, they both felt sharp nips at their rear ends and were brushed aside as the mother grizzly went to join her cub.  As Richard said, they were very lucky.  Still, many more injuries are caused every year by bison than by bears, and just the week before, a child had been gored to death by an elk.

But we did not see a single grizzly on this trip (except one in our cabin in Gardiner),

nor any wolves, though, on our geyser day, we were caught in a traffic jam at one point, whereupon a coyote crossed the road immediately in front of us, went quickly up the embankment to our right and disappeared over the top.

We stopped and took the short hike up to Trout Lake, a peaceful spot.

As the afternoon was drawing on, we continued westward, bidding a fond farewell to the Lamar Valley.  On the way we pulled off at the Roaring Creek overlook, mentioned favorably in both Janet Chapple's Yellowstone Treasures (a detailed and valuable guidebook to all things Yellowstone) and a National Park Service video on the North Loop.  We went past it the first time, since there is no signage.  There is a broad panorama of the Yellowstone valley, but no really spectacular scenery.

When we got into Mammoth, there were elk sitting in the shade of some of the buildings.  As in Grand Canyon Village in Arizona, elk act as if they own Mammoth Hot Springs.  The same is true of Gardiner.

We parked in the lot near Liberty Cap,

a forty-five-foot-high cone of travertine--calcium carbonate rock deposited from a now-defunct hot spring.  Mammoth Hot Springs, unlike the other thermal areas in Yellowstone, is not built of volcanic rock.  Instead, the springs are hot water forced up through limestone, dissolving out the calcium carbonate, then depositing it when the water reaches the surface and cools.  The result is huge mounds and terraces of white travertine, constantly growing and changing.  Janet Chapple says that the springs put out 1.4 million gallons of water and two tons of new travertine a day.  If you are a Rick Steves fan, you might remember seeing one show where he visits Pammukale in Turkey, where there are similar but larger springs and terraces.

We wandered around the Main Terrace, going up and down the wooden stairs and boardwalks.  My favorite feature was Naiad Spring, a colorful watersource issuing from Mound Terrace.

We had huckleberry ice cream at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel's Terrace Grill, then checked out the Hotel Dining Room.  Mary Joy wanted to go back to Gardiner to change for dinner, so we did that, driving the twenty minutes each way, down and up the canyon.  Mary Joy liked her meal at the Dining Room (I forget what she had), but mine was the worst meal I had on the trip.  The penne pasta had clearly not been drained, so the sauce was mostly water.

We drove back to Gardiner just before it got dark, had some cookies and tea at the main house and went back to our cabin to bed.

Geysers

On Tuesday, June 4th, we slept in a little, then had breakfast again at the Mural Room.  Instead of the buffet, Mary Joy had an eggwhite-spinach frittata, which she liked very much (maybe the best meal of the whole trip, she later said).  I had oatmeal with strawberries and brown sugar.  We checked out a little after 10 a.m. and finally got on the road north.  Just north of the Lodge, they were resurfacing the road, and in some places it was down to one lane, with a flagman (or, more likely, flagwoman) stopping traffic with his (or her) red "STOP" sign until all the cars allowed through heading south were past.  Then he (or, more likely, she) would twirl the sign around so that it was now orange and said "SLOW," and wave us on through.

We got through this, eventually, and left Grand Teton National Park and the Teton range, transitioning immediately to the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway.  This ended seven miles later, at the South Entrance to Yellowstone National Park.  We started going up, first along the Snake River, then along the deep, deep canyon of the Lewis River, walled with black volcanic rock.  We passed Lewis Falls and Lewis Lake and came up to and over the Continental Divide.  In the woods alongside the road, there were still occasional patches of snow.  The snow that melted just before the Divide would, theoretically, end up in the Pacific, by way of the Lewis,Snake and Columbia Rivers, while the water from snow along the way from the Divide to Yellowstone Lake would go through the lake to the Yellowstone River, then down to the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Gulf Of Mexico.

We arrived at West Thumb Junction (more about West Thumb and Yellowstone Lake in a later post), turned left and drove on, crossing the Continental Divide twice more, before we came down and caught sight of the multiple steam plumes from the Upper Geyser Basin, then arrived at Old Faithful Village.

On the way, our car had been sleeted on a little and rained on a little, but now, while the sky was overcast, it felt a little warmer here than it had the day before in Jackson Hole, the valley that contains Grand Teton National Park ("hole" being the term the early nineteenth-century beaver-hunting mountain men had used for a valley surrounded by mountains).  The crowds here were substantially larger than in Grand Teton.  We wondered what sort of madhouse it would be in full season, in July and August.  As it was, we had to park fairly far away from our destination, the visitor center.  When we got there, there was a sign saying that the next expected eruption of Old Faithful would be at 12:15, give or take ten minutes.  It was now 12:10, and we saw through the big picture windows that the crowds were congregating around Old Faithful, so we rushed out and joined them.

Old Faithful erupted for several minutes, then subsided.  Well.  Exciting?  Well, something different.  You don't see any geysers in Minnesota--half the world's geysers are in Yellowstone Park.  This is because Yellowstone is actually a huge volcano.  Its last major eruption, 640,000 years ago, was an explosion much more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption.  A similar eruption today would devastate much of the central United States.  Two previous, similar eruptions were 700,000 years apart, so the next one could happen any time now, give or take 60,000 years.

After listening to Ranger Leah give a short talk, interrupted by her scolding some children for dipping their hands in runoff water from Old Faithful, we decided to have lunch at the Old Faithful Inn.  

The Inn has a huge stone fireplace in the lobby, going up the tall central atrium, past four stories of dark, wood balconies.  According to Wikipedia, this is the largest log hotel in the world, perhaps the largest log building in the world.  It began the fashion for rustic lodges in the National Parks, where previous hotels (such as the Lake Yellowstone Hotel), had followed the more neoclassical style of resort hotels in the eastern U.S.  

The Inn's dining room is large and in the same style as the lobby.  Mary Joy followed the  host's suggestion and had the Cajun bison burger special.  I forget what I had, but it was much less adventuresome--Mary Joy is a lot less cautious about trying exotic foods than I am.  I did have a taste of her burger and liked it--it was like very good beef, no gamy taste.

After lunch we wandered around on Geyser Hill.  Nothing much was going on except that Anemone Geyser would erupt every eight or so minutes, not very high above the ground.  When it was done, the water would flow back into the hole with a gurgling sound.

We drove north to the Midway Geyser Basin.  From the parking lot you cross the Firehole River and go up a boardwalk to a natural terrace where hot water flows down from the Excelsior Geyser Crater into the river.  

The Excelsior is a large pool, covered with steam.  In the nineteenth century, it was the largest geyser in the world, with eruptions shooting up to 300 feet.  However, these eruptions apparently damaged the geyser's plumbing system, so now it is just a huge hot spring.  According to Wikipedia, it discharges 4,000 to 4,500 gallons of water per minute.  Further along the boardwalk is the Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring in the United States and third-largest in the world.  Photos from above show a very colorful pool, surrounded by yellow and orange bacterial mats.  From the edge of the spring, however, it is hard to see much of it, due to the haze of steam.  

Mary Joy heard some tourists speaking French, and addressed them in that language.  They were enjoying the park very much, and spoke good English, though when one woman asked us if we had "[something] beer," it took us a while to figure out that she was asking us if we had seen any bear.

We took a slight detour out Firehole Lake Drive,  stopping for such geothermal attractions as Firehole Spring and Surprise Pool, and driving around Firehole Lake, a small lake surrounded by spouting springs.  The most interesting thing we saw on this road was an eruption of White Dome Geyser.  

White Dome is a big, dirty-white lump, with a reddish streak down one side.  While we were there, it suddenly started giving off steam, shooting a plume up high into the sky.  We quickly backed away to watch for the few minutes that this lasted.

Firehole Lake Drive, which is one-way, from south to north, comes out at the entrance to the Lower Geyser Basin.  We went up to Fountain Paint Pot, a big, bubbling mudhole.

 There we overheard a guide point out bison turds inside the fence.  We had seen the same thing at the Grand Prismatic Spring.  He said that bison, in spite of weighing a full ton, had no trouble jumping the fences!  While we were there, we noticed a very high geyser eruption nearby, probably Fountain Geyser, but by the time we got over there, it was finished.

 I liked Red Spouter, a small, red mudhole that was constantly bubbling, rumbling and steaming.

 Back on the road, we saw our first bison herd, which backed up traffic as people stopped to take pictures.

 We stopped to see Gibbon Falls, but by now it was getting late in the afternoon and we were geysered out, so we didn't stop at the Norris Geyser Basin.  Somehow, we went past Roaring Mountain without noticing it, but we stopped at Obsidian Cliff, where we talked with some fellow Minnesotans.  We noticed cars stopped at Swan Lake Flat, so we got out and asked the people what they were seeing through their binoculars.  Bear.  However, I wasn't able to find anything with my own binoculars.  

We drove into Mammoth Hot Springs and stopped briefly at the visitor center, before going on to Gardiner, Montana.  Gardiner is only five miles from Mammoth Hot Springs, but is a thousand feet lower in altitude.  What that means is that the drive down is through the canyon of the Gardiner River, and not for the faint of heart.

But Mary Joy has driven Highway 1 in Marin County, and down Boulder Canyon from Nederland to Boulder, both at night, so, since there was still plenty of daylight, this was a piece of cake.

In Gardiner, after driving through the Roosevelt Arch and out of Yellowstone National Park, we found our way to our B&B, the Gardiner Guest House.  

We received a warm welcome from the owner, Nancy, a transplant from Maine.  There are three rooms in the house itself, but our "room" was a cabin down the hill in back.  The ground floor was a living area with sofa and kitchenette.  Upstairs was a comfortable bedroom with a bathroom and separate shower.  Nice.

For dinner, Nancy had suggested Cowboy's Grill, across the street.  Unlike Jackson, Gardiner is not known as a fine dining destination.  Cowboy's was what you would expect from the name, but what it had wasn't bad.  Mary Joy liked the stew.  I think I had  a barbecued pork sandwich (pretty good) along with Moose Drool (!), a good Montana brown ale.

Then back to the Guest House, where we had cookies (wonderful!) and tea and met a young couple from the east coast, who had just graduated from college and were seeing the country before she started work and he found a job.  Then around the corner and down the hill to our little cabin, and to bed.

So ended our day in Geyser Country.  Mary Joy was unimpressed, while I would have to say that having seen it once, I have no need to see it again.

Busy

I'll finish posting for this Yellowstone trip when I have time, but we got home to some things that have kept us busy, such as a new hardwood floor in the living room.

Inspiration Point and the Snake River

On Monday, June 3rd, we went to breakfast in the Mural Room, again with a table by the windows.  We took the breakfast buffet:  not bad, but the usual buffet items of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, cereals, pastries, waffles, French toast.  At the next table was a Canadian couple who had emigrated from the U.S. seventeen years ago, keeping dual citizenship.  Some years ago, the Canadian National Health system had taken them very well through a medical emergency that would have wiped out their finances if they had still been living here.

It was much cooler than the day before, in the upper 40s, and windy.  We dressed accordingly, in three or four layers.  We took the Teton Park Road back south, to the Jenny Lake Scenic road.  We stopped, out of curiosity, at the Jenny Lake Lodge, to see what would have justified paying four times what we were paying at Jackson Lake.  It's very nice, in a rustic-elegant sort of way, cozier than the other lodge.  Outside, a raptor rescue center was showing off some of its birds: a golden eagle, a great horned owl, a Lanner's falcon and a hawk of some sort.

We went on to the Jenny Lake Visitor Center and went down to the dock for the boat ride across the lake to the Hidden Falls trailhead.  The crossing is $7.00 one-way, $12.00 round-trip.  The trailhead is a two-and-a-half-mile walk along the lakeshore, which might have been nice, but we didn't have the time.  Jenny Lake is right at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by lodgepole pines.  It was a dark, dark blue, ruffled by the wind--I needed to make sure that my hat was tied on securely.

The company that runs the lake shuttle rents boats, but only when the water is above 55 degrees, and today it definitely was not!  The captain gave us our hiking options: Hidden Falls was half a mile from the boat landing.  From there, you could go another half-mile, up (with an altitude gain of about 300 feet) to Inspiration Point, with a great view over the lake.  From Inspiration Point, you could continue up Cascade Canyon, on a trail that would become first slushy, then with snow over your ankles.  After the twelve-minute ride across the lake, we took the first two options, with a crowd of other people.  At the dock there is a rack full of hiking sticks to borrow.  We didn't take any, and really didn't need any, though they might have made a not-difficult trail even less difficult.

Certainly, the trail up Cascade Creek to Hidden Falls was pretty easy, though the signage wasn't as good as it could have been.  Some people, us included, mistook a cascade lower down for Hidden Falls, and when we actually got to Hidden Falls, we missed the turnoff and at first saw it only through the trees, saying, not so jokingly, that that was why it was called Hidden Falls.  Just after that muddy turnoff, the main trail crosses a bridge and starts going up and up, eventually coming to a natural staircase of granite ledges, ending at Inspiration Point (altitude around 7200 feet), a natural platform with a view over the whole lake.  Nice.

When we got back across the lake to the visitor center (after greeting the breakfast Canadians, who were headed in the opposite direction), we decided to get in another hike before lunch and our float trip.  The ranger at the visitor center in Moose had recommended the Taggart Lake trail.  I was skeptical of our ability to do the entire three-mile hike in an hour, but Mary Joy said that we needed to do more walking, so we continued down the Teton Park Road to the Taggart Lake trailhead.  The trail was uphill, along a creek, with no good views.  Near the beginning we passed a corral that contained a number of mules and a few horses.  About two thirds of the way to the lake, it was time to turn back.  Not one of our most wonderful hikes.  As we were about to leave, we got a phone call saying that the pickup for our float trip would be delayed fifteen minutes, from 3 o'clock to 3:15.

We drove into Moose, to the Dornan's complex.  Dornan's has a grocery store and deli, several restaurants, a souvenir store, cabins, etc., etc.  The deli makes good sandwiches, so we picked up some and went over to the visitor center, where we found a picnic table and had lunch.

Still having time before 3:15, we looked around the visitor center.  Then we went out to the parking lot, where we found that the people from Triangle X were there with a big black and red rubber raft on a trailer behind a van.  It turned out that they hadn't been delayed after all, so we were the last to arrive of the three couples on the trip.

We had looked at reviews (on Tripadvisor and elsewhere) of companies running the standard ten-mile float trip on the Snake River, through Grand Teton National Park from Deadman's Bar to Moose.  Reviews for the three principal companies, Barker-Ewing, Solitude and Triangle X, were almost unanimously positive.  Triangle X (whose principal business is a dude ranch), however, was the only one with a 3 p.m. trip, which was the best fit with the rest of our schedule.  Again, age has its advantages: my AARP membership brought the price down from $65 to $59 per person.

So, in the visitor center parking lot, we met the boatman (Adam, a bearded young guy in a baseball cap), the van driver (Jack), and our fellow passengers: a couple who had just driven in from California, on their way to the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park, and had gotten onto this trip at the last minute; and a couple from Naperville, Illinois, who were on their way to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park and the national parks in the Canadian Rockies.

We got into the van and Jack drove us to Deadman's Bar.  We were fitted with lifevests and told the groundrules. Then Jack backed the trailer into the river, Adam got the raft afloat and we boarded, we and the Californians at one end and the people from Illinois at the other end (the raft was designed to hold as many as sixteen passengers).   Jack drove away and Adam cast off.

It was a very pleasant trip.  Adam deftly handled the two oars from a platform at the middle of the raft.  He has eight years of experience and takes two to four trips a day during the season, but this is his last year doing this, because he starts medical school in the fall.  He told us about the geology of the area and pointed out places to look for wildlife.  This was not the best time for that, since the animals usually come out in the morning and evening, but we did see four bald eagles (one of them towing a long branch behind it, apparently for nest-building), an osprey being chased by a red-tailed hawk, and a mule deer fawn, curled up in a ball, at the foot of a rocky bank.  At times, we were carried along with a rush of riffled water, but mostly we just floated, steered by Adam around any obstacles--he pointed out where, just the day before, another (unnamed) company's raft had gotten hung up on a dead tree, which had grounded on a sandbar.  The danger was that if all the people were no one side of the raft, the force of the water would catch the raft's bottom and flip it, tumbling all the passengers into the water.  Adam said that he had arrived at this point while the other raft was hung up, and had landed his raft to wait, helplessly, in case he were needed to rescue anyone.  Eventually, however, the other boatman managed to get his raft off the snag.

After beginning the trip between high embankments, which looked artificial, like levees, but which actually were the result of glacial flooding, thousands of years ago, we came out into a magnificent vista: the entire forty miles of the Teton range.  It is a view that one can never tire of.  We passed by Menor's Ferry, the way across the river in the late nineteenth century: a heavy metal cable spanning the Snake.  Then came Dornan's, on the left bank and shortly thereafter we landed, on the right bank,by the park headquarters.  This is where the van pickups normally take place, but they were changed to the visitor center parking lot because of construction around the park headquarters.

We walked over to the visitor center, got into our car and drove out the  Antelope Flats road.  We'd heard that there were bison there, with calves.  At first, we didn't see any, but while we were out there we went down Mormon Row, with its famous viewpoint of an old barn, with the Tetons in the background.  At the time we left home, there was a billboard as you crossed the Mississippi into St. Paul on I-35E, advertising Wyoming tourism, showing exactly this vista.  I didn't get the same ideal conditions for my shot: clouds hid the tops of some of the mountains.

On our return to the highway, we saw a bison herd in the distance, but it wasn't close to the road, so I couldn't get a good photo.  We drove back north on the Teton Park Road, enjoying the spectacular scenery, until we got to the road to the summit of Signal Mountain.  We took maybe half an hour to drive up the twists and turns, past some bicyclists (!), to the parking lot near Jackson Point.  William Henry Jackson, photographer with the 1871 Hayden Expedition, which led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, took a photo from this spot, at 7700 feet above sea level and more than a thousand feet above Jackson Lake, looking across the lake to Mt. Moran. He developed the glass plate in a tent on the spot.  Since it was around 7 p.m., with the sun right above the mountains to the west, the light wasn't ideal either for viewing or photography, but it was still wonderful.  You could look almost all the way down the valley, over the green sagebrush plain.

We drove back down the mountain, to the Signal Mountain Lodge, where we went into the main restaurant, The Peaks.  The view through the windows was almost as spectacular as at the Mural Room.  Mary Joy decided to try the wildlife sliders--three small elk and bison hamburgers.  I had chicken with a rosemary sauce.  Not as good as the previous evening's meal at the Mural Room.

We headed back toward the Jackson Lake Lodge, but stopped at a lakeside turnout along the way, to watch the little pink clouds floating over the mountains across the lake.  When we got to the Lodge, we went up to the lobby to watch Mt. Moran in the deepening dusk.  Then we went to bed.