YellowStone National Park

Supervolcano, Super geology

With all the talk of volcano explosion in Iceland, the power of volcanoes, and their predictable unpredictability, I decided it was time to pay homage to the supervolcano that is the heart of the Great Plaines of North America. Its beauty in the form of flora and fauna, its size that forms a caldera 30 miles by 40 miles, its diverse geological landscapes create a mystical world of nature that has morphed over a few million years. Here we are at Yellowstone.

So we landed at Billings, Montana, and got a rental car and drove the 150 miles or so to Yellowstone. It is a wonderful drive up and down snow peaks, taking curvy roads that can be fun to drive. This also means you can’t do the normal 70 miles or 80 miles an hour, so be prepared for a bit of a longer drive than a normal 150 miles.

The best time to go to Yellowstone is between June and mid-September, the summer months. We picked the long weekend in September, Labor Day weekend, to go to Yellowstone. At that time, I was doing a lot of camping in parks within driving distance of Chicago from Wisconsin to Kentucky, so I thought it would make for a complete park experience to stay in a rustic log cabin, so we choose Roosevelt Lodge which is all the way north of the park at Tower Falls. It has communal restrooms and no hot water; heating for the room is provided by an actual log burning fireplace. Note: They are not kidding when they say the temperatures dip down to freezing at night. Pick up a couple of extra logs for each night if you are not used to the cold, or don’t like it, like me. Or else you’ll have an uncomfortable, restless night. These are the basic cabins. Ones with attatched bathrooms etc are available, but since these cabins oprate only June through September, they get sold out fast, so be sure to book early.

There are several other options for lodging in the park. The best place to llok for accurate up to date information is : http://usparklodging.com/yellowstone/index.php

The Roosevelt Lodge has the perfect look to fit in with the nature. Even the main dining area and other facilities are built from logs, and have a very mid-western, out back feel to them. About 20 feet from our cabin was a little stream, and the first morning, we saw deer hanging around the water and playing. Perfect! That’s worth the money and time right there! Plus the lodge offers an Old West Dinner Cookout, where they take you in horse stage coaches into the mountains, and the cowboys and the wild west men cook a meal as you sit around a fire with tea pots hanging over it and enjoy the nature around. It was something like I saw in Clint Eastwood movies: the men, their outfits, the fire, the tea pots, the landscape around, the horses.

There are only so many roads in Yellostone, so it isn’t like one can get lost, really. But if you take the wrong turn, it will take you a while to back track. We realized we had to not worry too much about drive time as we got stuck on the road because some one ahead spotted a black bear with three cubs. Of course, every one abandoned their cars, pulled out their cameras and traffic came to a stand still even as the rangers were dispensing caution and common sense stories about how bad it can be to go near a mother bear with her cubs near by. None the less, it was worth the sight and a couple of pictures. That’s the story one wants to go home with, and a photo to make it all believable! At the end, it takes a while for the traffic to get to normal again.

There is so much to do at Yellowstone, I could have spent a couple of weeks there easily and had busy tiring days every day. The best place for current activities and information is http://www.nps.gov. It is key to read through this if you want to do a lot of outdoor activities and camping. It even tells what you need to know before you go there, and what you need to take.

Since I had only a long weekend to spend there, basically three nights and four days, I choose to see the different colors of mother earth instead of doing fun activities. To me, the wonder of what makes Yellowstone house such a variety of geology and landscapes that I can’t see in such close range any where else in the world beat out fun camping and hiking trips. It was wonderful to see that there were plenty of animals every where and we didn’t have to really go looking for them. We saw plenty of bison, pronghorns, elk, moose, black bears, and even one grizzly. That was a healthy vibrant feeling to know these animals are thriving so well and are not as endangered as they were once.

I did take a horse back ride for a couple of hours onto a hill. That was a pretty sight from up there across to the other hills. I can’t explain the serenity and calm that such a vast natural picture can bring about. It is as if everything is just right with the world, as if nothing can go wrong. No technology, no buildings, no hurrying people, just the nature doing its thing in time.

Starting up north are the Mammoth Terraces. These are hot springs that are very active in a certain part of the park. The unique limestone build ups give a very mars like look and feel to this geological wonder. There is a long walk that one must do to get up close and literally be able to walk over these hot springs. They are in a few areas, but there is a main walk that has several of them and will take at least an hour to walk through.

The canyons of the Yellowstone are quite something to see. The name “Yellowstone” comes from the color of the rock of the canyon walls. At sunset or sunrise, the color looks unreal and shines as if it were gold. It has more greenery than the Grand Canyon and is smaller, but it is quite something to see hot gases escaping from the water below, to know that as cold as it is, as calm and cool as the water looks, there is something boiling beneath it that is more destructive than we can tell standing there. There is a Grand Canyon of The Yellowstone, aptly named so, that is a nice place to sit and catch a bite to eat if you are carrying your food with you.

If you look at the road map of Yellowstone, you will see it is basically and “8”, with roads connecting into it from different sides. So if you plan right, you can drive each road and see as much as possible of the park’s different facets while you go from one point to another. Also, we covered the north first, but since the geysers and hot springs were more south, we decided to stay there for a night too. There, we stayed at the Old Faithful Inn, from where you can see the Old Faithful geyser, and which is right in the middle of the area that one can walk through to see several other geysers. Old Faithful may be the highest geyser, but there are several more active ones that are going continuously. One can easily spend half a day walking this trail and looking at the same natural event occurring so differently within feet of each other.

We drove south of Yellowstone to the Grand Teton National Park for not other reason but to get a glimpse of the massive mountain ranges. At that point, I had never seen anything so big. It seems funny even now to think that such a large area of pure, untouched nature sits in the middle of America. Chicago doesn’t seem so big with the millions of people and buildings and cars and fast life. There, in those forests and mountain ranges and water falls and animals, it seemed like earth had more to offer than a road to run from place to place and be “productive citizens”. It seems I am more at home in the jungle of Chicago than the natural jungle for that was alien enough for me to ogle and marvel at for days. This is definitely a place to take children and family to a few times in life, be able to see and do different things each time, and work with and around nature.