Today began slowly, as we slept in a little later and took some time to enjoy our last morning in Canyon Campground with a breakfast campfire. A little unconventional, for sure, but we all enjoyed the warmth of the fire in the coolness of the morning, and we were happy to spend this time enjoying the beautiful surroundings of this campsite since we really hadn’t spent very much time there otherwise (while awake, anyway).
We finally shoved off and, after a brief stop at the Canyon General Store for a few lunch items, we headed out for a picnic at a beautiful wooded area that abutted a fork in the glistening Yellowstone River – an area called Nez Perce (named for a Native American tribe that had moved through the area, while running from the U.S. Army). This was definitely the most memorable meal we have had together on this trip! We had the whole area to ourselves, and the day turned out to be a perfectly sunny day. It all just came together… you just can’t plan anything to be that perfect!
But then, after lingering over lunch and strolling alongside the river for a bit, we moved on with our plans for today… To figure out more about this whole Yellowstone-being-a-giant-volcano thing. We have already learned that there are some extremely unique forces at play underground throughout the entire park (…like the fact that every year there are between two and three thousand earthquakes here, and that’s just part of it), and that Yellowstone has been the scene of many volcanic eruptions. So we started out very close to one of the major vents from which lava has flowed -- the Mud Volcano Trail in the Caldera section of the park.
Our first site on the trail was Sulphur Caldron, with the accompanying first smell of rotten eggs from all of the hydrogen sulfide these things spew. It’s just wild to be walking along a wooded path, and then come upon these three very very large “puddles” of boiling substances… the largest is rapidly boiling water, the middle-sized one is just bubbling water and the smallest one is gurgling and spewing in the air what looks like liquified clay. Just bizarre. And we learned that these boiling substances have a pH level that is very close to the acidic level of car battery acid – stay away!
As we continued on the trail, these very abnormal conditions did start feeling more and more normal…. “Oh yeah, there’s another belching, spewing mudpot…. and look, over there, the steam is hovering over that boiling pit of bright turquoise water like a sorcerer’s cauldron.” And on, and on. But our favorites among these freaky natural occurrences were:
1. The Dragon’s Mouth Spring. It was a little cave opening in the side of a hill that was filled with boiling water that collected in a small pool surrounding the opening. What made this hot spring even stranger than the others was that, every once in a while, it would make a sound very similar to the rushing sound of a toilet that was just flushed, but then it would let out a loud growling sound (where you would expect a toilet to gurgle) and simultaneously spew a thick puff of steam (which I hope isn’t part of any of your toileting experiences!).
2. The forest-covered, rolling hills immediately behind Sulphur Caldron. Although these hillsides looked relatively non-descript among all of the other evergreen-covered hillsides we have seen in the park, we learned that the streaming lava beneath them causes them to rise and fall – imperceptive to us, but well-documented by scientists – like the rise and fall of a person’s chest as they breath. Whoa…. We were amazed!
From there we went to Norris Geyser Basin, and joined a Ranger-led tour (one of the requirements for earning the Yellowstone Jr. Ranger designation, of course). He took us around the entire lower portion of this geyser basin, and showed us the location of the largest geyser in the world…. Steamboat Geyser. We saw this geyser squirt large amounts of water up 40 to 60 feet several times (called a “minor eruption” for this geyser), but never up to it’s highest level (a “major eruption) which is around 380 feet! It only does that “every 5 to 50 years” per Mr. Park Ranger and, although it hasn’t done it since 2005, we decided not to wait it out. I mean, we’ll be at Old Faithful tomorrow, and we’re really OK with a guaranteed 200-foot water spew. Really.
In the middle of our tour, a wayward bison went for a stroll through the hot springs area. This was clearly a distraction from whatever our guide was saying since, at any given time (as we had learned, over and over again, from the hundreds of signs warning against walking in these areas), that 2,000-pound bison could have fallen through the crust and become well done and then some. Very distracting, indeed. So the kindly Park Ranger just paused for a bit, until the bison found his way back into the forest and our attention was sustainable again…
The Park Ranger also taught us a lot about the “plumbing” of geysers, and how sometimes they can unexpectedly hurl out huge rocks all over the place as, notably, a geyser by the name of Pork Chop so hurled in 1988 to the profound surprise and deep chagrin of 8 park visitors. Although, thankfully, none of the visitors were harmed (amazing!), once this hurling stuff happens, the plumbing of the geyser is irreconcilably broken and it just turns into a run-of-the-mill bubbling hot spring.
The tour came to an end after a little over an hour with nary a true eruption - with most of the geysers on the tour having gone the way of Pork Chop geyser, and they were now relegated to hot springs (although once named a geyser, always named a geyser). One geyser at the end of the tour used to erupt almost every minute, but tourists throwing coins and other objects into it eventually stopped the eruptions. Of course Steve asked the Park Ranger about the locations of geysers that, you know, actually STILL erupting fairly regularly happened to be and, quite unbelievably, he responded that there were a bunch in the Norris Geyser Basin (where we were the WHOLE tour!) but that, basically, he just took us through the has-beens... thanks for that! LOL. But, by that time, we were all too tired and hungry to continue on with touring... So, the "Windows into Yellowstone" Tour we had just experienced was re-dubbed by us as the "Geysers that Used to be Great" Tour. Ha.
Then, quite unlike us, we headed back to the campsite for a late dinner and to turn in early after that… although this time to a new campground – Madison - on the other side of the park. We tried to blame our pitiful campfire on various conditions, which was very hard to do as the campfires of our camping neighbors continued to roar in mockery of us. When Steve, with Grandma’s coaching, finally got the campfire to a mildly respectable state, we moved forward with our plan of making campfire pizza with our grill placed just inches above the flames. We waited, and waited…. But that cheese just wasn’t going to melt over that sad little campfire. We finally broke down and just heated it up over Grandma’s gas grill, and that did the trick. By this time, Steve had sufficiently struggled over the fire long enough that we were able to roast our marshmallows over the licking flames with our heads held high. Whew! Thank goodness!
There is something about that campground camaraderie thing that made the whole turning-in-early plan impossible. The kids made friends with four other kids immediately, and were having a blast. Then, the next thing you know, now the adults are meeting and talking around the campfire, so we finally called it a night much much later. But, no regrets. Vacations just have to roll like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment