Yellowstone, day 2: moose jam

(Written Monday night, posted Tuesday when I have Net access)

All I wanted to do today was walk up and down mountainsides and get out of breath, but this morning I found that yesterday's steady drizzle and 50s temperatures had turned to a steady rain and temperatures in the low to mid-40s. I have bad-weather clothes, sort of, and could buy gloves at the general store here, but my hiking boots' Gore-Tex tops let the rain in. I just didn't look like a fun thing to do.

So I wimped out and got in the car, pointing Penny toward Old Faithful 51 miles south. At Norris, less than halfway there, a sign said the road was closed until 8 a.m. It was 7:15, so I took the Norris Geyser Basin turnoff to see what was there. Good decision: the basin is a huge field of steaming fumaroles, colorful pools, and weird formations. This description sounds like the upper Mammoth Hot Springs I showed you yesterday but the basin is very different. I photographed large billowing or swirling plumes of steam, bubbling spouts and an emerald-green rill (the sign explained that the microbes that produce this color live in merely scalding-hot water, while the orange water is near boiling temperature). But what I'm showing you here is a pair of symmetrical round bluish holes that go "bloop-bloop" every five seconds or so. Eventually I hope to show you video I took of this and several other features of the basin as much for the strange sounds as for the visual effects.

A bit after 8:00 I continued south until I joined a line of stopped cars waiting our turn through a one-lane road construction detour. A construction worker eventually made her friendly way down the line explaining that a herd of bison were holding up the northbound line of cars, and since one of them was lame they couldn't be hurried. Maybe a half-hour later, here came the first of about 50 bison plodding along purposely very like a herd of cattle heading in from the field. They included many calves - sorry, my clearest photo is of one of them pausing to pee - and cows and bulls wearing dreadlocks on their necks. Some of them passed my window closer than my camera could focus, grunting a bit like pigs. An endless line of northbound cars followed at walking speed, with one lone bison straggler way back in the line. I noticed that the construction worker prudently kept the cars between her and the bison.

We finally made it through the detour, past two more herds of bison galloping along the road, and I pulled into the Old Faithful area. After feeding Penny and myself I went looking for the geyser, only to find that it was an hour until the next expected eruption - I'd apparently missed one during breakfast. Cold and wet, I just took some pictures of the steam plume and headed west toward Yellowstone Lake 17 miles away. This stretch of road crosses a loop of the Continental Divide twice at Craig Pass, elevation about 8200', where the temperature dropped below 40°.

I followed the lake for 21 miles but it wasn't much to look at in the gray downpour, especially after sunny views of two Great Lakes; here's a photo just so you can see it's big.

After leaving the lake the road follows the Yellowstone River downstream for 16 miles to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Totally different from the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and much smaller, this canyon is spectacular in some of the same ways (huge canyon walls excavated by the river over millions of years) and in different ones (Technicolor decorations from the same hot-water flows that color so many parts of the park). Here's a view from high above of the lower falls of the Yellowstone, hard at its work of excavation.

The last 12-mile stretch of road back to Norris, largely through burned-out forest just beginning to recover, brings the total of this loop to 96 miles, not including the 21-mile road from Mammoth to the loop. Here's the amazing thing: this loop follows the northern rim and otherwise is completely contained within the 30- by 45-mile-wide bowl or caldera of an immense volcano that last erupted less than a million years ago and is still active, as all the geysers and hot springs show. I think the sign at Norris Geyser Basin said it's the largest caldera in the Western Hemisphere.

A bit of trivia: Xanterra, the concessionaire that runs all the hotels, restaurants, and shops, puts staff's state or country of origin on their name badges. A great conversation-starter. I've met young people from Minnesota, Maryland, Japan, and Bulgaria among other places.

In a similar vein, driving a car with DC tags also starts conversations. The construction worker was delighted to see me - DC was the last state missing on her life list of car tags.