Yellowstone

You can only spend so long stuck indoors, writing a thesis and eating your boyfriends secret stash of sweet food before you need to get out. So we got out. We headed to Yellowstone for a long weekend (ok dad, Jellystone if you prefer). We had an amazing time- it's just beautiful, ethereal even. I saw a black bear, deer and baby bison (Andy wouldn't let me have one, how unfair).

The hydrothermal features are just awsome. In the morning, the steam condenses and drapes the roads with a heavy mist. We drive through it and the skeletons of trees emerge as silhouttes. The dead trees are everywhere, victims of the 1988 fires but still resolutely refusing to obey gravity. In places, the slopes are carpeted with trees a few feet high, and the bare dead poles of the fire victims poke up between them, dwarfing them. We went to Old Faithful, and I laughed at the tourists who expected it to go off on time, like some orchestrated Disney attraction. I wondered if they even realised that there were walking around in the caldera of an active volcano. Old Faithful is impressive, but it seems bizarre to have a bunch of tourists sitting around in a 'viewing area', RVs parked in a tarmacced parking area, watching the guts of an active volcanic system spewing out steam.

The mudpots are hypnotic. I wanted a bunch for ages, just captivated by the hands of clay pushing up from beneath the ground. The plumbing gurgled like a hungry tummy the whole time, and misbehaved by flinging lumps of pale clay out of the small crators. The whole park is captivating, amde more so by the stark unpredictability and violence that produces these surface effets. Andy and I would stand for ages in clouds of sulphuric steam trying to capture the image we could see in our mind's eye, and emerge with drippin hair, nausea and hopefully a few good photos.

My favorite geyser (sounds like a big-up for a cockeny bloke) is called Grand Fountain. Layers of ejecta have been sculpted by the acidic water to form flat platforms that fill with water. The effect is stacked mirrors that capture the white clouds of steam thrown out by the cone. It's stunning. Similar features form in the north of the park, where the hot waters erode the limestone into something like an overimaginative geologist's description of a karstic landscape. The platforms that build up from the dissolved minerals are coloured in red, purple, blue, green- a combination of dissolved minerals reprecipitating, and the mats of crazy thermophile bacteria. This is the most active part of the park, and so the most stinky, even though it's outside of the caldera.

We camped, and I've never been so cold in my life. My sleeping bag is four season but I'd had to leave my thermarest at home because my case was full (of scientific papers, grr!). I don't know if it would have made much differnece. The days were hot, but as soon as the sun went down it began to get cold. Lying on my sleeping mt it felt like someone hat turned on a tap and was steadily draining the heat and life out of my body. At least it forced Andy to learn how to build a fire. We settled into a routine on getting back for the day of him building a fire, and me starting to boil water and prepare things for dinner. This routine was broken on sunday when, several miles from the campsite, the car stopped making it's 'I'm going to die at any moment' noises, started to run smoothly, and then promptly died. The fan belt had snapped, and the water pump given up it's long and vocal life. We ended up stranded, and a friendly park ranger took us out of the park to spend the night in Gardiner, Montana. The next day I bought books to read while Andy arranged to have the car towed. The garage was busy, so we ended up shipping out to Livingston since they could fix it sooner. All in all, it was a bit of a strange end to a trip, but it seemed like an adventure. Hopefully we will go to Utah for Christmas; we are hoping to go climbing but Andy's ankle is still a problem. Whatever, there seems to be plenty o help me get through writing up. America definately has it's good points :-)