This weekend I went to Yellowstone National Park for a couple of days. Despite a bad start, with lost luggage, and therefore lost 1/2 day, and then an untimely rain storm, it was a prettty fun trip.

The weekend started with United losing my luggage on Friday night. I'm not sure how they could do that with a whole 2 1/2 hour layover in Denver, but somehow they managed. Luckily there was a flight arriving at 10am Saturday morning, and thank goodness my bag was on this flight. So I only lost about 1/2 a day, but still it was annoying because the morning was great sunny weather, and the rain would come later that afternoon.

I also managed to learn that putting your contacts in water overnight is not even close to using solution. My contacts were so increadibly dry the next day, that they sucked right onto my eyeballs like crazy-glue when I put them on. I could not even blink for a short time right after they were in. After a little while though, they got more moisturized and much better. Probably not a good thing for either the contacts or my eyes though. I'm going to have to eventually get the 30ml sized bottles of everything so I can carry-on. I just haven't had time to get around to it yet. I looked in one drug store here in San Antonio, but they didn't have much of anything travel sized. Oh well, someday.

So, any ways, after getting by bag back, I took in a brief visit of Idaho Falls, where I had spent Friday night. Not much exciting there. The falls the town is named after, were only about 8-10ft tall. They were quite width in width, but still all together not very interesting.

After that, it was a 2 hour drive to Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson is situated just south of Grand Teton National Park. This was a much more interesting little town. Quite touristly, with all the buildings done up in a kinda wild west theme, but still very nice. It also had a little central park that had the coolest elk antler gates on all four corners. They were fixed together with bolts and wires, but they were all real and some were very big. I'd hate to think of all the elk that were sacrificed in building it, but the end result was very cool.

After the short stop in Jackson, it was off to Grand Teton NP. I had a hike all planned out around the Jenny Lake area. This plan included a short boat trip across Jenny Lake (in order to save time), and then a hike up to Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point. Well, I got up to Hidden Falls (nothing that exciting), and then about half way up to Ispiration Point, when the sky completed clouded over and it started with quite serious thunder, lightning, wind and of course rain. And here I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Opps. Luckily it was not "that" cold, and I was able to find shelter under a tree and wait it out... only it did not stop!

I think I stood for about 45 minutes under this tree, waiting to see if the weather would clear. Most other people had either rain ponchos or wind-breakers or something at least to put on. Most people also left for the boat after about a 1/2 hour of constant rain and thunderstoms. But not having any rain protection at all I tried to wait it out. One nice Chinese man had an extra hand towel in his bag and lent it to me so at least I could dry my head. Finally, at one point I had to admit that it might never stop. Plus after 45 minutes, it was starting to get a little cold. So, in the end I had to abandon the rest of the hike. The major feature of Inspiration Point is the view any ways, so with all the clouds and rain, it would have been not worth it to continue. Damn United Airlines!!

So, at a pretty decent break in the rain I made a break for the boat landing. I was actually able to stay quite dry on the maybe 40 minute jog back to the boat landing. Unfortunately, everybody else on the mountain had made the same break for the landing in the last 1/2 hour and by the time I got to the bottom there was about 7 boat loads of people in line ahead of me. And Murphy's Law, almost as soon as I step into line, it starts to rain. To make it worse being in line, there are no trees you can run and duck under. So, now I started to get very very wet. Yeash.

Well, luckily it was no longer cold because there was no cold wind once I was off the mountain and down by the lake. And there were lots of little shuttle boats (about 4 or 5), so I thought it would not be that bad, and not take long at all to get shuttled back. Unfortunately I did not count on the thunder and specifically lightning. It seems that the little boats are not allowed to operate when the lightning is directly overhead. So three times operations were brought to a temporary stop before after about another 40 minutes in the rain I was able to get a boat across the lake.

At one point the boats brought back garbage bags for those stupid tourist not properly prepared for the elements of Grand Teton... that would be me. And thus the picture of me with my garbage bar raincoat and hand towel raincap. Very classy. Oh well, everyone in the line was nice and in good humour despite all the nasty weather.

After getting back to the car and warmed up and dryed off it was out of Grand Teton NP and into Yellowstone NP. I was staying the night in West Yellowstone (town) which is just outside (west) of Yellowstone NP. So the drive from south to west took another few hours. The maximum speed is 45mph in the park, because of the wildlife, and thus takes a lot longer to cover such small distances. The views were worth it though.

The first thing I was surprised at with Yellowstone was the amount of wildlife that is litterally right outside your car window. The bison especially were very abundant. On at least three ocassions they were wondering either just on the side of the road, or right down the middle of the road. It was pretty cool. I guess when you're that big you don't have much to worry about. Also, twice wildlife ran right out in front of my car. Once a small family of three deer and another time one of the big bison. Also twice, I came around bends in the road to views of massive valleys and probably 30-40 bison in one valley and 60-70 in another. Very abundant wildlife, all right in plain sight.

The second thing that was really really nice was that the water in all of the lakes and rivers was crystal clear. I took some pictures of Jenny Lake, and you can see the bottom crystal clear which really surprised me for a US lake. I didn't even know that such great clean bodies of water still existed in the US. I thought all of their rivers and lakes were exploited and poluted to some extent. This was consistent through the entire park. All the rivers I saw were completely clean, as clean as New Zealand's, at least from what I could tell. It was very beautiful.

What was not as nice as Canada was that the forest was not as dense as say BC or Alberta. The trees were very sparse, but my guess is that this is natural for the area. I think that's also why it's a lot easier to spot the wildlife, so it's probably a good thing for the park.

After a slow 45mph drive and quite a few wildlife spottings later, I made my way to West Yellowstone. I spent the night in the most expensive ($180) roadside motel I think I have ever been in. It was a crappy little Best Western and would probably cost $50 bucks anywhere else. West Yellowstone though obviously has a good market on accomodations being the closet town to the park. Plus the only accomodation in the park itself is even more exorberantly priced.

The next day it was up and out to see the individual sights of Yellowstone. Old Faithful was of course high on the list, but it actually ended up being quite dissapointing. It was basically just a geyser, and was not even that high. I guess the big draw of it is the fact that it can be predicted when it will go off, almost to the minute. The prediction is based on the last time it went off, and for how long, how high, etc.

So, Old Faithful out of the way there was many other areas that were showing the obvious signs of all the volcanic activity underneath Yellowstone NP. One thing different here from other volcanic areas that I have been to, was that Yellowstone had the most beautifully coloured deep deep hot water pools. Some were an amazing light blues, and other dark blues. But the depth and colour that went all the way down these pools were absolutely amazing. I remember looking down into one pool, and it looked like the sides of a snow covered mountain sloping down inside. They were quite beautiful. Other than that you had the typical bubbling mud pots, water spurting geysers, and other various noise and/or fountain activities.

My favorite part of Yellowstone, followed closely by the widllife, was the Canyon area. The signs around this small area call it the "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone". Although nothing on the scale of the Grand Canyon, it's quite easy to see why they call it this. The Yellowstone river drops all of sudden from a normal quiet landscape, into a quite spectacular canyon. The river drops dramatically, through two waterfalls (the Upper and Lower Falls), and then opens out into a massive valley.

There were many viewpoints on both side of the canyon, all easily accessable by car. It's not that large an area where the conyon drops all the way to the valley floor, so a few short hikes gave great vantage point of both the Upper and Lower Falls. Plus, viewing platforms along the ridge of the canyon often gave dramatic views of the canyon walls and valley below. It was a very spectacular spot and I enjoyed it very much.

The whole day on Sunday was much better weather than Saturday, even despite the every now-and-then spatter of threatening rain. It never did all-out rain like the day before, but I think that was only (Murphy's Law again), because this time I had both my wind-breaker and an umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh... opps never mind. I just put that in there so when I look back at this blog years from now I will be like what the heck, was I already insane at that age... any ways I am rambling...

So after various other viewing opportunities, including some pretty spectacular volcanic formations at Mammoth Hot Springs; a herd 10-15 of elk grazing right on the grass in front of a parking area in Mommoth; 3 more various waterfalls; a couple of very cute marmots on a short hike to one of the waterfalls; and various volcanic sights named things like the Devil's Thumb and Dragons Breath Pool; then it was a couple of hours drive north to Bozeman, Montana, where I spent the night and flew back to work on Monday morning.

A very fun weekend and has inspired me to write a blog entry, which I have been very neglegent with since I got back from New Zealand... almost a year ago! Opps.