Yellowstone Trip - Part II

west yellowstone is a small town but have some very good gift stores selling authentic items at reasonable prices. more than 90% of the yellowstone national park is within wyoming, however the states of idaho & montana also share the rest. all the gift stores had something special from each of these states. i had “idaho trout” in the office cafeteria just a few weeks before my trip and felt the call of yellowstone and trout. however, i was not lucky to have trout in idaho. montana is famous for it’s fly-fishing and there were stores selling gears for that through out the town of west yellowstone.
rivers and streams in montana are strangely not very deep and you go into the knee deep or waist deep water to catch the river fishes. read more about it here
http://www.flyfishinghistory.com/

90% of the tourists travel through an eight-shaped road within the park and stop at different spots to take photos and enjoy the beauty of yellowstone. i regularly watch the travel channel and am quite inspired by their motto “be a traveler, not a tourist”. the only thing out of the ordinary that i did in this trip was to drive to beartooth highway. i will talk about that in the coming parts.

day 2
among the must see attractions of yellowstone, “old faithful” geyser ranks number one. currently, it erupts at a 90-minute interval. the predictability of this geyser has given its well-deserved name. people flock that area and check out the next eruption time at a nearby visitor center and gets ready with their camera and camcorder around the big sitting deck created around this geyser.
i read that new zealand and finland is also famous for it’s geysers but yellowstone can boast of the number of geysers it has in such a small area. the first thing of second day was to see Old faithful erupt (eruption lasted for about a minute) and have brunch at old faithful inn. one option of staying within the park is to stay at this lodge.

after lunch, i started driving north and stopped by at the midway-geyser basin & black sand basin areas. one of the most colorful hot springs “grand prismatic spring” is in this area. it is amazing to see a bluish-green & orange smoke coming out of it from a distance. i saw an aerial view of this hot spring in the Internet before my visit. it was simply awesome. i was disappointed by the fact that the park authorities did not create any elevated platform to see this spring and enjoy its aerial view. see this picture :
http://www.skyimagelab.com/granprisspri.html
but still the colors from a close distance was breath-taking and i spent some time in doing some photographic experiment to capture the best angles and colors of this spring. it is unbelievable that the colors of this spring and all others in yellowstone are attributed to “thermophile” bacteria living in them. it is said that if life at all exists in other planets it exists in the form of “extremophile” bacteria. read about them here:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/extreme/extremophiles.html

there are so many geysers and hot springs present in this area that if you poke a hole in the ground you can create a geyser which you can name after yourself. i continued driving north towards Norris geyser basin and then towards canyon village. my next destination is grand canyon of the yellowstone. did i tell you why the yellowstone is so named? it is because of the yellow colors of the stones in the grand canyon area. the lower falls of the yellostone river is more than 300 feet high and you can reach up to the brink of this falls through a small hike. it is a nice feeling to be able to see the water falling 300 feet down into the canyon and i was wondering about the people who first saw this beautiful image. they did not capture it in camera but saved it for future generations unlike us !

you can continue driving towards the upper falls or there is a strenuous hike from the lower falls to the upper falls. i preferred the first option. it was kind of pleasant even though it was middle of summer and crowd was just beginning to pour into the park. it was late afternoon by the time i finished seeing the falls and the canyon area. i started driving back towards my hotel but this time southwards making the loop of lower ‘circle” of eight in reverse direction. i had dinner in grant village and by the time i reached the madison junction it started raining with hailstorm and lightning. living in california, i miss the summer rain with lightning, which i was used to in india. after a long time i saw so much lightning. it was continuous and i wish i could capture those “fractal” lines in my camera. the “inventor” of fractal geometry benoit mandelbrot once said that “clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones and lightning does not travel in a straight line”. i guess a car is the safest place to be in a lightning storm and that was the only comfort by which i continued driving towards my hotel. strangely enough by the time i reached the park entrance the lightning almost vanished magically. for the last half an hour it was a feeling of desperateness to reach safely back to the hotel even though i was enjoying the “dangerously beautiful” images created by nature.

after a tiring day, it was nice to be back to the comfort ness of my cabin and started dreaming about the places i saw and did not realize when i felt asleep( without dreaming).
to be continued ...