Posts Tagged “yellowstone”

Here’s another photo from 1979… of Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone!

And here’s one of ours from 2008!

Mammoth is awesome. I can’t believe elk and bison walk around up there, but they do!

More Yellowstone comparisons!

Here are some lady elk lounging by a river in 1979:

and in 2008…

We have soooo many more to post, but we’ve been super busy and haven’t had much blogging time. Stay tuned though!

Here’s another exciting comparison shot of White Dome geyser in Yellowstone NP! From my parents’ collection from 1979:

and from our collection (2008):

You can see a 2008 eruption in the background of this photo:

Also! Breaking news for our photo comparison project: turns out the slides Brian scanned didn’t comprise the entire collection. After seeing the ones we did, my parents checked again and unearthed hundreds of additional slides covering even more locations, etc. Sooooo those are going to keep us in photo comparisons for a long time to come! Stay tuned.

From the 1970s…

and from 2008:

I totally can’t get over how the same themes emerge in my parents’ photo collection and in ours. Genetics or human nature?? You decide.

This year for my dad’s 60th birthday, Brian had the brilliant idea to take all my dad’s old slides (which have been sitting in slide pages in binders for around 30 years) and scan them as a gift. Scanning old family snapshots and the like has been a hobby of ours for a while — we love seeing old pictures of our relatives, and scanning them gives us a way to preserve them for the future. Scanning slides is a little more challenging because it requires some specialized equipment. When I worked in a photography supply shop in the 1990s (holla), slide scanners were really expensive, and professional-level ones still are, but now manufacturers are making some consumer-level slide scanners that are very affordable and work really well. We’ve been very pleased with the scanner we got for my dad’s present, the Epson Perfection V200 Photo.

Part of our motivation for doing this was selfish. My parents did a lot of traveling in the USA to national parks before I was born, and, in fact, they did an epic road trip in 1979 similar to ours (which is when they purchased the green cooler they loaned us for our trip!). Originally, they had planned to go coast to coast, but because of the gas crisis, they ended up heading north into Canada (where there were no gas lines). However, they went to many of the same parks we visited, and Brian and I have been dying to check out their pictures. Scanning the slides has been truly delightful not only because we get to see awesome pictures of my parents in the 70s, but we’ve also discovered that the same places and features that we photographed on our journey inspired my parents to do the same. In fact, the first slide we scanned (and by “we,” I really mean “Brian,” because he did all the scanning for this project!) was this:

It wasn’t labeled or anything, but we knew immediately it was our friend Lower Falls! Here’s our picture from our trip:

Keep checking back because I have many comparisons like this to share. Good job, Mom & Dad!

The point of driving the past few days hasn’t been to cover ground really, but to experience Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. That being said, the parks are quite large, so I thought I would post the path that we took to see and get through them. The route log is below.

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We had another amazing day in Yellowstone. Yesterday was all about the elk and bison; today was a giant geyserfest (and thermal-feature-fest). We saw lots of hot springs:

Many of the hot springs are surrounded by thermophiles (microorganisms that thrive in hot temperatures). The thermophiles have different colors depending on their temperature requirements. Orange and yellow ones are very hot:

We also saw some mudpots, which are like hot springs with mud instead of water. Well, okay, actually they are really different in how they function, etc., but they look like mud hot springs:

We also saw geysers!!!

This geyser is really interesting because it’s right on the shoreline of Yellowstone Lake:

There are several geysers on the shore of the lake near West Thumb. Apparently sometimes they are even underwater bubbling away! We learned that fishermen used to catch fish in the lake and then throw them immediately into a boiling geyser to cook right then and there.

Of course, we made sure to visit the park’s most famous geyser, Old Faithful. They have a huge area with benches all around the geyser for people to sit and watch the eruption. We happened to be standing over near this guy a few minutes beforehand:

He gave a very interesting little talk in which he explained how geysers are like coffee percolators. And then we got to see this:

Hooray!!

We finally bid goodbye to Yellowstone and drove south through Grand Teton National Park as the sun was setting.

We’re now in a Motel 6 in Jackson, Wyo., and we’re planning on staying here two nights so we can relax a bit, do laundry, and go see the Grand Tetons in the daylight. Whew!

Cooke City was really cute in the daylight!

It was really cold, though. There was even snow on Pearl (and a lot of it had melted off by the time we took the photo):

Anyway, we drove straight into Yellowstone National Park from Cooke City!

We were barely in the park before we saw our first bison:

Hooray! We saw SO many wild bison today. We went to Antelope Island (near Salt Lake City) last spring and saw a ton of bison there — at least we thought so at the time. After that first group today, we saw herds and herds of them everywhere. We saw a lot of calves, too. One of the most interesting bison incidents we observed was when we were on the road from Tower-Roosevelt to Mammoth Hot Springs. We saw a large herd of bison traveling along the road. One of the bison was rolling around in the dirt!

He loved it!! And as soon as he was done, another bison came up for his turn in the dirt bath. I think we saw three or four of them take turns. It was amazing!!

We saw our first waterfall (Undine Falls) early in the day too!

Then we arrived in Mammoth Hot Springs Historic District, which is overrun with the other star animal of our day, elk!

Now, you may remember from our previous Bear Country USA post that it’s breeding season for elk. Therefore, they will kill you. Brian and I watched an entire safety film about elks chasing people down and stabbing their antlers into cars at the Yellowstone General Store this afternoon. So it’s kind of weird that they just live among people in the Mammoth Hot Springs area. Check out this guy here:

Well, he owns all these lady elks:

He was keeping them all between a couple of buildings in Mammoth Hot Springs, and whenever one of them left the circle, he would freak out and go round them up. Meanwhile, park rangers in reflective vests were herding all the visitors around making sure they weren’t in the path of any angry elk. It was crazy. And so are Mammoth Hot Springs themselves!

After we saw that, we drove around on a falls-finding adventure. We went to Tower Fall:

Tower Fall is 132 feet. Check out those volcanic pinnacles!

Then we went down to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is home to two major waterfalls in the park, Upper & Lower Falls. Upper Falls (109 feet) is pretty easy to see:

But Lower Falls is a little more work. We elected to take a very intense trail down so we could see it. It’s called Uncle Tom’s Trail and it involves this:

It’s 328 steps and 500 feet down (and back up), so it’s a strenuous trail, but the craziest part for me was that the steps are all made out of this metal grate material, and they are built right next to a canyon obviously, so you can see right through the bottom of the steps to where you are clearly about to plummet to your death. I was completely terrified but managed to make it the whole way down so I could enjoy the 308 feet of Lower Falls:

The Statue of Liberty (with the base and everything) is three feet shorter than those falls. Nicely done, Yellowstone Park.

The hike down to Lower Falls took quite a while (in general, it takes a long time to get places in Yellowstone), so we got to catch the sunset on our way out of the park:

Now we’re at the Days Inn in West Yellowstone, Mont., and we’re trying to figure out what all is going to happen tomorrow. I hear there may be a geyser we need to see, but beyond that, I’m not sure what to expect! Brian and I are hoping for a moose.