Montana to Wyoming

September 2

We awoke early this morning to cold – comparable to the cold we'd experienced in Australia. I researched a little on the Internet this morning, to learn that it was 37°F (3°C) this morning when we woke up, and the light we'd seen above Butte was an illuminated statue called "Our Lady of the Rockies." She is the second tallest statue in the United States, surpassed only by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. I also learned that Butte, Montana had an interesting history involving mining and labor unions. I wonder what the political leanings of the current populace might be, considering their past.

I went to the campground office and got a receipt. I told the proprietors about the places we'd been, but they were not impressed. I heard myself talking and my swollen cheek seemed to be making my pronunciations a little different. The swelling is getting worse when it should be getting better. I'm beginning to be concerned about this. How much patience should I have before I decide that the three doctors in Seattle were wrong not to give me antibiotics?

We drove to the town of West Yellowstone, Montana. According to my GPS we actually drifted briefly into Wyoming getting there, but saw so signs to that effect, and I doubt that the few miles in question are even maintained by any authority in Wyoming. As we drove south across rangeland in the direction of that gateway town, we saw range upon range of mountains in the distance rising higher than the ones before them. The viewing conditions were such that the lyrics "purple mountain majesties" came to mind as a perfect way to describe this vista.

West Yellowstone this Labor Day Weekend had shops that catered to outdoors types and this was their last chance to sell off their stock before the summer season ended. Razelle found some items she was very pleased with. I bought a new backpack to carry my irreplaceable items around in whenever I leave the van. The IMAX Theater here was the big draw to West Yellowstone. I walked into the lobby and smelled the popcorn, but we didn't stay to watch the show and I didn't buy the popcorn, either.

Our access pass got us into Yellowstone free of charge. We drove directly to Old Faithful, but passed a number of interesting features along the way we considered seeing on our way back, if we could. We found a parking spot among license plates from many of the states I still hadn't found until now. Fewer than ten remain to be seen, now.

Old Faithful erupted within less than 10 minutes of our arrival. Razelle was moved to tears of happiness while watching it spout heavenward. This moment, emotionally, for her, was on par with her first moments at the brink of the Grand Canyon. Razelle and I posed with our backs to the eruption while a stranger took our pictures with Razelle's camera. I had no opportunity to turn and look at the eruption before it was over. I was very upset to have driven all this way and miss it. Razelle, however, had seen it and that was what I'd hoped for. I'd been here with Maayan in 1997 and we'd seen Old Faithful erupt twice. Still, I had counted so much on watching this again during this visit that I wouldn't leave here until after the next eruption.





We ate in the Old Faithful Lodge. Afterwards, I wandered among the other geysers in this geyser field and waited for the anticipated eruption of Old Faithful from a vantage point downwind of its vent. I noticed during my previous visit and noticed again this time that the steam from Old Faithful smelled like maple syrup to me. Razelle stayed on the viewing seats and saw Old Faithful erupt from that direction, while I admired this eruption through glasses that became speckled with Old Faithful's spray. This was perhaps the most spectacular and protracted eruption I have ever seen. It justified the wait, by far.

We drove away from these geysers with others who had seen it, and yet traffic had not become an issue until we found a crowd of cars on the roadside. We discovered that the focus of their attention was a lone bison grazing between the road and the stream. Many people were out of their cars taking pictures. I did the same, but when the bison sauntered in my direction I put some parked cars between myself and the beast.

Throughout the remainder of the day we would encounter clots of cars clogging the flow of traffic. Once it was a female moose, once it was some turkeys. Most times we couldn't see anything at all as we strained our eyes all the way to the horizon as we threaded our way past the congregation of roadside naturalists, so we had no idea what the fascination was. They were a curiosity to us, more than the phantom beasts could have been.



Yellowstone had been subject to devastating fires a few years before Maayan and I were there in the 1990s. I could see that these areas were now sprouting a healthy forest of mid-sized trees; very encouraging. However, many other parts of the park had huge tracts of trees that had died standing up and still stood as testimony to the National Parks System's policy of letting nature take its own course. There was particular beauty in this policy, in a peculiar way.


We circled around the top of the figure eight road system in the park. I walked a short trail to the Artists Paint Pots while Razelle waited in the van. One feature here really appealed to me. It was a pale muddy geyser that percolated with a catchy cadence, while shooting cots of ropy mud above circular ripples of soupy silt. The jets of steam emanating from this stuttering and plopping and hissing ooze added to the cheery effect. This was nature having fun in the mud. I returned to Razelle in the van feeling thoroughly entertained by this interlude in our tour of the park.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone truly was grand, and we saw it with just enough daylight left to appreciate it.

We then passed vast meadows and finally saw a herd of several dozen bison on a hillside by the road, while herds of cars and tourists were occupied looking elsewhere at bison we couldn't see. Finally with the sun on the water, we passed Yellowstone Lake. It was far larger than I had expected it would be. We turned away from the lake and twisted up a mountain road, dwarfed in our van by dense spires of dead trees as far as the eye could see, their barkless bleached forms catching the last rays of the sun in such a stunning way that I wished I could have found a turnoff to freeze their images with my camera; but no such turnoff appeared before the effect was lost and the sun was gone. We drove down, down, down out of Yellowstone National Park through a canyon I wish we could have seen in better light. I'm sure it would have been among the most memorable parts of the trip if only we had gotten here sooner.

At the bottom of this canyon, the city of Cody, Wyoming greeted us. We had not yet arranged for a place to stay, so at the first RV park we came to I pulled in and spoke with the proprietor. He asked me how we dealt with sanitary matters during the night, since we had no sanitary hook up on this simple van. He then rejected us as customers and told us he didn't need our business, there were other places we could go. This incident left me deeply wounded. We had been treated as untrustworthy vagabonds, as homeless people. We certainly had more integrity than he did. We drove into Cody looking for other options when we came to a Walmart Superstore. There were many other RVs already parked in a far corner of the parking lot here. This was the first time we saw this phenomenon. We'd heard of it; we'd contemplated trying it, but now we were doing it – sleeping at Walmart. I had no idea if it was safe, or if it required signing in or what.... I actually knocked on the window of a van like ours to ask what the procedure was and I startled the occupant who was sitting behind his steering wheel. He said it was OK to just turn off the van's engine and lights, relax and go to sleep. I tried to sleep, and succeeded eventually, but I didn't relax. I felt vulnerable in this parking lot. It was a first for us.

Selfie with spent geyser

======================================

RAZELLE'S PHOTO OF THIS DAY

A bison in traffic in Yellowstone National Park