| The Devil's Tower.... |  | 27 June ‘06
We left Yellowstone through the East Gate, which just about made our day…road construction for better than 9 miles. Now I mean road construction. They were rebuilding the road that ran right on the side of a mountain. There were spots that made us stop because there just wasn’t any room left on the down-side of the mountain as we approached on-coming traffic. The road bed was nothing but dirt and rock, not gravel, but rock. Again we just happened to be the front vehicle, so that saved us from any possible rock chip damage. When we finally pulled out of the park, we entered some more absolutely beautiful Absaroka Mountains (Central Rockies). The colors, the designs of the rocks, and the totally unspoiled countryside made this a complete package of beauty. There were these formations that looked and reminded us of the fortress walls of Old Europe. Even a couple looked so much like castles that we had to look again…where are we anyway??? Well, we are in Northwestern Wyoming and being entertained through our eyes all the way to Cody. After lunch and filling our gas tanks in Cody, we headed for Sheridan and our next campground. Now we are in the rolling hills of Wyoming, which were made up more of sage and open range. The next morning we headed off to see “Devil’s Tower” and our next overnight campground. As we crested the top of the ridge and saw Devil’s Tower rising up out of the ground as if it had been thrust out of the crust of the earth as a punctuation point…all by it’s self. Many times we have driven by the basalt stone alongside I-90 going to Spokane. This stone, almost 6 to 8 sided columns, that is the same with Devil’s Tower, only on the tower, it rises 867 feet. Looking at the top of the tower, it is like looking as a parquet floor, only octagonal vs. squares.
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| June 30, 2006 10:42 AM
By Joel and Louise
Location: USA-Wyoming
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| My First Time In Yellowstone Park.... |  | Happy Birthday Leslee !!!!!
Boy it got cold last night…we had to pull on all the standard spring blankets and then through the Winter Down Quilt on top. Besides that, the furnace came on 3 times this early morning to tell us that it was “really cold”. Because we were both too chicken to roll out of bed at a reasonable time, we were late getting out seeing this wonderland. I think we rolled through the gates of the campground just before noon. We can’t keep this up if we want to see anything while we are here. The first thing we did was to find the post office, so we could get a letter out. Since we are “roughing it” at this campground, we have to resort the old fashioned means of communicating…general mail. We have no electricity, water, TV cable, and, can you believe, no internet wi-fi. Heck, our cell phones wont even work. After finding the mail box, we headed off to Artist Point and the Mud Volcano to see some thermal features of the park...mudpots, were the supper heated water spouts mud into the air or just makes like a boiling pot of “mud”. Some of these pots are absolutely huge, while others can be as small as a foot in diameter, or colored a bright or opaque blue, red rust, green, or just plain light mud. All that, and you could smell a slight odor of sulfur all the way to strong battery acid. I think in the 4 days we were there, we visited and walked at least 6 totally different thermal basin areas. The earths crust is so thin in a lot of Yellowstone, it isn’t uncommon to find steam rising almost everywhere you go. Then it was “The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone Park”. Now we’ve never taken the opportunity to go and visit “The” Grand Canyon, but this one in Yellowstone was absolutely incredible. The high walls as much as 1200 feet deep with the Yellowstone River running through it below, the rock panicles coming up the walls like sharp knives and best of all, the thundering Lower Falls of the Yellowstone taking your breath away with it’s beauty. We hiked “many a mile” to see the above and even more to see “The Best” (in our opinion) geyser in Yellowstone…Lonestar Geyser… It had a 12 to 14 foot cone, and spew hot water 30 to 40 feet into the air with steam shooting much higher. When the Lonestar Geyser erupted it lasted just over 20 minutes of full eruption and made a special impression on all 7 of us that hiked the 5 mile round trip into see the show. We took in the Mammoth Terraces. I really don’t think there are more than two areas in the world that have travertine terraces like these, and the second is in Turkey…we’ve now seen them both. They are really something special. Our last full day in the park, we did take time to see the most visited site…”Old Faithful”. It was nice, but it is getting “Old”. In the 4 days we were there, we also drove through 3 of the 4 entrances to Yellowstone. We saw a lot of the park animals, especially bison. They were just everywhere, even 2 that seemed to make their home right beside our coach. Fact is, one of them decided to scratch its back on the living room slide and then have the audacity to leave a token of appreciation lying on the ground beside the slide-out. If it weren’t for the signs that warned us of the yearly deaths inflected by the bison I might have just jumped out of the front door and chased them off…well, I didn’t.
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| June 28, 2006 09:52 AM
By Joel and Louise
Location: USA-Wyoming
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