Old Faithful and Yellowstone National Park

I did an 8-hour drive today from Montana, all the way East through the whole state of Wyoming, and am now in Rapid City, South Dakota. Tired, so I'll keep this update short. Not much to chronicle anyway as it was mainly a touristy, but nonetheless awe-inspiring view into the beauty, majesty and inherent power of mother nature.

I enter Yellowstone Park from the West Side (Montana) and see thousands of dead blackened trees/naked tree trunks pointing up to the sky, with shorter greener trees interspersed beneath them. These are the remnants of a huge wildfire in 1998, according to the guidebooks I read the night before. After driving through this somber reminder of that tragedy for about 30 miles or so, I enter a clearing that goes as far as the eye can see. And in the distance I see smoke rising from the trees. Hmmm. I have a few "uh oh" moments, thinking I did not want to get caught in another wildfire. But I see the cars ahead of me driving on, so I decide what the heck, and follow suit. As I get closer, it turns out it wasn't fire causing the smoke, but the thermal energy from under the ground! This was steam rising from hot springs and cracks in the earth! For a moment I felt like an idiot. Ugh.

Then driving along, we hit a bisonjam. This is when bison decide to take over the road and block motorists. These are large creatures and can run 30 mph (3x faster than man) so they should not be taken lightly. Apparently quite a few people every year get gored by these creatures (unless that's just rumors the park rangers promulgate to keep tourists in check).

After a short wait for the bison to get bored of us and leave the road, I drive on towards Old Faithful. Rangers can predict the next eruption to within 10 minutes, and they predict the next one to be at 3:21 pm. I have a few minutes to kill so I go to the book store where the ranger announces that the Beehive Geyser was about to erupt in 10 minutes! This is the tallest of the geysers in the park (200-300 ft high) and it erupts only every 12 to 23 hours (unlike Old Faithful, this one is unpredictable). So I thought I was pretty lucky to catch that:

I then head to Old Faithful to wait, and sure enough at 3:23 she does not disappoint:

(All these eruptions remind me of my night in Salt Lake...)

I continue to drive to other spots within Yellowstone Park. Beautiful hot springs, with bacterial mats adding color to the base of the springs.

And the wedding-cake like terraces at Mammoth created by hot springs:

Other wildlife I see in the park (but was not fast enough with my camera) include wolves, deer, and elk! I leave the park after dark, get stuck again in another bisonjam for a few minutes, then head into town for dinner. After a beautiful day enjoying nature and wildlife in its own terrain, I do what every nature-respecting human is expected to do: I have a nice buffalo steak, medium rare.