Day 09

We were able to witness Old Faithful last night and again today. It is phenomenal sight to see and made all the more extraordinary by the geothermal mechanics that give rise to a geyser.  Yellowstone has thousands (yes, thousands) of earthquakes every year.  The vast majority of these earthquakes are completely undetectable to anyone without sensitive seismic equipment.  The fissures that underlie a geyser have a tendency to clog with deposits; the earthquakes help to break up the clogs and/or form new fissures. The average interval between eruptions has gradually been increasing for Old Faithful. In the 1950's, the average interval was about 50 minutes; today, it is closer to 90 minutes. It is far from a consistent interval; however, the park service can predict the next eruption within 10 minutes with a 90% confidence level. We definitely saw that to be the case.

Like every park we have visited on this trip, we went looking for a challenging hike today. Unfortunately, most of the trails into the woods are closed due to bears. I believe they are very active at the moment. Instead, we stayed on the shorter hiking loops near various scenic points. Of course, everyone that comes to Yellowstone wants to see wildlife, and we were not disappointed. We saw more buffalo, elk, deer, chipmunks, marmots and bears.

Remember the four major park rules from yesterday? That's great, because a large number of the visitors don't. The traffic rules are just reminding everyone to be courteous. The other two rules are for everyone's own safety - and someone is going to get seriously hurt.

In this picture, you can see how the deposits form a thin crusty coating on the surface. That layer, which is solid - not foam, may extend yards in any direction but be thin as ice, even with vegetation on top. Warnings abound; even so, people venture off the walkways.

Before this trip, I never realized that Yellowstone had a large lake within its borders. It doesn't surprise me, but its not the first thing you think about when you hear some mention Yellowstone. The lake freezes over solid in the winter - not surprising given the average winter nightly low is about 1 °F (−17 °C). However, there are sections that do not freeze due to geothermal features on the lake bed.

Even with this guy, I used zoom and didn't get too close.  He looks friendly.  A bit TOO friendly for my tastes. I have a fear of my obituary being posted under the "Humorous" or "Offbeat" section of the news.  Man Killed by Rabid Chipmunk - Will We Ever Learn? 

In addition to Yellowstone Lake, there is Yellowstone River, which has carved the Yellowstone Grand Canyon.  Actually, I believe it is called the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. The views were stunning, but we were disappointed that the paths and walkways down into the canyon were closed - presumably not yet open for the season. Given the steep grade and the amount of ice/snow still in the park, it is not unexpected; however, it was a shame that we didn't get down there.

We were in the car and there was no one behind us.

Even here in May, there is evidence of the tough, long winters in this part of the country. We had a particularly mild winter in North Florida; I'm not sure that we even had a single freeze.

The highlight of the day was back at the inn.  The Old Faithful Inn is huge - especially the lobby. Back in 1959, a 7.8 scale earthquake hit the area and knocked part of the inn off of its foundations. The inn was repaired, but the upper areas in the lobby (see pic below) were closed off to the public. There are catwalks, a "birdcage" and an access to the roof way at the top that have been closed off to the public for over 50 years. However, starting this season (yesterday to be precise), the staff is taking 6-8 people per day on a tour of the off-limits area in the afternoon. Angela found out about it and got us on the list.

It was a breath-taking tour. However, I must admit, it was a little nerve-wracking.  The hotel is over 100 years old; it was designed by a 29-year-old architect who was trying something new; it was built over a winter; the boards are a little shaky; some places are about 7 stories high with minimal railings; the area was closed for a reason 50 years ago and I'm thinking that they just forgot the reason and decided to open it up again on a whim.

"Why did we close off that area?"
"I'm not sure. Tim used to know, but he retired. I think its some sort of safety thing."
"Why don't we open it up?"
"Ok... but to be safe... let's just start by taking like 6 or 8 people per day."

We also went on the roof of the hotel and helped with lowering of the flags. That's the Wyoming state flag that we're trying to get down. The Old Faithful geyser is directly behind us.

Dinner was at the Old Faithful Inn Dining Room and it was the best meal of the whole trip. Food was very good, service was exceptional and it was easy to imagine dining at the inn in the 20's or 30's.  I did see a menu from that era and the fare has changed somewhat. Boiled ham is no longer on the menu. Tastes have changed.

Tomorrow, we will leave Yellowstone and head back south. Our route has yet to be determined, so it might prove interesting. Along those lines, we picked up a dishcloth at a gift shop here that reads "Poor Decisions Often Lead to the Most Interesting Stories".

Day 08

Good Morning Idaho Falls!

We took the opportunity this morning to drive around the city before we left, and it is a cool place. The Snake River runs through town and, as you'd expect, there are some waterfalls.  Not high waterfalls... but the original town seems to be built around a 10 foot waterfall that run diagonally across the river. Like I mentioned yesterday, a very clean city. I wish we had a bit more time to explore, but we got an early start today before anything was open.

Our destination for the day was Yellowstone National Park via West Yellowstone MT. Yellowstone National Park is huge - over 3,600 square miles.  About three times the size of Rhode Island. About 50% bigger than Delaware. While the majority of the park is in Wyoming, it does spill over into Montana and Idaho. Despite its size, there are a limited number of entrances into the park - only five. And once in the park, there are relatively few roads - all of which are only two lanes.  Most of the entrances and roads are closed in the winter.  Not all of them... just most of them. Strangely, the only entrances that are open year-round are on the northern end of the park. Here in May [again, ignore the posting date on the blog], we have to travel up to one of the entrances at the northwestern end of the park. It will be a few more weeks before the southern entrance via Jackson Hole is open and almost another month before all of the roads are open.

As has been the case with this entire trip, the views and scenery were amazing.  Traveling north in Idaho and over towards Montana, the lingering effects of winter were still visible. There is clearly a winter tourism industry in these parts that centers around snowmobiling.  The various businesses that sell, service and/or rent these vehicles were closing for the season. Angela pointed out various "trails" that ran parallel to the road as snowmobile routes. Apart from a single night-time excursion on a frozen fjord in Norway, I have never been on or around snowmobiles.

West Yellowstone MT is at the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park. It is a huge tourist destination in its own right that began in 1908 when a railway line from the west was created that ended effectively at the entrance to the park.  The town grew up around the railroad terminal and now has restaurants, motels, shops as well as residences - houses and condos.  We drove around and saw hotels or hostels that looked like dorm rooms. It appears that this too is a snowmobiling mecca with a very seasonal work force.  In the winter, it is bitterly cold with an average daytime HIGH temperature of only 24 °F (−4 °C).  It the gets really cold at night.

After we drove around the town, we parked and walked around the town. We are in that "between season" lull that occurs right after the winter season and before school lets out and the crowds descend upon the park. Like any tourist town, there are a lot of souvenir shops. We hit the shops and grabbed lunch at a local spot. The town was pretty dead, due to the aforementioned lull.

The entrance to the park is literally on the outskirts of town and that leads to a long two-lane highway into the park. The thing that was most impressionable to me upon entering the park were the lodgepole pines.  This trees are almost perfect cylinders with branches sticking out. And when they fall, the park service just leaves them there.  They appear to take forever to decay - just based on the number of fallen, solid lodgepole pines laying across the forest floor.

It doesn't take long to come upon hot springs and buffalo.  The buffalo shown below were grazing right next some hot springs (note all the fallen lodgepole pines).

Apparently, a buffalo weights two tons and can sprint at speeds up to 30mph.  I used the zoom on my camera and stayed behind both a fence and a boiling calderon of highly acidic water to take these shots.

There appear to be four main rules in the park:

1. Do not stop your car in the road.
2. Pull over if you are driving too slow to let faster traffic pass.
3. Do not approach wildlife; they will attack.
4. Do not venture off the walkways around springs and geysers; the ground is typically just a crust and you will fall through and boil to death.

We are in the slow season and the traffic is already a problem - mainly because people ignore Rule #1 and #2.  All roads are two lanes.  There are places to pull over to view the scenery or let other cars pass.  I cannot imagine the nightmare that this place becomes at the height of the season.

We are spending two nights at the Old Faithful Inn, which just opened for the season today.  The inn, which is huge, was built over the winter of 1903-1904 using locally sourced lodgepole pines and quarried stones.  It was expanded with an East wing in 1913 and a West wing in 1927.  We are staying in the West wing extension. While the rooms in the original portion of the inn are nice, they have shared bathrooms.  As it is, our cozy room has its own bathroom, but no phone, TV or internet (the horror).

Old Faithful Inn

Yellowstone sits above a "supervolcano" - a ridiculously big volcano.  Most volcanoes are found along the edges of tectonic plates, where there are natural weak areas for magma to force its way to the surface.  The Yellowstone supervolcano is somewhat unique in that it forces its way up through the middle of a tectonic plate. Over half of the world's geothermal features (e.g., geysers, hot springs, mud pots) are in Yellowstone. Steam can be seen rising from the ground at numerous sites all over the park. There is a volcano under there that is just waiting to erupt. I'm sleeping good tonight.

Tomorrow we get a chance to thoroughly examine the park.

Day 07

Today began in the very clean city of Idaho Falls, ID.  With nearly 60,000 people within its city limits, Idaho Falls is the second largest city in Idaho (behind Boise). The main venue for today was the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, which is about 88 miles west of Idaho Falls.

To get to Craters of the Moon, we drove through Idaho National Laboratories (INL), a 570,000 acre facility dedicated to a bunch of stuff - but most of it is nuclear related.  INL is the fifth largest employer in Idaho.  It is a division of the US Department of Energy, and their mandate is something along the the lines of: conduct vital research that allows us to sustain and develop nuclear energy technologies, scale other clean energy technologies, protect critical infrastructure, support national defense and homeland security, bolster cyber security, and make sure nuclear materials do not fall into the wrong hands.

Elephants, camels and giant bison roamed these parts of Idaho

Here's something you might not know about INL: it is the site of the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic power.  The Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 (EBR-I) was operational between December 1951 and December 1963. You can actually still visit EBR-I, and we planned to do so. Unfortunately, we were a few weeks too early as it was not yet open for the season. Yes... there is apparently a nuclear reactor "season".

Here's something else you might not know about INL: it was the site of the world's first (and the U.S.' only) fatal reactor accident. The Army was developing a portable nuclear reactor that could be deployed in remote locations, such as the Arctic, with minimal crew.  The reactor had been operational, but shut down for periodic maintenance.  On 1/3/61, when restarting the reactor, one of the three operators apparently made a very bad mistake and removed a control rod thus causing the reactor to immediately go critical and effectively explode.  It wasn't a nuclear explosion; instead, the reactor overheated so quickly that the water coolant instantly converted to steam and exploded inside the reactor vessel. The vessel, which weighted 26,000 pounds, jumped 9 feet into the air spewing steam, water and bolts. Only the three operators (one of which was a trainee) were at the site, and all three were killed.

Craters of the Moon is a stunning park, and we really just lucked out to visit it. We were planning our trip back home and asked "what's close to Idaho Falls?"  It looked big and close enough... and that's all it took. It is in the high desert and most of the area's annual precipitation of 15" comes in the form of snow during the winter.  Lots of sage brush across wide open plains as you approach the park, and the sage continues into the park as well.  But you can immediately see that this was an area with a history of extreme volcanic activity.  The park is full of lave tubes, cinder cones and lava flows.

Unfortunately, this picture doesn't give a good sense of scale. If you fell into this cone, you'd be about a hundred yards deep and have a hard time getting out any way other than the precarious trail on the left.

The Apollo astronauts in training came to Craters of the Moon to learn to look for and collect good rock specimens in an unfamiliar and harsh environment.

We took the 4 mile North Crater Trail.  Our daily walk back in Amelia is about 3.5 miles, and Angela was confident that this hike would be a breeze.  However, it proved a tad more difficult right off the bat as we climbed about 400 feet up a cider slope. We were a bit out of breath before we even lost sight of the car. In our defense, we were also at over a mile of elevation.  The hike was over lava flows and up more cinder hills. We encountered only two couples on the entire hike - pretty much had the place to ourselves (at least on this hike). The views and landscape are absolutely stunning; it looks like another world.

The volcanic eruptions that gave rise to the features in the park occurred numerous times between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago.  There is still tremendous geothermal activity underneath, and there will be more volcanic activity. Geologists predict that the area will experience its next eruption some time in the next 900 years with the most likely period in the next 100 years.

Our visit to the park in early May [ignore the date stamp on this posting] may have been the perfect to hike.  Winter was letting go of its icy grasp, schools were still in session and the full force of the summer heat was at least a month away.  This last item can be exceptionally discomforting as the heat-absorbing lava rocks can send the surface temperatures up to over 150 F.

After our hike, we drove around the park seeing some of the other sites.  It was then back to Idaho Falls.  Along the way, we stopped in the small town of Arco (pop about 1,000) for lunch.  Arco was the first city in the world to ever be powered by nuclear energy.  We stopped at Taqueria La Costa, a very small Mexican restaurant, at close to 3pm.  This was an "order at the window and then go sit in a booth" type of restaurant. Unbelievably inexpensive (we snuck in just in time on the lunch menu) and mine was very good.  Angela's was just ok.  From what we could tell, the only staff were a woman and her 8-year-old daughter, whose job it was to instruct patrons on how to ring the bell for service. I could eat there four times a week and probably would if I lived in Arco.

This evening was pretty uneventful - just a week's worth of laundry for me. Tomorrow it's off to Yellowstone.

Day 06

I had to say good-bye to Briggs today as he was flying to Santa Ana, California.  He is the process of moving from Florida and needed to scout out apartments. I was so sorry to see him go. He kept me exercising and eating somewhat healthy (not counting the Bacon Maple Sundae). He was out the door to catch the airport shuttle at about 5am. I'm sure he's going to have fun in California.

Angela didn't fly in until about 3:30pm, so I had a good part of the day to kill. I scouted out the airport and then headed downtown.  What a gorgeous city.  Snow-capped mountains are visible throughout downtown.  And it may be the cleanest major city that I have ever seen. I took the opportunity to wash the car - the second car wash of the trip. Today is Angela's birthday, and I wanted to car to be especially spiffy for her.

When Angela arrived, we headed north to Idaho. Our destination for the evening was Idaho Falls, which is in the southeast corner of the state.  Salt Lake City is a large metropolis, and it took us a while to get of it and the surrounding suburbs. But when we did, it was amazing countryside. The west is just so big, wide-open and varied.  The scenery continued into Idaho, where parts look like Switzerland.  We were headed due north up I-15, with huge mountains immediately to our east and some intermittent farmland to our west.

We stopped for dinner in Malad City (also known as just Malad) - it is the only city in Oneida County.  Population is about 2,100.  The city was named for the French word for sick - malade (the "e" was subsequently dropped from the city's name). The name came from some early French trappers who got sick camping in the area and blamed it on the river. Subsequent trappers had no such problems. It is believed that the French trappers had eaten some bad beaver - beaver that had fed on the poisonous roots of the "water hemlock".  While beaver is immune to the poison, the amount of it in the beaver's body would have made the men very ill.  Natives had learned to boil the beaver first before eating it.  So there you go... and I'm going to leave it at that.

Here are some more fun facts about Malad:

• It lays claim to having more people of Welsh descent per capita than anywhere outside of Wales.
• In 1910, the earthen dam north of Malad broke and flooded the city.
• In 1975, a 6.1 magnitude earthquake caused damage to two-thirds of the buildings in Malad.
• In 1996, a turbo-prop airplane carrying Coca-Cola executives crashed outside the city killing all eight people on board. The NTSB determined that icing was the cause of the accident. BTW, the plane did not take-off or intend to land in Malad; it was just flying overhead.
• In 2003, a national influenza outbreak hit Malad the hardest, and the city was virtually shut down.
• Because of its proximity to Utah, which has no lottery, the tiny city of Malad accounts for 19 percent of the total Idaho lottery sales. One local store alone sells 3 percent of all Idaho lottery tickets.

Angela's big birthday dinner was at a small restaurant called "Me-N-Lou's".  There is a story behind the name, but I forgot it - however, I believe we were served by the "Me" in the name.  Much like the restaurant in Wellington UT, the service here was very good, the food good and the portions enormous. Being Idaho and all, the potatoes were a large part of the dinner.  But the amazing part were the scones with raspberry honey. I checked on the definition of scone and it says "a small unsweetened or lightly sweetened biscuitlike cake". These were pie-sized, deep-fried, covered in sugar, airy flat cakes.  In other words, the exact opposite of a scone. When we explained to "Me" that we loved them but that these were not traditional scones, she stared at us as if she couldn't understand the words coming out of our mouths.  That might have been the case, since our mouths were stuffed with "scones"... however, she insisted that this was indeed a traditional scone. Having entered that dreamy part of a diabetic coma, I had lost all enthusiasm for arguing or continuing this discussion.

We waddled out of "Me-N-Lou's" with some spare scones and raspberry honey under our arms and headed back north on I-15. The interstate snakes its way through the valleys on the way to Idaho Falls with small farming communities along the route (see below).

Unfortunately, we took no pics today. We are staying two nights here in Idaho Falls at a very large Hampton Inn.  Our room is the last one on the right on the top floor and our keys appear to work only once before going blank. Tomorrow we shoot for the moon.