Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Grand Teton Vacation Summary

Published
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Michael
on July 31, 2006
in Journal
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The preceding ten entries contain a day-by-day description of my vacation to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. If you haven’t read them, you may want to start with the oldest and work your way up. You can see them all at once by clicking on the “Jul 2006″ link, located on the right edge of this blog page, below the side navigation buttons.

It was a great vacation, one that I am very happy to have taken. The scenery was awesome, the wildlife was amazing. It reminded me of the grandeur of Alaska, with a unique and rugged beauty all its own.

I think if I do a trip like this again soon, I would like to have a better camera. My digital camera is okay, but I would really love to have a digital SLR with at least a 300mm lens and a tripod. I think that is probably the minimum setup to get the kinds of photos I wanted to get. I would also like to spend more time at certain spots, and try to do more in the early morning and late evening. Those are really the best times to catch wildlife and to get great scenic shots.

Day 10: Home Again

Published
by
Michael
on July 30, 2006
in Journal and Photos
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We drove all night Saturday night, and stopped Sunday morning for breakfast at an International House of Pancakes (which now goes by the—in my opinion—less interesting name, “IHOP”). It was my first time eating in that restaurant chain. I ordered lingonberry pancakes, which were very good. The waiter told me that these particular berries sometimes sell for $30 a jar, but IHOP gets them at a special price. I had never had lingonberry anything before, but found them very tasty. (I later learned that lingonberries are also called “mountain cranberries,” although they are not true cranberries, and they do have a somewhat cranberry-like taste, only slightly sweeter. They are served with ample sweetener, or they would presumably be quite tart.)

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We made good time, and had lunch at an Olive Garden in Illinois, just east of St. Louis. I had the portobello ravioli with specially ordered marinara sauce instead of the usual creamy sauce. Yum! By 6:00 I was home. My mom thought she might rest a while at my place, but was eager to get home and couldn’t sleep, so she left very soon and headed on to her home in Tennessee.

I did my best to unpack, but was totally tired and ready for bed. I crashed! Thankfully I had the foresight to have requested Monday off as well, so I had a full day to “recover” from my vacation!

Day 9: Devil’s Tower

Published
by
Michael
on July 29, 2006
in Journal and Photos
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Sabbath morning we went to church in Powell. It was a very small group, maybe eight of us altogether. We had a nice lesson study, but because the pastor was away, there was no church or fellowship lunch that week. So after Sabbath school we continued on our way.

One stretch of highway was an unusual blood-red color. It doesn’t show perfectly in the photo below (I took it while driving), but you get the general idea.

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It was a very interesting road in other respects, too. It had a very long and somewhat steep incline, and we drove a long time before reaching the top. It went in and out of open range, so I had to keep an eye open for cattle. (We did see some, but not on the road, thankfully.) On the other side, it descended through many layers of rock labeled according to geologic time tables (so many billion years old, etc.); there seemed to be an unusually wide gamut of rock layers exposed.

In western Wyoming we came to Devil’s Tower, another natural site that I’ve always wanted to see. I wish we could have seen it in the early morning or at sunset, but our driving schedule did not permit that. It was very impressive, and I was awed at the sheer size of it.

The most easily recognized profile (colorized a bit in Photoshop):

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A closer view from a path near the base; the photo suffers from some perspective distortion:

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Scenery within the Devil’s Tower park:

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According to information inside the visitor’s center at Devil’s Tower, no one is really sure how the tower formed. But apparently as the rock cooled, it fractured into tall columns, each with a somewhat crystalline shape (mostly hexagonal, but some have 5 or 7 sides). Over time pieces of these columns have collapsed, and you can see fragments of all sizes strewn around the base of the tower and out into the surrounding woods for some distance.

Below is a close-up of Devil’s Tower. You can see that some columns are missing their tops, others their bases. Can you spot the people in the photo at left? Even standing there in person, I had no idea of the scale of the formation until I saw the climbers and took these photos. The red rectangle is the approximate area shown in the second photo; the two big red circles are magnifications of the smaller red circles.

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The rock behind me appears to be part of one of the columns that has fallen (the crystalline shape is not as clear from the ground):

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We also enjoyed visiting a large colony of prairie dogs there.

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In the evening we came to the Black Hills in South Dakota. We might have been tempted to stop, but we were tired, and the Black Hills are one of the places I remember well from childhood vacations, so I was not so eager to see it again. I did want to visit the Badlands, but by the time we reached them, it was already dark, so we just drove on.

Day 8: Packing Up and Heading Out

Published
by
Michael
on July 28, 2006
in Journal and Photos
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With Eugene and Heidi gone, my mom and I decided we might as well head on home too. We were both satisfied with what we had seen and were ready to head back. While my mom was purchasing some items at a local convenience store, she saw a marten—something I’ve always wanted to see in the wild, and I was disappointed I missed it. That was the second rare animal she had been privileged to see alone!

We took the northern route home, so we first drove up through Yellowstone. We ate lunch at Old Faithful at a grill, which had some very good vegetarian items on the menu. As we drove the loop around Yellowstone Lake we came across a beautiful elk with an amazing set of antlers, and later several decent herds of bison. (Unfortunately we could not photograph the elk. The road was congested with a long line of cars from both directions, all stopping for this one animal. The park rangers were taking people by the arm and threatening to handcuff people who were getting too close. So I decided to just drive on.) The scenery through the eastern Yellowstone entrance, along the Shoshone River, was absolutely amazing, so beautiful and majestic. A sign indicated that it was grizzly country, but we did not see any bears.

Scenes from Yellowstone:

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We spent the night at a hotel in Powell, Wyoming. On the way there we saw some really beautiful clouds and an incredible sunset (the colors and streaks are natural, nothing added):

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Day 7: Our Last Day Together

Published
by
Michael
on July 27, 2006
in Journal
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By Thursday our supply of clean clothing was running low, so we decided to do laundry. Fortunately the laundry prices were not as outrageous as the shower prices had been. I had learned a computer with Internet access was freely available to all campers, so while my mom was working on the laundry I decided to go check my email. There was nothing interesting, but at least I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. (Okay, I admit it: My life revolves around email.)

We went on another wildlife hunt, this time heading towards the Snake River pullout. My mom wanted to check on canoeing, kayaking, and rafting costs, but it turned out that the reservations office was located elsewhere. (It was an interesting road going down to the river: 19% grade!)

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the Jackson Lake Lodge again so my mom could rest. Eugene, Heidi, and I went for a short walk about back, which was nice.

Later, towards evening, we returned to Signal Mountain, where we saw the same mother moose and calf, as well as a red fox, and a very beautiful sunset over the Tetons.

Eugene and Heidi decided that with all the driving ahead of them, they should head out that evening while they were feeling energetic.