Tales of a vagrant ant

Day 8 - Yellowstone Park continued, and making it to the West.

Having stuck around the Black Hills as long as we did, we really only had a day to check out Yellowstone in daylight. More time would’ve been nice, but with Elly, it would’ve been hard to leave the car for long at any rate. We were able to see some really cool stuff with the time we did have though!

Geothermal and hot spring features, in a dazzling array of shapes and colours.

Katie was a bit concerned at being on top of a hotbed (haha) of volcanic activity, and this picture didn’t help

At first I thought this was a funny picture, until I read that some kid had died exactly like that, and this sign was a reminder to that accident, and both of us wondered at the plight of hapless animals who had somehow dared to wander into these places. Mmm scalded alive. yum.
We also got to check out some classic yellowstone destinations, like old faithful. Here’s what I thought of old faithful, when it didn’t start spouting on time.

Something else that struck me about the park was the amount of dead trees, that hadn’t fallen, but were just left standing. The combination of pests and forest fires had really decimated the trees there. So many trees stripped of its foilage as to be haunting, and contrary to what my beliefs of what a forest should “be” (despite my intellectual understanding of its cyclical nature).

Today also abounded with buffalo, much to our delight. We even got to watch some cross a river!! That was really cool

I love this shot, because one buffalo clearly doesn’t want to keep walking, while the other one is just trucking on, oblivious

Other buffalo are interested in other things, like the following:

After we left Yellowstone Park, we tried to look for Gallatin Petrified Forest high in the hills of Montana. We turned off onto a gravel path and drove. The road just kept going and going, and after about 1/2 hour of driving, we got skeptical, and abandoned the dream. I think it may have been 10 miles more, but we were driving at 20 miles a hour on this bumpy gravel road. So we decided to make out for a bit, just to say that we made out in the high hills of Montana, on the side of a gravel road. Haha, well that’s why I did it. After that, we got back on the main road, and drove through paradise valley, to get back to I-90, and I was underwhelmed by the landscape.

Perhaps if I had been a settler, this WOULD have been a Paradise Valley, and I would have rejoiced at the fertile fields, However, I think that at this point, I was getting pretty desensitized, and for me, the landscape of Montana had little to offer me. It was just like the Fraser Valley all over again. This was also the point when the reality of non-vacation was setting in for Katie, and she was starting to get homesick with the knowledge of just how far she was from her family, and that she was actually moving to a new place, and not just having a vacation.
We had dinner in Bozeman, and it was pretty much the first place on the trip where young university folk hung out as a place to live, not as a travelling destination. Granted, we hadn’t stopped in many of the big cities along the way to test this theory fully. Dinner satisfied a growing hunger for Mexican, and we hit the road after that, to get to Butte. Dusk in Montana was so strange and surreal. There was an overwhelming… blueness to the skyscape, and visually you could almost see the wall fo blue that crept over the horizon into view, and consumed the other hues. At the same time, our westward trajectory also meant that we were chasing the receding light of the sun. The result was a slow motion conquest of solid azurean night over the diminishing light of the sun. Unfortunately, I think that I was driving at the time, so I didn’t get a chance to snap a shot of this. Topping off the peculiar evening was the Finlen hotel, in historic Butte. You could almost taste the splendor that this place once was, in the proudness of the foyer , with its large marble pillars, to the large prominence of the typewriter behind the front desk, as if futilely resisting the symbolic twins of modern technology, the personal computer and the internet. The elevators even used mechanical buttons that had to be depressed and when we got into our rooms, I just knew that the bathroom once had those clawed bathtubs, rather than the white metallic sheets of metal that surrounded the shower stall.
Three more days left now. Unfortunately, the next couple entries will be relatively sparse on pictures. Til next time!