Author Archives: Jen

Day 19 – Again with the arches

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Landscape Arch, considered to be the longest natural arch in the world
Today we repeated our strategy from yesterday – a morning hike before things got hot.  We took another trail that left from nearby our campground, to the famous Landscape Arch.  They don’t let you climb under this one anymore, since about 20 years ago a huge hunk of it fell off and crashed to the ground.  They’re not sure how much longer this one will last – it’s very long and narrow.
The kids (at least the aforementioned 2/3 of them) had pretty much had it with hiking by this point.  We made a quick stop to see the iconic Delicate Arch, which is what you often see in Arches pictures and is also the picture on the Utah license plate.  We only saw it from a distance, since we would have had a mutiny on our hands if we attempted the 3-mile uphill round-trip hike to the base.

Spotted lizard
Delicate Arch (from a distance)
     

We wanted to escape the heat in the afternoon, and drove back into Moab to find a likely place.  Bob hit on the brainstorm of finding the library, which suited the bill perfectly.  Books, toys, air conditioning, kids to play with, and free internet access – we had it all.

In the evening, we’d decided to say enough with all this quiet hiking business and had booked a sunset jet boat tour through the canyonlands of the Colorado River.  Naturally, the girls wanted to sit in the raised, exposed back area of the boat – but it actually turned out to be the place to be.  The boat was fast, the scenery was beautiful, and the whipping wind kept us cool.  The driver would slalom back and forth across the river, twisting the wheel and sending up a wonderfully cool spray of water just before it appeared that we would crash into the canyon wall.  We also saw various wildlife, Native American pictures on the side of the canyon, and crazy people climbing its walls.  The tour also included an all-you-can-eat Dutch oven dinner with several kinds of roasted and barbequed meats that had been cooked in a Dutch oven for 22 hours – delicious.  We all retired full and happy.  Zoe and Nadia were so full and happy that we managed to convince them to go on one last little hike on the way home — down a trail called Park Avenue because of the skyscraper-like fins on either side.  (Lanie could not be convinced, and went in the car with Bob to pick us up at the other end.)

 ***

From Bob:
There are actually 2,000 arches in this place – although some of them might be as small as the ones Tom used to sit next to and wait for Jerry to come out.  I don’t know.  We haven’t seen them all, but even if some are tiny, that should not diminish the splendor of this place.  Any one of the arches we’ve seen in the past two days would be the crown jewel of any other state’s park system. 
                Still, slim and delicate as they are, these arches don’t offer much shade, so it was back into Moab for the afternoon.  This time we visited the County Library, which was air conditioned, offered wifi, and promised many books to keep the girls happy for a while.  As it turned out, the local parents also like some of these features, too, and they brought their kids in.  So the girls got a rare chance to play with some people they weren’t related to.
                It should be noted here that the most time-intensive part of producing this blog is not the sitting down and writing part, which what I expected would be the case.  In fact, the tedium and delay comes from uploading the pictures.  Public wifi – or even the wifi Jen had to pay for in Yellowstone – is pretty slow.  It takes a long time for the pictures to get from the computer to the blogging servers.  The County Library in Moab is a very pleasant place, and it has really cool water coming out of its water fountains, but its free Internet connection is not much quicker, if at all, than the other places we’ve managed to get online.
                So we wait (and read a few more Berenstain Bear books than we thought could possibly exist – did you know they went up into space?). The pictures are very important to the process, especially here, where the landscape so dramatically defies description.
Sunset hike through Park Avenue

Day 18 – The Not-Really-Golden Arches

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Sand Dune Arch

Arches National Park

Finally the stars aligned today and I was able to get up earlyish to go for a bike ride.  It was a beautiful morning, with the early sun making the rocks glow like fire.  It’s definitely worth the effort to be up and about before the heat of the day rises and the roads get congested with other tourists.
Arches sunrise
This morning we tried to get everyone moving early (for the above mentioned reasons) and went on a hike that left practically right from our campsite.  We walked through a lot of desert and red rock scenery to Broken Arch, then went on to the refreshing Sand Dune Arch, which is housed between two giant red rock fins and is therefore nice and shady.  There were lots and lots of rocks to climb, and you could get right up inside the arches.  (Fortunately we were able to tell the girls that it is against the rules to attempt to go on top of the arches.)
Our time at Arches is proving to be a lot more relaxed than at our other destinations.  There’s not as much too see, so there’s less pressure to stay on the move.  Also, you’re almost forced to take a break in the afternoon, when the heat becomes overwhelming.  So, we motivated the kids through the morning hike with promises lunch in Moab, at a nice air-conditioned restaurant (no peanut butter!)  As we were driving into town, Bob and I saw this billboard shining out like a glorious beacon: “Moab Microbrewery, 1 mile ahead.  Kids Welcome!”  There was much rejoicing.  The brewery turned out to be very popular with the whole family, in fact.  The food was quite good, the kids loved the homemade root beer, and there was an in-house gelato bar for dessert. 

In the  afternoon we did a shorter ranger-led hike to see the Windows arches.  It started at 3pm, which as it turns out is not  quite late enough to escape the heat of the day.  At least 2/3 of the kids were dragging through much of this one, although Bob and I were still awestruck by the spectacular scenery around every bend.

Including this one for scale.  This is one of the Windows.  Can you see the kids in this picture? (lower right quandrant)
***
From Bob:
Even at the time we knew that we would miss the cold we were experiencing on those Yellowstone mornings.  The kids even seemed to grasp this, as they clutched their tea cups and huddled by the fire.
                The afternoons here are the proof of that earlier hypothesis.  It’s around 100 degrees – only 9 degrees shy of the hottest temperatures they say one can expect here in August.  It is, of course, a dry heat, and there’s often a soft breeze that makes it bearable.  The sun does get oppressive, what with all the sand, the short trees and the fact that we’re still 5,000 feet above sea level.  It all conspired, once our three-mile morning stroll was done, to get us off the Arches National Park plateau  (you should see the road you have to drive up once you pass the visitors’ center) and into neighboring Moab by noontime.
                This city is almost mythical, such is its reputation as an mecca for extreme outdooriness. Most storefronts on the main strip are advertising river rafting, mountain biking, atv or Jeep excursions, mountain climbing, hang gliding, parachuting, or a bunch of other activities that people have thought up that fall in the range of having an acceptable chance of survival, yet a titillating enough possibility that you’ll wind up broken up in many pieces.  The main practice of law in this town must concern the exact wording of waiver forms.
                Even the brewery has boats hanging from the ceiling and bikes riding up the wall.  There were multiple advertisements for extreme sporting opportunities – several hours of beer drinking is probably a prerequisite for checking out a verticalwhitewaterJeepskydive adventure.   We just stuck to the beer.
I’m not sure how they got up there
Campfire dinner!  The not-exactly-traditional falafel.
                
Once we were back at our camp site and things started to cool down a bit, the girls were able to climb on the big rock behind the tent.  Simultaneously, many children were climbing on many rocks adjacent to tents and campers right along the campground road.  It’s that kind of place.
The kids were taking their shoes off any chance they could.

Day 17 – The Not-So-Great Salt lake

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The Great Salt Lake.  Looks beautiful, right?  Don’t be fooled.
Strange day today.  Our plan had been to do a hike that our friends had told us about, to a natural hot spring waterfall that’s a popular bathing spot.  But when we found that it was a 2.5-mile hike each way, and the weather was going to be over 100 degrees, we didn’t think anyone would be much in the mood for a hot springs soak.
So, we figured when you’re in Salt Lake City, what do you do?  You go to the Great Salt Lake, of course!  Surely this must be a big tourist destination, with nice beaches, right? 
Turns out, not so much.
Salt- and shrimp-poop encrusted beach
The first clue should have been when I looked at the map and remarked to Bob, “It’s really strange – there’s almost nothing near the lake at all.  Not even any roads.”  But undeterred, we located a “Great Salt Lake State Park” on our map, and figured that was just the ticket.  When we arrived, we found a deserted beach behind a chained off parking lot with an ancient sign saying “Beach parking, $5”.  There were some other people parked outside the gate and we asked them about swimming places – and even though they were locals, they were not able to think of any place to swim in the Great Salt Lake (clue #2).
Salt-encrusted sinkhole
At this point we noticed two people way off, actually wading in the water.  At the same time a van full of Asian tourists parked next to us, and they started heading toward the beach.  So we figured we’d give it a try.  Things only got weirder.  On the way across the large stretch of beach, we noticed that at some point well in the past there had been some sort of bird holocaust.  The remains of dead birds were scattered around the beach.  Then the smell hit us – sort of a low tide mixed with rotting animal smell.  Then the flies.  When we actually reached the water, the smell and flies receded, so we did wade in a bit.  At that point, we found the water to be teeming with tiny shrimp (and the surface largely covered with what I assume was floating dead shrimp). 
Lanie caught a shrimp!
You’ll see from the photos that it actually appears to be a beautiful place.  But none of us really wanted to get too deeply into that water.  It was shallow for a long, long way out.  It’s apparently 70% salt, too salty for almost any fish or plants.  I talked to the other people who were actually swimming, who turned out to be a local guy and his daughter.  I felt a little relieved at this, figuring he still seemed healthy, but he then confessed that he had never swum in the salt lake previously.  Apparently this just isn’t done in Utah.  (Public service announcement: He also told me that all the black stuff we could see in patches on the ground was shrimp poop.  He said it gets harvested, then sold to hotels in Las Vegas who use it to make “black sand” beaches.  So you should probably avoid those if you’re ever in Las Vegas.)  The biggest mystery remains why the van-load of Asian tourists chose this spot to visit.  Maybe as an example of Western decay.  As I told the girls repeatedly, at least we can tell our grandchildren someday that we went into the Great Salt Lake.
So we said farewell to the not-so-great salt lake and went to a nearby different state park on a different lake.  This proved to be substantially more appealing (despite the weird layer of green algae floating near the shore), and the girls had fun swimming for a while before we moved on.
Then it was on to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.  It’s a stunning place – words can’t do it justice.  There are huge red rock formations everywhere (some of which are arches, hence the name), rising from a carpet of soft red desert sand.  Driving to our campground at the far end of the park (Devil’s Garden), we couldn’t stop gasping in amazement at everything we were seeing.  Unlike Yellowstone, this park is a nice manageable size – it has one main 18-mile road running through it, and most of the hikes and famous formations are accessible from it.
Our campground is also stunning – we all immediately agreed, the most scenic we’ve ever been in by far.  We’re nestled among the rock formations, looking out across the desert with our tent on soft, fine, red sand.  The kids immediately threw off their shoes to run in the soft sand and scale the rocks.  (The only downside to this campground is the lack of showers.  This is a substantial disadvantage given that you end up sandy and very sweaty with the 100+ degree desert temperatures, and if you were foolish enough to visit the Great Salt Lake you may also have a crust of salt on your calves.)  We got there in time to prepare a dinner feast (including a watermelon, sweet corn, and tomatoes that we’d gotten at a roadside stand) and attend the campfire program on local animals.  Chances are that everything we own will end up coated in sand (despite our strict foot-brushing requirement prior to entering the tent) but we still think it’s worth it.
We got to camp here!  It was actually sprinkling a bit as we arrived, but that didn’t last long.
***
From Bob:
Hey, the tent’s back.  And it’s sitting on a nice bed of soft bed of fine red sand.  This is the grooviest camp ground in the world.  Everything is red.  Red sand everywhere.  Big red rocks for our tent to hide behind.  Sunburned Europeans. It’s the Devil’s Garden.  Sounds like another Grateful Dead song.
                AND, when it’s sunset, which it was not long after we got the tent set up, everything gets even REDDER (except the Europeans, who turn orangish in the fluorescent lighting of their rented RVs).  There is no campfire ban here, thanks probably to the large amount of fireproof sand in all directions.  The Nation Park Service is not very generous with their firewood prices: we bought two packages for $5 apiece, and each has about eight pieces of wood in it.  No doubt the wood has to be shipped here from somewhere.  While the trees around here do look pretty flammable, they are sparsely spread around and they’re not very big.
                In fact, we should all be proud of the way the Park Service is trying to fulfill its mission without wasting a lot of money – aside from gouging people for firewood. When you enter a park, you get a map and a newspaper if you want one.  If you lose your map, you could as for another one, I guess, but they’re not out in racks everywhere where people can just pick them up and toss them around.  Certain sections of the parks have their own maps at little stands that request a 50-cent donation per map, or that you return the map to the rack.  You don’t see a lot of maps lying around and I think the way they’re distributed has something to do with that.  We can also rest assured that these parks – the big western ones, at least – are lightening the wallets of people from all around the world.  Most of the towns we’ve visited seem to survive mainly on tourism, and they treat foreign tourists well.
                In many cases, we’re in rather the same boat as the foreign tourists, as was clear in our trip to the Great Salt Lake.  It’s a beautiful place, but it smells awful (every time I pass the dumpster on my way to the bathroom here I have a Salt Lake flashback).  Pretty much everyone seems to know this except us and those two vanloads of Asian tourists.  We all hiked across maybe 200 yards of salt crusted sand, amid dozens of dead birds in various states of decay.   They didn’t know any better than we did.  We did find that it didn’t smell so bad once you waded in a few hundred feet.  Unfortunately for our fellow tourists, they did not venture off shore.  If we run into them again, I’ll let them know.
                As for now, we’ll rest comfortably knowing that we don’t have to go anywhere for a while and maybe we’ll spill some food wantonly because we can.  We are now officially out of bear country, and the kangaroo rat and grasshopper mouse do not inspire the same fear as does the grizzly. 
                

We’ve seen SO many rainbows out here.  I think it’s because you can see so far.  It never seems to be raining across the
whole sky like at home — instead you can see patches of rain in the distance interspersed with patches of sun.

Day 16 – Escape from Wyoming (on the third try)

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At Grand Teton National Park

If you ever happen to drive from Yellowstone to the Salt Lake City area, you’ll notice a few strange things about your route.  You’ll be puttering along nicely, believing you’re making excellent southward progress, when suddenly you find yourself in Idaho, on a road with a different number.  As you’re scratching your head and consulting your map, never fear – about 45 seconds later you’re back in Wyoming again, on the same old road, as though Idaho were just a momentary hallucination.  Then, a while later, you rejoice – you’ve arrived in Utah!  No, wait, here comes Wyoming again.  It is a very hard state to escape.
The other thing that’s odd, at least to someone from the east coast, is how little is out here.  We’d planned to stop for dinner and made the foolish assumption that a town that actually appeared on the map, in a substantial size font, would have some sort of restaurant.  Then we’d arrive there and find the customary “Pop. 37” sign, four houses or so, and maybe a couple of trucks.  We had to find a town with a large, bold font on the map (probably equivalent to say, Hartford on a map of New England) to find anything that would remotely qualify as a “town” to us New Englanders.  And in between the marked towns on the map, forget it – nothing but endless fields, trees, and maybe a few cows.
If there is a body of water, my kids will be in it.  They will promise just
to wade but will end up soaked from the waist down.  This is a law
of nature that I’ve learned it’s best to just accept rather than fight.
Prior to all this driving excitement, however, we made another stop.  The south entrance to Yellowstone leads directly into Grand Teton National Park, and we’d planned to spend a couple of hours there.  It was a beautiful place – we did a 2.5 mile hike, had a picnic lunch (surprise, peanut butter!) along a breathtaking lake, and wished we’d had time to ride on the lovely bike path that seemed to run along much of the length of the park.  We saw the iconic mountains towering in the distance, with glaciers still clinging to their tops.  Bob and I both agreed this was a place we’d like to come back to.
As we got into Utah, the scenery changed dramatically.  Instead of lush forests and snowcapped peaks, we saw dramatic red rocks, sometimes streaked with pinks and greens.  Our destination was a cabin at an RV resort outside Salt Lake City – chosen purely for convenience and with a less than charming setting right off the highway bordering on a gas station parking lot.  But it was nice to sleep in a bed for a change, and very pleasant to be warm.
***
From Bob:
Tonight in a cabin in Utah, perhaps the very same on where Jerry Garcia hung out in that song, we are enjoying the beds.  It was a bit of a struggle to figure out who would get which bed, and Lanie is sleeping on the floor on one of our thermarest pads. Well, anyway, I plan to be enjoying a bed in a few minutes.
In much the same way that our family had trouble deciding who got the top bunk and who had to share their space, I’ve been spending the last few minutes filling up the four electrical outlets in our cabin.  These are a precious resource.
                At this point, after some rather primitive surroundings at Yellowstone (remember those signs in the bathroom about personal care items only), we have a good number of electrical items that need charging.  Right now the battery charger is plugged in and charging AAs for the camera.  Also in that outlet, Jen’s Kindle is plugged in.  This device is important because it gives us Internet access, even without a hot spot. 
                The iPod is in another socket, paired with this laptop.  The laptop we will continue to charge, as we don’t expect to see another outlet until Colorado, four days from now.  Once something gets fully charged, we have two cell phones to plug in.
                We do have the car outlets, and Charles gave us a nifty gadget that lets us plug anything into those, but things charged in the car seem to get depleted very quickly.  Maybe it was the altitude, or the cold, but I think it has something to do with the physics of the car electricity.  Also, our car is working so hard, and doing so well, we like to give it a break any time we can.
                So we plug in when we can.  This is what I like to think of as resource management.  It’s much the same as all those pepper and salt packets I took from Taco Mike’s in Wyoming during one of our few fast-food stops (the first since Canadian Wendy’s, I think).   We also grab ice and water from soda fountains when we can and napkins and plastic cutlery when they’re within reach.  Not too much, just what we need.
                Good news, we heard a ranger talking the other day about what background people need to become rangers.  He said resource management was one of the things people study.  Jen and I want to be park rangers someday, and we’ve already got a head start.

Day 15 – Cold night and hot springs

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The coldest morning yet, and we had difficulty getting going – we all kept having to stop and warm our cold, stiff hands by the campfire.  But eventually we were back in the car, ready to take on Yellowstone’s upper loop.  The advantage of our campground is that it’s in the center of the figure eight, and is therefore on both loops.  (The disadvantage is the high elevation – we discovered that the Mammoth Hot Springs campground was predicted to have balmy mid-forties temperatures tonight!)

We had three main stops today.  The first was the Norris Geyser Basin, where we happened to arrive in time to go on a ranger-led hike.  This was quite a workout for Bob, since Lanie really hit the wall this morning.  She’s been a real trooper, going on two and three mile hikes without too many complaints, but today her cold was really getting to her, and she just wanted to be carried the whole way.  (Luckily she perked up as lunchtime approached – though I’m frankly surprised anyone is able to summon any enthusiasm for lunch these days, since we’ve had peanut butter sandwiches pretty much every day since the start of the trip.  It’s hard to find anything as convenient, non-perishable, and nutritious as a good old peanut butter sandwich.)
The second stop was the Mammoth Hot Springs, a little town on the upper loop that has beautiful rock terraces that have been created by the mineral-rich hot springs.  Today is Saturday, and everything was extremely crowded.  We had trouble even finding a place to park.  However, the terraces were beautiful — like a frozen winter wonderland, even though they were really just icy-white rocks — and we had an up-close-and-personal encounter with a herd of elk that apparently like to cool off in the shade of the buildings in town.
Note the herd of elk lounging under the tree and the warning cones (I guess they come here a lot).

Not ice!
Next came the stop that the kids were most excited about – the Boiling River.  This was the other swimming spot that the ranger had told us about, and I have to say it an amazing place to take a dip.  We had to take a road north just over the border of Montana, and look out for the unmarked parking area off the road.  There seemed to be nothing else for miles around, and we had a long walk from the parking lot to the swimming hole.  The swimming hole was in the Gardner River, with beautiful mountains rising on either side and no roads, cars, or buildings visible.  At this location, the Boiling River, a hot spring, feeds into the icy waters of the Gardner River, in a series of waterfalls stretching down the bank.  Rock walls had been built near each waterfall, creating pools where the hot, sulphurous water could mix with the cold river water.  You could stand just in front of a waterfall, with your back scalding and your front freezing.  Or you could find a little nook off to the side, and soak there in comfortably warm water.  Or, since the current was quite strong even within the pools, you could struggle upstream and let the current carry you back.  It was a unique experience, and the kids would have stayed there all day if we’d let them.  Unfortunately we left the camera in the car, so you’ll have to take our word for it.
                                                                                    
***
From Bob:
Try as we might, it’s difficult for us to get out and about before 8:30.  I had hoped to be driving the roads of the upper loop early so that we might be able to see some interesting wildlife.  Not that bison aren’t interesting.  We just saw a cool ranger program yesterday on wolves, and I thought it would be cool to see some of those guys.
                Also, as today is Saturday, there was a little pressure to get out to Mammoth-Hot Springs before large crowds assembled there.  We didn’t, of course.  Mornings are slow when temperatures are low.  It is now important to cook a hot breakfast (today was a hash made from the other night’s potatoes, leftover meat and corn from last night’s burritos, cheese and some eggs cooked over the fire in our cast iron frying pan, in case you’re interested).  We also make tea on the cook stove.  This cold really does make me feel like we’re camping, and it does help to warm us all up.
                We did have a nice drive anyway – even though by 8:45 all the wolves had clearly receded into deepest Lamar Valley and other parts unknown.  Only a large and gregarious herd of elk made itself available today, starting off on someone’s lawn in Mammoth Hot Springs and working its way leisurely up to the edge of massive thermal terrace display.  It looked like the elk were walking on ice.
Not snow!  It is not quite that cold.
                I also saw two very cool birds on the Gardner River: one looked like a large goldfinch with a red-splotched head.  The other had a shiny teal body and greyish wings and flew over the river.  There were no fish to be seen on the Gardner, although it is a very nice-looking trout stream.  Of course the gallons and gallons of hot sulphurous water pouring in might have discouraged the trout.   To be fair, the river was also very swift moving at that point, so spotting trout would have been tough.
                We did see a few good-sized  trout in Fire Hole Canyon the other day.  Zoe pointed them out to me.  She’s becoming a very good animal spotter.   There must be fish in the Yellowstone River because we’ve seen dozens of people fishing in it.  I’m not sure what to make of this, because August is usually a slow month for river fishing back home.  Here there are people on the river right in the middle of the day, and it’s 85 degrees out.  To be sure, I haven’t seen anyone catch anything yet.  They may be yahoos from back East or from California. (Californians seem to be the butt of a lot of jokes on this side of the Rockies.)  It does get cold at night, as I might have mentioned, and there are still snow patches high in the mountains so the rivers are  still being fed by runoff.  Who knows, maybe there is lots of trout action here at this time of the year.  I was told that everything is catch-and-release here, except if you catch a lake trout in the big lake.  Those are considered an invasive species that interferes with the native cutthroat population’s breeding.
                Anyway, I don’t think there were many fish at the junction of the Gardner and the Boiling River, catch-and-release or not.
***
From Zoe:
At the Boiling River there are a bunch of little waterfalls coming from hot springs and  they run into pools with rock walls to keep the water in and to make there not be very much colder.  The first one is colder but the second is warmer and if you get too close to the waterfalls it gets too hot. 
Also the second pool has a current and Nadia and I had fun riding the current down, then trying to work our way back up.  We met another girl and she was doing it with us. We were in the warmer water, which is a bigger pool.  Lanie had a little place that was sort of closed off by rock and it didn’t have a lot of current.  It didn’t have a waterfall in it but it was still warm.  She found a friend, too, and they were playing in there.
At the way end there was a big pool without any current. Nadia and I would ride all the way down to there and then try to force our way back up the current.  We went down past the bottom pool a little bit, into the river.  The current was stronger. 
I feel like we only spent a short time there.  I wish we could’ve stayed longer. 

Day 14 – The other Grand Canyon

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The view from Artists’ Point

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Everyone made it through the night successfully with our new sleeping arrangements, but getting out of bed in the morning is torturous.  We’ve taken to lighting a fire in the mornings – I don’t know what we’d do if there was a campfire ban.  We all feel the need for hot tea and a hot breakfast in order to get ourselves going in the morning.  Luckily we had procured pancake mix and eggs, and were able to make a splendid breakfast in the cast iron skillet over the fire.
Cooking and eating are fraught with peril here.  There are bear warnings everywhere, and rangers constantly circling to ensure that we’re keeping a “clean” campsite.  This means that no food, cooking equipment, dishes, toiletries, water bottles, or basically anything that has any kind of scent can be left out.  Cooking and dishwashing water must be carried to a special sink. .  Crumbs must not be dropped.  (This one is really fun when you’re camping with a four year old.  Lanie has many good qualities, but neat eating is not one of them.  She usually has so much food spilled on her clothing that we’re lucky the bears didn’t come into the tent after her.)

Yellowstone wildflowers

At least here we’re allowed to lock the food up in the car.  At Yosemite, some enterprising bear figured out that they could rip through the car doors and get to the food.  That bear spread the word, and now apparently all the California bears know this skill.  The evidently somewhat slower bears in the Yellowstone area haven’t figured this out yet, so for the moment at least, cars are safe.

Uncle Tom’s trail

After yesterday’s busy day of touring, we planned a more relaxed day today.  We’re camping very close to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is a scenic marvel featuring two huge waterfalls.  The view of the Lower Falls from Artist’s Point is one of the iconic images of Yellowstone.  We hiked a couple of trails on the south rim – one that involved stairs going 500 feet down (about ¾ of the way into the canyon), and the other along the rim to Artist’s Point, with many scenic (or terrifying, depending on your point of view) overlooks along the way.  At least today we weren’t worried about plummeting through the earth’s crust – instead we had the more humdrum anxiety about plummeting off a cliff 750 feet up.

Wolf-centered ranger program
The rest of the day was pretty relaxed.  We had lunch in the Canyon Village restaurant (disappointing), attended a cool ranger program, and had a nice evening around the campfire.  Tonight’s delicacy was banana boats, courtesy of the Girl Scouts.  This treat involves scooping out part of a banana and filling it with whatever treats are on hand – chocolate, pieces of marshmallow, nuts, etc.  Then you cover it back up with the peel, wrap in foil, and roast in the campfire.  Yum.  We needed a warm treat in our bellies to prepare for tonight’s predicted below freezing temperatures.
***
From Bob:
It’s pretty well documented that I don’t love heights, but I think I could’ve taken the South Rim Trail without much problem today if it were just Jen and me.  The combination of the dizzying heights right at the edge of the trail and our three free-spirited children made for a difficult walk.  Kids are just too unpredictable and heights are just too…high.  It all made me feel a little nervous for a while, and I had to call an end to the hike before we reached Serenity Point.  There was really no serenity for me.  I felt a little like Aunt Pat, but I had to do it. 
Note Bob’s look of apprehension, and how tightly he’s clinging to that tree
                Jen actually did a little trail run to I pick up the car while the girls and I watched a ranger at Artist’s Point.  I don’t know how much she actually ran.  It’s hard to run here at this altitude.  I can definitely feel the lack of oxygen, even after a few days of acclimation.  I get a little faint when standing up from a squat and if I try to move quickly I can feel myself getting out of breath. 
                We’re all good walkers, though.  Fortified by warm morning pancakes, everyone managed to make it down Uncle Tom’s steps and back up.  Nadia counted 317 steps (I counted 324).  And at the top we saw a mule deer grazing in a patch of grass near the parking lot.  Zoe had rushed past on her way to the bathroom – not a great urge to get when you’re in the middle of Uncle Tom’s steps.  But the deer obliged and hung around until she got out of the bathroom.  We’ve passed dozens of beautiful meadows here and this deer wanted to hang out next to the ladies’ room. 
                Oh, well.  I took a few pictures and tossed it a Snickers bar.  No, no.  If I had a snickers bar it would have been gone long before that.  Plus we’ve been well trained not to feed the animals, even by accident.
                Our camp site is a paragon of cleanliness.  Sorry, bears.

Day 13 – No one fell into a boiling mud pit!

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Yellowstone Lower Loop

Here’s something we failed to fully appreciate about Yellowstone – it is COLD here at night.  Our campground is at around 8200 feet elevation – something I didn’t quite pick up on when making reservations.  Between the altitude and the lack of humidity, once the sun goes down the temperature plummets like a stone.  We discovered this last night as we shivered in our tent in 40 degree temperatures, and attempted to get ready in the morning with our inadequate jackets and our fingers numb with cold.  (Everyone was very happy that we had brought tea!)  We further discovered today that 40 degrees is actually considered balmy by Yellowstone standards, and we can expect low thirties – probably below freezing – in the next couple of nights. 
We were debating what to do about Lanie, since her sleeping bag is really not designed for this kind of weather, when the older girls came up with the brainstorm of zipping both of their sleeping bags together to make a big sleeping bag for all three of them.  (It is a testament to how cold they were that they were at all open to this idea.) 

Once we got ourselves moving, we set off on our day’s adventures.  The roads in the main part of Yellowstone are laid out in a figure eight, and today we’d decided to drive around the lower loop, stopping to see the various sights.  The lower loop contains much of Yellowstone’s geothermal activity, and there are signs everywhere about how critical it is to stay on the boardwalks and paths.  A wrong step could cause you to fall through the thin crust of earth and into a boiling pool below.  This is nerve-wracking news when you’re traveling with three children, including a four-year-old – but Lanie really took the warnings to heart and in general was quite anxious about going anywhere near the edge of the paths.

Don’t go near the edge!
West Thumb Geyser Basin

A helpful ranger had told me exactly where we should stop, and she did not lead us wrong.  We saw boiling mud pits, boiling pools of water in almost every color, and steaming holes in the ground making ominous gurgling noises.  The smell of sulphur was everywhere, which Lanie in particular found very unpleasant.  (Luckily she has now developed a cold and her stuffy nose is cutting down on the odors.)  It was amazing to look out over a lunar-looking landscape of bubbling, steaming pools of water and mud, and almost more amazing to see

steam hissing from a hole within what appeared to be a normal forested area.  I loved the West Thumb Geyser Basin, where the geothermal area with all of its emerald pools was right up against the dark blue waters of Yellowstone Lake, with the ever-present mountains towering in the distance.  Also beautiful was the Grand Prismatic Spring, a large bubbling pool that was streaked with every color of the rainbow.

Grand Prismatic Spring
Front row seat for Old Faithful

We had our obligatory stop at Old Faithful, which faithfully spouted about 2 minutes after the predicted time.  I actually preferred the walk we did from the same area, around “Geyser Hill”.  The geysers were smaller and less predictable, but we could see them up close and not surrounded by hundreds of other people.

Our final stop of the day was at the Firehole Canyon swimming hole.  The girls were very interested in swimming, and the ranger told me there were only two places to swim in the park.  It was a beautiful setting – the steep walls of the canyon rose up on either side of the river, which ran very rapidly.  The older girls were able to fight their way upstream past the bend in the river and into another whole section, hidden away and even more beautiful, then allow the current to bring them back downstream.  Unfortunately, since the day was coming to an end and weather here being what it is, we were all freezing when we got out.
Firehole Canyon swimming hole

So finally to bed, this time with a better idea of what we’re facing.  The girls are snuggled into their triple bed, wearing several layers of clothing and snapping at each other about how little room they have.  But at least they’re warm.  (When I took Lanie to the bathroom late at night I discovered that she had put on pretty much every item of clothing that she had with her in the tent, including pants, pajama shorts, regular shorts, and pajama pants.  The latter were on the outside, so I didn’t figure out what was going on until she started staggering around the bathroom mumbling, “Uncomfortable.  Uncomfortable.”)

***
From Bob:

Yes, when the guidebook suggests you pack a hat and gloves for Yellowstone, you should listen.  We did not listen.  I was in favor of keeping as low of a profile as possible.  I wanted to ditch one of our sleeping bags and just have a sheet over Jen and me.  We would be in a lot of trouble now if I had my way. 
                As it stands, we have found out that Jen and my sleeping bags are not compatible.  Their zippers will not line up, thus we have to sleep in separate cocoons.  Last night was too drafty, with the cold air coming in from all sides of our unattached sleeping bags. The girls have altered their sleeping arrangement tonight, too, in deference to the cold.  Zoe’s and Nadia’s sleeping bags are compatible , and so all three girls are speeping in those two bags zipped together.   We’ve also added our tarps to the floor of their side of the tend to get them off the ground a little more.  They were very excited about this solution when they came up with it this afternoon.  I’m not entirely sure the excitement will last.

                The guidebook says it may snow at any time here.  There have been snowfalls in July and August, I guess.  What’s the forecast for tonight?  I’m not sure.  Jen glanced at the posting in the campground office today, but I don’t remember it very clearly.  Truth is, we’re pretty out of touch here – no cell phone reception, no wireless, not even any electrical outlets.  There is an outlet in the bathroom a few steps from our site, but that one is clearly marked  “for personal care items only – don’t leave items unattended.”  Great.  And I was successful in my lobby to get Nadia to leave her curling iron at home.  She could have used it here after all.

                So we don’t know what’s going on in the world, and it hasn’t really bothered me very much.  The head rodeo clown made a joke about Hillary Clinton the other night, and when the announcer groaned, the clown said, “Too soon?”  Did something happen with Hillary Clinton?  I’ll find out sometime if I need to know.  It would be nice to find out more about the Olympics.  I bet the girls would appreciate the swimming events especially, but for now we’re in blackout mode.  I tried to watch a few minutes of water polo in the bar of the Irma Hotel in Cody a few days ago, but my watching session was interrupted by a gunfight (they conduct one every evening at 6 on the street alongside the hotel.
                Thus, we have a slight guess at what the weather is going to be like tonight and tomorrow, but really it’s pretty clear that it will be cold every night we’re going to be here.  Thankfully, the campfire ban is not in effect here.  Usually when you go camping you have your fire in the evening, but I think we’ll have one in the morning, too.

Day 12 – Rangers and campfires and bears

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On the road between Cody and Yellowstone

Cody, WY to Yellowstone National Park

We have finally arrived at Yellowstone, which in many ways is sort of the apex of our trip.  We’ll be staying here for four nights, which many have said is not enough (Yellowstone is bigger than Rhode Island), but should give us a good taste of the park.  The road from Cody to Yellowstone was, like all the roads we’ve been driving on lately, beautiful, remote, and hilly.
I won’t spoil this scene by talking about how later Nadia found a leech 
on her leg (which, thank heavens, she removed herself before telling me
about it).
Yellowstone is amazingly beautiful.  We stopped at a random pullout on our way in to have our lunch, and after a short hike (during which Lanie fell in deep mud, I sank to my calf and dropped my glasses in mud while trying to rescue her, and Bob ended up knee-deep while carrying her out) we arrived on the coast of Yellowstone Lake where it was joined by Pelican Creek, with the mountains towering across the lake and the sun shining on the deep blue waters.  Any other place this would have been an A1 destination, but there’s so much stunning scenery here that this is barely a blip on the Yellowstone map.
The mud incident.  Apparently Bob found time to take a photo before coming to our aid.
Crazy bear lady.  Note (a) the bear mace in her hand,
and(b) that she has  arranged  things so that she has a  
protective layer  of children surrounding her.
I am the rear guard.
Bob has been a little worried about bear encounters, so naturally the first person we met at Yellowstone was this crazy bear-obsessed woman, walking around the beach with bear mace in her hand, who tried to convince us that we immediately needed to buy a can (at $50).  (I’m glad we saved our money, since the bulk of our time at Yellowstone was spent on semi-crowded boardwalks surrounded by other people, with approximately 0% chance of a bear sighting.)
We’re camping at the Canyon Campground, which is fairly crowded but nicely wooded so you don’t feel cramped.  I was initially displeased that we were right next to the bathroom, but this actually turned out to be somewhat of an advantage since not many people seemed to use it and it was nice and close for the two occasions when I had to carry Lanie to the bathroom in the middle of the night through the bear-infested campground (at least according to the crazy bear lady). 
The best thing about this place — we’ve finally escaped the campfire ban!  At last, s’mores can be made and consumed.  In our excitement, we even cooked our dinner over the fire – kielbasa and apples.
Fire!
***
From Bob:
We were only a few minutes into our first Yellowstone experience when we encountered one of the things that sets this place apart from all of the other places we’ve visited.  I sunk into it right up to my knee.  It was thick, thick MUD (thankfully not the boiling, sulfurous, volcanic kind).  I was rescuing Lanie, who had fallen all-fours into it, giving Jen a chance to dislodge her leg.  It was dicey for a few moments about whether she would be able to save her sandal. 
                It’s been so dry everywhere we’ve gone that the only surfaces we’ve seen have been parched grass, ancient volcanic rock (as in the Badlands and Devil’s Tower) or dried-up, hard-packed dirt.  We took it as a good sign, once we got ourselves out of the morass.  Maybe, if it was moist enough to be muddy in places,   we would be able to have our long-awaited campfire.  Close readers of this blog might remember that we haven’t been able to have one of those since Ohio, before we had a chance to stock up on s’mores ingredients.
Bear print on the beach
Aside from giving us a greater appreciation for the fates of all those mammoths in South Dakota, this first hike in Yellowstone, Pelican Creek trail, also gave us our first exposure to another aspect of the Wild West that we had not encountered before: grizzly bears.  Once we made it through the swamp and over to the shore of magnificent Yellowstone Lake, we saw footprints from many different animals (this time mud was our friend), including grizzly bears.   We have entered Bear Country.
We would later find out at a nearby visitors’ center that a grizzly had walked along the shore early that morning, only three hours before we had been there.  Before we got to the visitors’ center, however, we got a crash course on bears from a fellow park visitor who seemed to know a lot about the subject.  A woman from Colorado who was sitting on the beach when we got there was almost giddy when she found out about the bear tracks.  She began to tell us everything she knew about bears.  These tracks were probably black bear because they didn’t have any clawmarks. No, wait, maybe those are clawmarks.  The’re definitely grizzly.  A ranger told her she would definitely see bears on her visit, and she had.  She had run up to a roadside crevasse – against park regulations – to take a picture of a black bear and cub down below.  She made her husband walk in front of her and carry their can of bear mace in his backpack where she could reach it in an emergency.  She tried to make him walk right in front of her on the beach, where visibility was several hundred feet (we’re meant not to get closer than 100 yards to bears).
When you encounter a bear on a trail – and she made it clear that we would encounter a bear on the trail – she told us that we should not run or turn around but walk slowly backward and not make eye contact with the bear.  We should talk calmly, not scream, to the bear.
She was very happy to hike with us back the parking lot  (those guys knew a mud-free way back) because  you’re supposed to hike in parties of three or more and you’re supposed to make lots of different noises on the trail.  This last bit is something we’ve already mastered.
It turns out she may have been a little coocoo for cocoabears.  During the 3/4 –mile walk back to the cars, she prattled on nervously about bears.  It seems, in fact, that she is so concerned about bears that she sent her children to Catholic school.  Actually, by this point I only heard snippets of her conversation with Jen and the girls, so this part might not be 100-percent accurate.  I was walking ahead with her husband, a Red Sox and Patriots fan who was eager talk with someone from New England about these things (and, apparently, to anyone who could talk about anything but bears).  We talked so ardently and walked so far ahead that our friend was out of reach of the bear mace for a while. 
Luckily, we made back to the parking lot without further incident.  Except, once we got to our car, guess what we saw?  You’ll never guess.  A HAWAII license plate.  You can imagine our excitement.  We’ve already seen Alaska on our trip.  We’ll almost certainly get a full set by the time we get home, even if we have to drive through Delaware to do it. 
Delaware, a bear-free state, as far as I know.

Day 11 – The Wild West

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Our deluxe accommodations

Cody, WY

First, a moment of gratitude for the perplexing fact that none of the places we’ve camped have seemed to have any substantial mosquito population.  Is it the drought?  Are these places just divinely blessed and keeping quiet about it so we all don’t move here?  Whatever the reason, we have been amazed and delighted that night after night, as we cook, eat, and play outdoors, we have suffered nary a bite.  (This is really saying something because Lanie is a total mosquito magnet.  If there is any mosquito within a mile of her, it will arrive and bite her repeatedly.)   We haven’t even pulled the bug spray out of the car.
That is our tipi, way down on the left
In the case of our current tipi accommodations, this has been a key factor.  Our tipi walls don’t in fact come all the way to the ground, so there is a good 6 inches of space at floor level (right where we’re sleeping, in fact) that is wide open.  (The top doesn’t close completely either.  We’re not sure what people are supposed to do when it rains, but are grateful we weren’t forced to confront this question.)  The sound of the rushing water in the creek also proved conducive to good sleeping.
Our backyard creek
We started the day by wading in the creek behind our tipi, which was rather cold and very fast-moving.  Zoe and Nadia managed to work their way upstream a fair distance, and of course Lanie is always game to follow.  (I don’t know why we kid ourselves about the wading thing.  They invariably end up wet and muddy from head to toe.  We ended up letting them go back in later in the afternoon in their bathing suits.)  Then, off to explore Cody.
At Old Trail Town, a set of genuine wild west buildings
Cody is the town that was founded by Buffalo Bill, and they don’t let you forget it.  There are lots of Wild West-themed attractions, restaurants, etc.  We hit a couple of these and wandered through a few stores, but in general kept it a pretty low-key day.  The location of the town is beautiful, with mountains rising up in every direction.
 
The stores have a different attitude out here
Our big event of the day was the Cody Nite Rodeo, where we got to see such traditional activities as bull riding, calf roping, barrel racing, and trick riding.  At one point all the kids were called down to the arena (and it was unbelievable how many kids poured out of the crowd).  They then released three calves with ribbons on their tails, and set the kids loose to try to be the first to get a ribbon.  I’ve seldom seen such mayhem.  The kids loved it and all was well, until they sent them back to their seats and somehow Lanie went off the field at the wrong exit.  There were so many kids that we hadn’t seen where she’d gone, and we had all split up and were looking frantically for her when the announcer said there there were two lost little girls in the souvenir shop.  Lanie was rather traumatized by this whole event and had a little trouble enjoying the rest of the rodeo, but she seemed fully recovered the next morning.
***
From Bob:
Various parts of this trip have been hard on each of us, for sure, but lately we should pity Nadia, who desperately yearns to ride – or at least befriend – every horse she sees.  And there are a lot of horses in Wyoming.  There are constant offers for trail rides that she hopefully asks us to consider.  There is little hope in this stage of the trip; her riding will take place at our Colorado ranch residency, in about a week or so.
                Tonight she got the next best thing to actually approaching a horse.  The Cody Nite Rodeo is dripping with cowboy-ness, yet seemingly much more authentic than anything else in this rather touristy town.  It runs, they say, for 94 nights in a row over the spring and summer, and we got to see cowboys and cowgirls riding and roping, racing around barrels, and hanging on for dear life on bucking broncos and steers.  Tonight, nobody was able to hold on long enough to win the bull riding portion of the rodeo.
                As we were here on the last night of the month, however, we were treated the awarding of prize belt buckles to the most consistent competitors in the month of July for each event.   They were nice, big belt buckles, too; we could see them from all the way up in the stands.
                Another thing that marked our night at the rodeo was that the chief rodeo clown’s mother had died earlier today.  Midway through the evening, he knelt down in the middle of the ring with his main sidekicks (two guys with red tassels coming off the back of their clothes – they’re called bullfighters because one main part of their job is to distract the bull so the guy who just fell off the bull has a chance of surviving) and said a prayer.  Then the main clown put his hat back on and went on with his shenanigans.  It’s pretty hardcore here in the World Capital of Rodeo.  It’s drenched with country music, and it smells like a lot of animals pooping, but it’s also almost worth the drive out here just on its own. 
                And it was enough to satisfy Nadia’s horse cravings – for a while.
A rare moment of sisterly accord

Day 10 – Friend of the Devil

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Devil’s Tower
Custer State Park, SD to Cody, WY

We’d told the girls we needed to be on the road by 8:30 if we wanted to keep Devil’s Tower on the itinerary, so that helped get them moving in the morning (Devil’s Tower has Junior Ranger badges!)  We ended up making it by 8:45 – not too bad, considering – and since this was largely because we had to make a stop for ice, we headed for Devil’s Tower, 2 ½ hours away in Wyoming.
Devil’s Tower is awe-inspiring – a huge obelisk of rock thrust up far above anything in the surrounding prairies.  (For people of a certain age, it is most famous for its cameo appearance in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where it is carved out of mashed potatoes.)  It’s sheer rock going straight up some unbelievable distance, but we still saw many climbers (tiny, barely visible in the distance) taking it on.
There’s a 1.5 mile trail that leads all around the base, and also includes a few gorgeous overlooks of the surrounding country.  Nadia was very insistent on going to a ranger program (a requirement for the badge), so she and Bob did that while Zoe, Lanie, and I did the hike.  (I think they missed out but a side benefit is that they can now tell you a lot about turkey vultures.)  The bottom of the tower all around is a huge boulder field, where chunks of the tower have fallen off over time.  There’s not much my kids like better than climbing on rocks, and Zoe made it all the way up to the top of the boulders (where the tower proper started).

Once we left Devil’s Tower, we had about a six-hour drive to our final destination in Cody, WY.  It was a beautiful drive through various different kinds of mountain terrain.  One thing I’d never known was that a lot of the ground here is a rich red color, which contrasts nicely with the dark green pines.  We went through very long stretches without seeing any sign of civilization, then we’d come to a sign that would say something like, “Entering town of Buffalo Dung, pop. 24”.  At one point we crossed over a high mountain pass in the Big Horn mountains.  I checked our GPS out of curiosity and found that we’d gained about a mile in elevation (to over 9000) feet, before dropping down to below 4000 feet again.  The scenery was breathtaking but it was a little hard on the poor old minivan.
We stopped for a quick dinner in some town that at least had a population in the hundreds, and Bob wanted to try a new fast food chain he’d been noticing called “Taco John’s”.  Can anyone out there from the west defend this establishment?  We were a little leery when we found that there was not a soul in the restaurant (despite its being 6:30 at night), and quickly lowered our expectations when we read their special, which was a “meat and potatoes burrito” featuring ground beef with little fried hash brown things and ranch dressing.  I mean, we weren’t expecting a gourmet meal but we also didn’t think it would be somewhat less authentic than Taco Bell.
Anyway, we finally made it to Cody around 9, and set off to find our campground where we’d rented a tipi.  The campground was in the middle of the city, so I’d resigned myself that it would be one of those campgrounds that’s essentially a parking lot, and at first that’s what it appeared to be.  But then we followed the map to the back of the campground, and suddenly the road dropped away beneath us into a series of steep switchbacks leading into a deep ravine behind the campground.  There was a rushing creek behind the tepee, and it felt like we were in the wilderness.  (On the down side, there is a major climb involved in getting to a real bathroom, and we’re not 100% sure the loaded-down van will make it back up that hill.  Stay tuned.)
Traditional Native American shadow puppets in the tipi
***
From Bob:                                                                                                           
I don’t know that anyone reading this blog has ever experienced anything quite like these tipis.  They are very odd, stuck down in this hole, nicely secluded from the rest of surprisingly-bustling Cody (except the one streetlight I can see over the canyon rim).   I’m not going to say they’re absolutely authentic – for instance, our first Americans seem wise enough not to have covered the ground inside their tipis with gravel.  Also, there is a metal spike right in the middle of the floor that may have something to do with keeping the tipi top open.  Whatever it’s for, it’s not the kind of thing you want to mistake for a pillow.  The tipi sides don’t reach all the way down to the ground, which is strange.  You lie on the ground –  hopefully not too close to the spike – and you can see the feet of people walking by.
                Those things aside, they really seem to aspire for authenticity.  The poles are wooden and the covering is cloth, and there are two big poles connected to flaps at the top.  This must be indigenous air conditioning, but we can’t figure it out.  We can barely figure out how to close the door flap.  This leads me to think they’re pretty authentic.
                Also, we’re right on the banks of a nice rushing stream, a nice departure from all the dryness we’ve experienced so far on this trip.  It makes a nice noise that will help up sleep, I’m sure.  Though it may also make us have to use the porta-potties (we have to climb back up the hill to reach the regular bathroom) overnight, which is not the most pleasant prospect.