7/23/14

Monday afternoon, we had thunderstorms roll through, so we weren't able to go on any hikes. But we did go to the Old Faithful area for dinner, since neither of us wanted to cook after work. Our timing turned out well as it just started to rain as we entered the restaurant. While we were eating, there was a hard down pour and the rain quit just as we finished eating. On our way home we took a side trip through the Firehole Lake drive. It was getting close to sunset and White Cone Geyser just happened to be erupting as we approached it. We were able to get a couple of good photos of it.

Tuesday morning was beautiful, so we went on a hike through the Hoodoos, with our neighbor coworkers Al and Mary. We drove up to Mammoth and dropped off our truck. From there, we rode with Al and Mary back to the Glen Creek/Bunsen Peak trailhead. The trail is about 5.25 miles long and climbs up the hill southwest of the Hoodoos. Fortunately, it was a fine, cool morning and the first half of the hike is through the forest, so there weren't many mosquitoes.

 

 There were plenty of butterflies though.

 

Once we made the intial climb up to the top of the hill, we could look back over the valley that we parked in.

 A little farther up the trail you can see across the road to the waterfall that most people only see from the road. It runs in a canyon it has carved out of the hills, along the road.

Not much farther up the trail you start seeing the rock formations that are the actual hoodoos and you begin hiking in the rocks rather than the dense forest.

 After the hoodoos, you move into a meadow/forest area, where many flowers are in bloom.

 

At this point our camera batteries ran out of juice, so we didn't get any photos as we walked through the back side of Mammoth Hot Springs, which are even more interesting than the tourists see from the boardwalk. At least that gives us a great excuse to do this hike again. Unfortunately, at about this time, the sun/heat got to my glasses and delaminated the layers of plastic in the lenses. So for the next couple of weeks I'll be wearing my sunglasses indoors and out, until I get a pair of new glasses. Unknown to me, high index lenses are made from layers of plastic rather than just a solid piece of plastic that  has a higher index of refraction than glass. When they get hot, like they did on tis hike and you go to clean them with a wet cloth, the front and back layers cool at different rates and cause shear stresses in the intra-layer adhesive, which then fails in shear. At that point, the lenses look like they have a wavy fluid on them and they are impossible to fix.

We had left our truck in Mammoth and taken our hiking partner's car to the trailhead, so we were able to plug the camera in to the power port in the truck and get a few more photos while we were driving back to the trailhead. In Mammoth, the elk love to lounge around on the groomed grass and lie under the trees when it gets hot. The elk born this year a already getting big.

 

The park rangers were having to do crowd control duty, to keep the tourists from walking right up to the elk.

 

 

7/17/14

Monday afternoon we went on a 2-1/2 mile hike to Mystic Falls, near the Old Faithful area. The walk starts out at Biscuit Basin, where you walk along a boardwalk loop and see hot springs and small geysers.

At the top of the loop there is an off ramp that puts you on the trail to Mystic Falls. The trail follows path to the falls travels through fields of flowers and around interesting rock formations along the Little Firehole River, until you get to the falls.

 

 

 

 

Once you get to where you can see and hear the falls, the climb begins. You get to walk up rock stairs to get a better view of the falls.

  

 

Then you get to walk up a couple switch backs to get an even better view of the falls and the work it has done over thousands of years.

 

At that point, you get to decide whether you will go back the way you came, take the loop route back to your car or continue on to Imperial Geyser. Since it was after 6 p.m., we decided to go back the way we came, so we could get back to our car and home before dark. We were also getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, even though we had liberally sprayed ourselves with bug spray.

On the ride home, it was getting on towards sunset so Penny took a picture out the windshield, while we were on Firehole Lake Drive.

 

 On Tuesday morning, we got up early and went on a hike to Fairy Falls with our coworker neighbors. This hike starts at a trailhead just south of the Midway Geyser Basin. Being early in the morning, the geysers were putting up a lot of steam.

 

It was somewhat foggy and there was a lot of dew which made for some interesting and somewhat eerie sights.

There were an incredible number of spider webs in the bushes and trees, where they had collected a great deal of dew, making them standout and look particularly interesting. There were webs from Funnel Web Spiders

And others from spiders we couldn't identify.

 

There was also and interesting fungus growing on a dead tree.

The hike to the falls didn't follow a river this time, it went through heavily burned, Lodgepole pine forests. These forests were burned during the 1988 fires that consumed over 30% of the park. Fortunately, the forests are recovering, though it will take decades more for the trees to reach the height of the ones that were burned. The fires left some interesting stumps.

With the bark burned off, you could see where the bark beetles had been doing their business before the fires.

After walking through narrow paths between trees, across small creeks and through clouds of mosquitoes, you finally get to where you can hear the water fall. Then, a little farther down the path, you get to where you can finally see the 200 foot high falls.

After climbing over some fallen logs you can actually get to the base of the falls and look up at the brink of the falls. 

  

 

Here, again, you get to choose whether you walk back the way you came or continue on. Since the continuing path would take us miles further away from our car, we decided to go back the way we came.

As we were leaving, a friendly little chipmunk found a bite to eat near us.

 

Interestingly, some of the trees killed in the 1988 fires are not nearly as weathered as most of them.

Near the beginning of this trail is a hill that overlooks the Grand Prismatic Spring. Since the path up the hill is very steep and requires you to climb over a lot of dead trees, we decided to consider doing that climb at another time, having already hiked 5 miles.

On Wednesday we took another of the company provided bus tours. This time to the Grand Tetons. We had to catch the bus at the Old Faithful Inn at 8 a.m. Travelling down through the geyser basins that early on a damp morning really shows the amount of heat being generated in the area.

The bus stopped at Grant Village to pick up more employees, on the way down to the Tetons. There were 12 of us in all. South of Grant Village, the bus stopped at Lewis Falls, on the Lewis River.

 

This river drains the Lewis Lake into the Snake River.

 

Since we already showed photos of our earlier trip to the Grand Tetons, we won't repeat them here. They did take us to a few places that we hadn't seen before though.

On the southeast side of the park, next to the Snake River is an old ferry - called Menor's Ferry, that still operates for part of the summer. They were filling the pontoons with water to get the planks to swell, so they could put the ferry in the water when we were there.

It operates by turning into the flow of the river to cause a side load to be applied to the hull, which causes it to move across the river, guided by rollers running along a cable stretched across the river.

 

There was also an old store there that operated in the early 1900's.

We ate lunch in the town of Moose and stopped to look at Mormon's Row. It was a settlement of people that moved here in the 1890's, during a drought in Utah and homesteaded this area of the Jackson Hole. 

The views looking west at the Tetons, across the Snake River were phenomonal.

  

At one of the stops on the way back to Yellowstone, we picked up an extra rider. We believe it was a Pine Bark Beetle.

 

We got home about 6 p.m.