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.