8/13/14

It rained most of last week, so we didn't get out to do any touring. This week was much better though.

Monday evening we went to West Thumb Geyser Basin after work. We hadn't been there for many years. They have replaced the asphalt walkways around the thermal features with wooden boardwalks, which allows better viewing of the scenery. West Thumb is on the southwest end of Yellowstone Lake where you get some spectacular views of the lake.

 

The thermal features are also interesting

Tuesday we went on a 12 mile hike to Shoshone Lake, with our coworkers that we hike with so often. It was another one of the free guided tours that the company provides for the employees. We met the bus at the Old Faithful Inn. Near where we parked there was a male bison "courting" a female bison. There was quite a bit of bellowing coming from the male bison as he tried to make the female know that she was his. There were also visitors within 20 feet of the pair. We were expecting a good goring of one of the visitors but the male bison was more interested in the female than the visitors.

There were four young women who worked in the Old Faithful Inn and the four of us 50 to 70 year olds on the hike. The young hikers finished the hike long before the four of us. For us, the hike took from 9:30 am to 5:30 pm, with a 45 minute lunch at the lake.

Less than 1% of the visitors to Yellowstone ever make it out to this lake. It's the largest alpine lake in the lower 48 states that has no road access to it.

Along the way we found loads of wild strawberries and even more huckleberry bushes, full of not quite ripe fruit.

We walked a loop trail that took us through forest that was burned during the 1988 fires, but has recovered nicely.

Along the way was a pond where a mother duck was leading her brood of nine ducklings through the lily pads.

There are very few places along the trail, where you can see any part of the lake as you make your way out to it. Finally, as you approach to within 100 yards of the lake, you start to see it through the forest.

 

The photos below are a panoramic view of the lake from the end of the trail.

 



 

There is a small ranger station by the lake that allowed us to sit at a picnic table instead of the sharp rocks on the lake shore.

 

On the way back, we took the other trail that runs along the channel between Lewis Lake and Shoshone Lake. There were groups of canoes making there way out to Shoshone Lake, but the channel is so shallow that they had to pull the canoes over the rocks. They probably didn't get to paddle half the distance between the lakes. 

Lewis Lake is another beautiful alpine lake.

 

By the end of the hike Penny and I had blisters on our feet and we were dead tired. Our lower legs were ready to fall off at the end.

We rested all day Wednesday and were almost able to walk normally.

7/31/14

Monday afternoon, I called Walmart to get an idea of when my glasses would come in, as I was getting tired of wearing sunglasses full time. Fortunately, they had come in that day, allowing me to go to Bozeman and pick them up on Tuesday. Penny was working in place of one of her coworkers who had gone back to Georgia for a week, to visit her ailing mother, so we weren't going to miss a hike just so I could get my glasses. While I was in Bozeman I got the oil changed in the truck.

Wednesday we decided to go on a hike to Monument Geyser Basin. It is a relatively short hike (about 3 miles) but feels like twice that far because it is up the side of a mountain. The trial climbs over 600 feet in about a half mile.

We left home a little after 8 a.m., trying to avoid traffic and the hordes of visitors that pack every corner of the park at this time of year. There was quite a bit of cloud cover and a lot of moisture in the air. This is a photo of the Gibbon River, looking south, from the bridge where the trail starts, at 9 in the morning.

Penny found an interesting fungi growing on a chunk of dead wood.

 

This is a view looking north along the Gibbon River, from the trailhead. The steam near the road is from a hot spring under the water at the river's edge.

 

The water is very clear and you can see the interesting bottom features clearly.

 

While climbing up the trail, Penny saw a tree squirrel in a burned out tree. We're not sure what it thought it was going to find in such a barren tree.

Similar to the hike to Fairy Falls, we noted a lot of interesting burn patterns in the trees still standing since the 1988 fire.

 

Once you get to the top of the mountain you have a commanding view of some interesting rock formations and the Gibbon River Valley to the south.

 

Fortunately, there were places to sit after our arduous climb.

Walking to the west on the summit you get to see the geyser basin. It has some unique geyser formations not seen elsewhere in the park.

By the time we left a couple of hours after we started, the fog had burned off and we could see more of the mountains in the distance and how much the Gibbon River meanders through the Gibbon Meadows.

With the skies clear and the fog gone, the view to the bottom of the river was even better.

 

We decided to drive the lower loop to get home since it was only a little after noon when we finished the hike. Most of the view points were crammed with visitors, so we didn't stop anywhere until we got to the LaHardy Rapids, in the Hayden Valley. There, at least, there weren't too many people. The rapids is where the Harlequin ducks come to mate in the spring. Though there are no ducks there at this time, the Yellowstone River is still beautiful.

Right below one of the view points, on the boardwalk along the river, is a quiet little pool of water where we found a couple of large and a bunch of small cutthroat trout lounging around.

 

Got home around five that evening and relaxed our legs after the strenuous hike. Then we took a bike ride around the campground, just so we wouldn't stiffen up.

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.