Day 9 - Yellowstone to Grand Teton National Park

Wildlife Tally: elk, bison, magpie, clark's nuthatch

Today we made our way south through Yellowstone to Grand Teton National Park. We stopped at the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake (B in the map above). The thumb was formed by a much smaller volcanic explosion some time later than the original explosion. Notice how the thumb is circular like you might expect from an explosion? There are 2 other places on the lake where similar explosions added to the lake. At West Thumb there is an extensive geyser field, including some right along the shore of the lake and a couple in the lake. One, known as Fishing Cone geyser, has an interesting history. It sits out in the lake a little ways. In the early days of the park people would catch fish and then dunk the fish in this geyser to cook them. 3-5 minutes was the proper time in the geyser.

Cooking fish in Fishing Cone geyser

Geyser with Yellowstone Lake in the background

We ate a picnic lunch in West Thumb and then headed south to Grand Teton National Park, which is about a 90 minute drive. The scenery is great, but at this point we have seen so much great scenery that I think we are all a little numb to it. We got to Grand Teton just in time to watch a thunderstorm roll over Jackson Lake and the nearby Tetons. I can't tell you how many pictures we took trying to catch a lightning bolt streaking from cloud to lake or cloud to mountain. You have to be really fast or really lucky to catch one so you'll have to imagine the lightning bolt yourself. Now that I think of it this would have been a perfect time for a video. Hindsight ...

The picture does not show the scale of this. It is miles to those mountains!

We stopped at the Coulter Bay visitor center so that David could get his National Park passport stamped. His cousin gave him the passport, which has a section for each different region in the country. The National Park Service has cancellation stamps at all of their visitor centers and you can stamp the passport. Everywhere we went David was looking for the stamps. Smart people at the NPS. While we were getting the stamp at Coulter Bay, another thunderstorm rolled in and he and I made a full sprint back to the car, getting pelted with rain the whole way.

We rented a small log cabin about 15 miles east of the park. When we got there it was very wet and a couple of guys on bikes (the pedal kind) pulled up while we were checking in. They had all their gear on the bike. I talked to one of them. They did 10 miles that day, which is not a lot right? I thought well they are riding in mountains so that probably cut their distance down and the rain could not have helped either. I found out later they had come across a 9600' pass! In thunderstorms! Anyway, they started their trip in Fort Collins, CO and were biking to Missoula, MT, about 900 miles, most of it through mountains. Crazy dudes. They were not the only ones. We saw a good number of people on bikes loaded with gear slowly chugging up grades that made our car grunt. 

The cabin turned out to be perfect. Susan started talking about how nice it would be to have one of them in NY on a lake. She started thinking about small alterations in the layout and pretty soon the small cabin had doubled in size. Dreams.

Early to bed tonight because tomorrow we get up at 5:45 for our horseback ride.