Biters, shooters, steep grades, enormous nipples, etc.

WENATCHEE, WA, June 23: Today's story is about predatory insects, otherworldly nipples, shootouts, double crosses, and some other odds and ends. I'm starting this at 5  a.m. My traveling companion is upstairs, sleeping off an exhausting week of travel, while I compose the final post to my  Yellowstone adventure blog, before heading out for the 2.5 hours drive back to Seattle.

The last two days have been a bit of a whirlwind. A photography excursion to Mammoth Hot Springs on Friday, followed by a one-day road trip to the Grand Tetons, then rising at 6 a.m. Sunday, the 22nd, for the 12-hour drive back to Wenatchee, where the journey began.

Before these trees died, they sort of semi-petrified themselves by drawing
the poisonous calcite chemicals up through their roots.

Instead of looking for El Dorado (the City of Gold) in the Amazon basin, Pizarro should have headed for Yellowstone.

There are few places like Mammoth, and no place like the Grand Tetons. Mammoth presents a surreal landscape created by deposits that boil endlessly up from the bowels of the earth.
 Farther south, at the Teton National Park visitor's center, the narrator in an automated film presentation calls the mountains "breasts." But Grand Tetons really translates as "big nipples," which is how frenchmen anthropomorphized those spectacular peaks, I guess.  (If that's how you want to envision them, I think they should have been called "jaw breakers.") When the film is over, a very long curtain slowly retracts, putting these grand alpine-like mountains, complete with a Matterhorn-like peak, on full display. They are magnificent.  To wit:

The Tetons in the background, the valley floor in the foreground.

We rose early on Saturday and headed southward through Yellowstone, past steam vents and geysers into Grand  Teton National Park.

Saturday morning: One final glance at Yellowstone's steaming landscape.

Just inside the northern portion of the park, we discovered gauntlets of biting insects waiting as patiently as piranhas, pooling for their next snack. They appeared to be a variety of snowbird that had moved south for the winter and were working their way back north to Yellowstone. It was the first time we had encountered them, and as we drove father south into the heart of the park, the ravenous little biters were almost nowhere to be found. Gradually the Grand Nipples came into view--first one mountain peak, and then the whole vista. It was more beguiling than today's photo of Kim Kardashian's latest plunging neckline.

An early glimpse of the Tetons, with a patch of Balsamroot in the foreground.

These mountains were created not by the violence of volcanoes, but by a slow, ongoing pressing of one imposing earthly body past another. The metamorphosed rocks heaved and rose, the surrendering valley reclined supine, into a lower bed that filled with sediment and is now known as Jackson Hole. Rising from Jackson hole, we raced West toward Idaho, and then north again toward Yellowstone, through open country and small towns with names like "Tetonia," which afforded us occasional glances of the derrieres of the grand ladies. That ankle, calf and thigh of the trip began by ascending an imposing grade to Teton Pass, then plunging down a curvaceous  heart-thumping 10-degree grade that--like an irresistible siren--drew my Del Sol  toward the nether lands, almost overcoming the inhibitions imposed by the lowest gear. There was considerable apprehension, groaning and interrupted breathing throughout that descent as the little auto caressed the curves. All this was  followed by an extended sigh of release as the pent-up tension drained away when the road flattened out. It ended well.

During the entire road trip, the only other patch of highway comparable in danger was the Highway 191 approach to Yellowstone from the north. We had driven that road a week earlier, arriving quite late at night in a rainy mist and fog. The drive was surreal, like trying to find our way along an obscure path in an unlit hall of mirrors. The road twisted continuously. The shoulders were invisible. The only other lights came from oncoming cars that glared across our streaming windshield. Like tiny glittering, dangling earrings, reflectors suggested where the shoulders lay, but because of the highway's curves, they looked like floating spots of light whose position was as constant as the crest of an ocean wave. The well-worn fog line, and a centerline badly in need of repainting, were of little help.  When we drove out of Yellowstone and down that road on Sunday morning, we counted more than 26 crosses on the shoulders in a 13-mile stretch. Some of those crosses came in pairs. In one instance, there were four assembled in tight formation.

But in daylight, that road was scenic and interesting. The remainder of the trip home was uneventful, except for good conversation and the shootout in Post Falls, Idaho. We stopped for a drink of water and found out we couldn't get back on the highway, which was closed so that authorities could find the shell casings along the freeway. Later I learned some of the details--one gunman fleeing the police at about 2 a.m. in the morning. One person, probably the gunman, was in the hospital in critical condition.

The day before, at a visitor's center, we had picked up a very informative  pamphlet from the Department of Homeland Security. Tom Ridge, the department's secretary, was warning us to be vigilant and prepared against terrorists. "We can be afraid, or we can be ready," he says. Kind of reminds me of the TV ads in the 1950s about standing outside with binoculars watching for Russian aircraft. Or practicing air raid drills by going to the basement of Frances Willard grade school. Or bomb shelters. Remember bomb shelters?

By driving the back roads of Post Falls, we finally were able to get back on the freeway and find our way to Wenatchee. The only remaining danger was the glare  from all the bugs  that smeared themselves across the windshield. I'd like to send a photo of that windshield to their cousins in Grand Teton National Park.

I've added some additional favorite photos from the trip below.

Love,
Robert

Another Mammoth Hot Springs casualty--it kind of looks like a critter of some sort.

These trees likely died from chemicals they drew from the soil.

Apparently no-one told this bird to stay out of the hot springs.

A patch of balsamroot in Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone arrives

For 15 million years, the land that would become Yellowstone National Park crept toward its destiny--a  hot spot that created a string of volcanoes all the way from Nevada to Wyoming.  Two millions years ago, it arrived, yielding its first and largest eruption. When the Huckleberry Ridge Caldera Eruption occurred, the southwestern quarter of Yellowstone was blasted away, producing 2,500 cubic kilometers of ash. And that was just the beginning.

Map of fallout distribution from Yellowstone.

Yellowstone remains "one of the world's largest, most explosive and most unusual volcanos," according to a sign in a visitor's center.

Two other catastrophic eruptions followed, 1.3 million* and 640,000 years ago.** (*Henry's Fork Caldera Eruption, 280 cubic kilometers of ash; **Yellowstone Caldera Eruption, 1,000 cubic kilometers of ash.)  Thirty smaller eruptions have since occurred, the most recent one 70,000 years ago. "Yellowstone may erupt again."

Yellowstone's three caldera eruptions had global impacts. Those eruptions were from 28 to 250 times larger than the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which sent a 3,000 mile-wide cloud of ash and gases into the atmosphere, cooling global temperatures for about two years.


Intense heat welded the mountains of ash into rock called "tuff."

Beneath more solid rock, a bed of tuff is heavily eroded.

The hotspot below Yellowstone uplifted the land, making Yellowstone cold enough for massive glaciers to form locally and rework the landscape. About 20,000 years ago, Yellowstone's  Canyon area was buried under 4,000 feet of ice.


Then the volcano's chemistry took over, and the effects are clearly visible in what is called the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. Mineral stains mark the sites of hot springs and steam vents in the canyon walls. It's a sight to behold.

Tuff walls of the canyon streaked by the chemistry of the volcano.

Getting to the bottom of this canyon is not a trip for the faint of heart -- or asthma patients. Once the journey involved 528 steps and rope ladders.  Now there is the luxury of a steel stairway of only 328 steps that descend three-fourths of the way to the bottom for a view of the falls. A sign at the top of "Uncle Tom's Trail" warns visitors to "take your time, enjoy the scenery, and rest often."

Those who descend are treated to a rainbow from the spray of the canyon's waterfall.

"Uncle Tom's Trail" to viewpoint.

The fiery landscape of Yellowstone became the substance of legends.

An example--according to Native American tradition, Daw-Kee (God) promised land in Yellowstone to any tribe that  could yield a volunteer to plunge into Dragon's Mouth, a boiling cauldron at Mud Volcano. A tribe produced such a young man, whose scalding death transformed the land into a beautiful and abundant homeland for the Kiowas.

Steam blows from the cave known as Dragon's Mouth Spring, a moaning boiling, sloshing and deadly cauldron.

Two thirds of the world's geysers are found in Yellowstone, which also is a host to hundreds of steam vents.

In Norris Geyser Basin, steam vents and bubbling pools churn constantly.

This continuous vent suggests a sagging tea kettle.

A stinking continuous column of steam jets from a vent at Norris Basin.

Chemistry and heat-loving bacteria give this stream its verdant hue.

Elsewhere in Yellowstone, acidic water and steam, along with heat, accelerate nature's normally gradual process of converting rock to clay.

A motorist seems oblivious to the ominous threat of the cliff beside the highway.

Another view of the rock formation shaping the cliff.

Virtually oblivious to the geophysical forces beneath, a bison, shedding its winter coat, ambles across the highway

Love,
Robert


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Cataclysms

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. --This city just west of Santa Fe is where mankind finally harnessed the sun god. There had been legends in many cultures of the attempt, but in Los Alamos, a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer finally learned how to emulate the energy of our nearest star. In 1945, with the help of a couple objects called Fat Man and Little Boy, they brought the sun to earth over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before.

And yet it was a miniscule accomplishment, compared to what happened a million  years earlier, just a few miles uphill from this obscure outpost in New Mexico populated by Oppenheimer's team of scientists.

I must have walked by his home. I walked all around the neighborhood where he lived, looking for it, but it was unmarked, perhaps fittingly so. Unlike Ozymandius, King of Kings, Los Alamos national laboratory persists. But there is hardly a trace of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Easier to find was the Valles Caldera on the plateau above Los Alamos. This 13.7-mile wide pasture, where grasses blow in the wind, is characterized by hot springs, streams, fumaroles, natural gas seeps and volcanic domes. It is the quiet, more subdued, cousin of Yellowstone, and rides above the same hot spot that boils the Yellowstone geysers that thousands of tourists witness every year. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Caldera.)

Twice the Valles Caldera exploded with the power of 600 St. Helens. Now it is a placid pasture.

A million years ago, the earth twice lifted up here, with more than 600 times the power of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, filling the sky with ash that settled  into what is now called "tuff" in layers hundreds of feet thick. That compressed into soft rock, into which Native Americans would later carve caves for shelter and living quarters. You can see it today at Bandalier National Monument. That's me, below, standing on a ladder, peering into one of those carved-out shelters.

Fortunately, nature is more patient with its processes than mankind. There was a rush to make the bomb and use it, but nature takes its time, so we likely will be long gone by the time Yellowstone follows suit. At least we can hope so, because the ash from Yellowstone would do more than disrupt someone's vacation; what exactly would 600 Mount St. Helens do to the Midwest, the Eastern Seaboard, the American economy and national security? Somehow, capturing the sun god doesn't seem like such a big deal by comparison.

Yesterday I and my traveling companion, Dian, got a glimpse of another kind of power. We visited the site of the August 1959 Yellowstone earthquake, where hundreds of millions of tons of earth came down a hillside and up the opposite side of a valley, displacing enough air to create hurricane force winds that stripped clothing off of campers and carried some of them away. The quake was felt over several states. Because it occurred just before midnight, I slept through it in Spokane, but mom had been watching TV, and she recounted how the living room swayed.

A Yellowstone visitor center's display shows the enormity of the landslide.

In the 1959 quake, electricity was cut off. Geysers erupted continuously. A dam was threatened.Water in a nearby lake sloshed enough to create a virtual tidal wave. The Madison River was damned.  Houses floated downstream from their foundations. Tremors continued throughout the night as campers searched for loved ones in the dark; except for a full moon, until daybreak the only significant light must have come from car headlights. They gathered on high ground and awaited help, some of which came from the air in the form of Air Force helicopters and smoke jumpers.

A relic from the landslide, where the resulting flood left it 55 years ago.

A foot path leads to a boulder that rode down one hillside and up another without tipping over.

The Army Corps of Engineers was called in to, among other things, build a spillway that would control the new Madison River channel that was being cut. It's just a temporary fix, while time redesigns the river the way nature intended. Quite likely Yellowstone will be pretty much the same as it looks now when that task is complete. The park, like Valles Caldera, is sure to explode some day, but at a time of its choosing.


Love,


Robert

Viewed from atop the landslide debris, the Madison River continues to carve its new channel.

The land of stinky air

At the moment, I could imagine what it must have been like for the Romans in Pompeii in 79 AD. As figures passed me in the midst, I held my folded handkerchief close to my mouth and struggled for breath. My glasses were fogged, and my lungs were protesting the thin air and the oppressive steam  that boiled up from the ground. I held my breath from one steam-free spot to another and turned back. This part of Yellowstone didn't work for me.

We got here Sunday, June 15, Father's Day, expecting a 10-hour trip from Wenatchee, and taking 13. The last hour was spent fighting fog on a road with a fading fog line and a centerline that disappeared from time to time. The reflecters at the side of the road, patches of fog, dark of night and rainy mist created the sensation that we were driving in a very dark house of mirrors.

And on Monday it rained. But that just meant instead of hiking, we could take a road trip. We headed for Old Faithful.

If your hat blows off your head to a spot off the trail, it's not smart to retrieve it.

Remember that musical ad about Hamm's being the beer from the land of sky blue waters? Yellowstone is the land of boiling waters. Sometimes stinking waters. Sometimes deadly waters. The reason that hat in the photo above is abandoned is because it can be dangerous to step off the beaten path at Yellowstone. What appears to be solid ground may be a crust over a scalding cauldron. Although the steam can irritate the lungs, on one occasion it was far more than that. A ranger told one group that five buffalo were found dead one time; the speculation was that a burst of steam carrying arsenic may have caught them.

It's 12:30 a.m. Wednesday. I'm tired, and so I'm going to hit the sack. So I'll close now with some more photos of our first day, focusing on the waters of Western Yellowstone. I hope you enjoy the photos and the discoveries we make along the way.

Love,

Robert

Deposits from a bubbling stream hint at what lurks in the steam.

An icy stream flows steadily past a small, frothing geyser.

Trailing a blue cloud, steam rising to engulf visitors.

A backpacker passes a rock formation spouting steam.