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.
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| Before these trees died, they sort of semi-petrified themselves by drawing the poisonous calcite chemicals up through their roots. |
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| 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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| Another Mammoth Hot Springs casualty--it kind of looks like a critter of some sort. |
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| These trees likely died from chemicals they drew from the soil. |
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| Apparently no-one told this bird to stay out of the hot springs. |
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| A patch of balsamroot in Grand Teton National Park. |
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