M&Ms, cats and boredom

Today is day 27 of the Wayward road trip and we have 27 days to go until we board the plane to return to 'real life'. It is also the longest day of the year. Apparently the sun rose at 5:35am and will set at 9:25pm. Apparently the view from our current campsite is of a huge lake surrounded by mountains. But it is raining and windy. This is what we can see now:

And this is another part of the campground. No idea how much you'd pay for this but I'm sure it's not cheap! Note - fully concreted, classy picnic table, umbrella, outdoor sofa and full outdoor kitchen!

But we did have visitors last night! There are three camp cats. Only one was bold enough to come inside. We are missing our Kona and Cedric.

It is morning tea time now and we are still sitting inside our van at the campsite. I am drinking tea and interneting. Joel is eating M&Ms and interneting. We only have about an hour of driving to reach our next campsite. The plan was to be sightseeing along the way but there won't be much to see today. We will visit a local museum and the supermarket - exciting. Thankfully we have internet!  

Paloona on steroids

What would you get if you multiplied the Paloona downhill track by 5 times and added in a bit of Big Bend and a touch of the bottom of Tolosa in the pine trees with roots and 3 times steeper? And threw in a chairlift?

Answer: Big Sky Resort, Montana, USA - top lift elevation of 2788m and vertical drop of 500m

This is real mountain biking on a real mountain. No groomed bike park trails here. It is all loose, steep, rough, rooty single track that flows well for most of the time. It could be better signed as we got a bit lost and had trouble finding some tracks. We almost had the trails to ourselves as we only saw four other riders the whole time. Maybe it gets busier on weekends or later in summer. We managed to ride 3 of the total of 9 tracks on the map. We rode Soulhole twice as that was pretty awesome!

 Each bike gets it very own chair all to itself.

 Got bogged in some snow near the top of one track.

America

Gloria flies

Normally, I would not buy those expensive photos that they take of you doing touristy stuff and then hope you will come back to their shop and buy, but this is an exception. You see, it proves that Gloria and I do sometimes get airborne! This is not actually a rare occurrence any more but no one has actually managed to get a photo of me doing it. So thanks to Edge Imaging at Jackson Hole - here is proof that I can jump - not very high but we are off the ground!

And one of Joel too.

Medicine

MEDICINE LAKE - a favourite photo from near Jasper in the Canadian Rockies and a poem and that is Joel with his camera in the foreground

 

MEDICINE LAKE

serene stillness

dwarfs

contemplative reflected solitude

 

silent sentinel

observes

eons etched in snow and rock

I stand

immersed

attempting to fathom the expansiveness

 I sit

absorbing

the medicine of the lake and the mountain

Bison jam

About 20 minutes out of Jackson Hole and four bison decide to just stand on the road for about 10 minutes. I'm sure they were playing games with us silly humans. Payback for all the staring and photo taking they have to put up with!

 

 

Gas companies and a supervolcano

Gas companies must love Yellowstone National Park! Today, along with hundreds, possibly thousands of other people, we drove around the western half of Yellowstone looking at geysers. We drove 330km!

Yellowstone National Park is actually a huge super volcano that will one day erupt. It sits over a body of magma which is 60km long, 30km wide and 5 to 12km deep. This is rather scary if you stop and think about it. The ground, which is the floor of the caldera is continually rising, small earthquakes are very common and the geysers are a symptom of all this volcanic activity.

Old Faithful is the most famous of all the Yellowstone geysers. It has a huge visitor centre and hotel development around it. It is located in an area of barren terrain which you can walk around on boardwalks - not really all that interesting to look at. This is it simmering away about an hour before the next predicted eruption of steam which happens 17 times a day and averages 40m in height for 1 to 5 minutes. If you look closely you can see all the rows of seats for spectators and several dozen already waiting. We didn't bother hanging around. We had other stuff to go see (and we have already seen a geyser erupt in New Zealand. Not quite as big as Old Faithful but we got to sit much closer.)

A lot of the geyser locations just have some barren ground, some steam, occasionally boiling water and dead trees. What is impressive is the sheer size of the area over which they occur. Here a couple of the more visually interesting things:

Black Sands - geyser erupting about 10 to 15 metres in height right on the edge of a stream. The water must be quite warm for the fish - and there are fish in this river, as we drove along it for quite a distance and saw lots of people fly fishing.

This is the Lower Terrace of Mammoth Springs. It is like a boiling waterfall solidifying as the water deposits minerals and particles. It sounds like a boiling kettle and looks like a huge waterfall or a limestone cave formation. There is water flowing over the top but most of what you see is solid rock.