A River Runs Through It

I'm blogging tonight from Big Sky, Montana which is situated along the Gallatin River in the Rocky Mountains. It was awesome to drive north on highway 191 with the river running right along next to us the whole time and have mountains surrounding us on both sides. It's quite a view from out here as you could probably guess from the name and there are plenty of guys out here spending their entire vacation camping out during the evening and fly fishing during the day. It feels a bit like camping out in the Appalachians in the late fall considering it's in the low 40's right now and it's suppose to drop in to the low 30's tonight. However, we do have hot chicken and vegetable soup in our bellies and a fire to keep warm by.

Today was another awe inspiring day of nature and I got to reflect on a few different things about her. Her majesty, power, history, periods of recovery, beauty, and also how ugly and smelly she can sometimes be....seriously some of the off shoots off the geysers like the mud pots and the sulfur pits were just nasty to look at and smelled like rotten eggs. Most of it however was just beautiful and breath taking.

We left Cody in the late morning and came into Yellowstone from the east through the Shoshone National Forest and had a great view before we even got to the park. We decided that since Obama was going to be in the park at the same time as we were (I think he's been stalking us on this blog) we probably wanted to stay as far away as possible considering it was already free admission to National Parks this weekend on Saturday and Sunday. We passed along the southern loop along the Yellowstone Lake to the Western Thumb Geysers and then on down South of the Park to the Grand Tetons National Park.

It wasn't suppose to be such a haul down to the Grand Tetons as they are only about 60 miles south of Yellowstone, but we came to find out that 30 of those miles is under construction and the asphalt has been ripped out and made for a much bumpier and slower ride. They love to rip out the asphalt around here and rework the roads for some reason; my only guess is that the winters are pretty rough on the pavement and it's hard to make a Superpave  ® binder that can handle the swings in temperatures. (I appreciate when I get to use my undergrad knowledge for something)

We ended up stopping at the first overlook and got some great pictures and then had a simple lunch. PB&J for Chip and Ham and Cheese for Paul along with some tasty snacks that Helen packed for us before we left. Thanks Helen.

After lunch we headed back up into Yellowstone a little quicker than the ride down and made our way over to Old Faithful. Throughout the day I was pretty surprised at the lack of people in the park...you would see a car pulled over here and there and there would be some slow people driving around in RVs but all in all there weren't quite the amount of people I was coming to expect when I heard today was going to be free. That was until we pulled off the road to the "Old Faithful Village"....you would have though we were pulling into the County fair with the amount of people running around and then gathering along the boardwalk to view the geyser. After about an hour of very patient waiting and some more waiting and then about 20 more minutes of waiting Old Faithful finally decided she was in the mood and put on a very impressive show. Then after about 4 minutes of waterworks she calmed back down and people scattered and the park emptied out.

Since it took so long to get to and from the Tetons we only got to see the bottom loop of the park, which is HUGE (about 220 miles round trip), so we had to be satisfied with the pictures in the brochure of the northern half of the park. I'll try and post a part of the Old Faithful video later, but for now here is some bubbly from the Western Thumb Geysers.