Yellowstone - The Lower Loop

 We have hit the jackpot. Yellowstone is strutting its stuff. Today we were up early to get breakfast before being picked up for our all day bus tour of the Lower Loop of Yellowstone. We were early on the pickup route which took us up and down all over West Yellowstone - a town of motels, little shops and restaurants, casinos and bars. The first part of hitting the jack pot was in getting Tim for our driver-tour guide: 60, articulate with a rich, precise and extensive vocabulary, and funny. He said he didn't have an agenda, and took things as they came, but he was serious about our understanding the FEDERAL laws regarding the National Parks - especially keeping on paths, staying at least 75 feet away from ungulants - hooved animals, and 300 feet from carnivores. This proved to be very difficult, as the second part of our jackpot was coming upon herd after herd of Bison cows, calves and yearlings, and solitary bulls, who at first were in a distant field, and then were grazing right alongside the road very close to our tour bus, and then literally on the road creating a bison-jam around some of the vehicles ahead of us. We got up close and personal. Bison are BIG animals: the cows are about 1200 pounds, the bulls range from 1600-1800 up to 2400 pounds. Though they may look slow and plodding, they are agile as a cat and very fast. They are they largest cause of death in Yellowstone. Tim said we were very lucky today, that there have been many days this year that they have seen few or no bison at all, projecting that the heat had driven them up into the more inaccessible parts of Yellowstone. Also unusually, there were still bulls mixed in with the cows - and "two-story" bison gave proof that it was still mating season! If tails are raised, it's bad news - either a charge, or discharge.

Our guide/driver grew up in West Yellowstone, Montana. His father was with the National Park Service for 50 years, and Tim gave his own first tours in 1972, so he was a fount of information that most of the 200 park guides could not begin to match. He had such an engaging personality that Judy felt as though she'd spent the day with Garrison Keillor. He knew his history, botany, zoology, and geology. We were so fortunate to have him to answer our diverse questions, and provide us the base knowledge for the geothermal phenomenon that we were to see. We were underwhelmed by the world's most famous geyser, Old Faithful, which didn't seem to shoot 130 -150 feet into the air.  Too much anticipation perhaps, or maybe just a smaller release than usual. We were glad we had seen it, but were more impressed by the Lower Geyser basin walk where Tim showed us hot springs & thermal pools with their extremophile bacterial mats, bubbling sulphuric mud pots, hissing gaseous fumaroles - so hot that the water is converted into steam, and geysers. Yellowstone was created as the first National Park to preserve its unique geological features - the earth's crust is thinnest here - only 2-3 miles thick instead of the 20-30 miles thick. Two thirds of the WORLD's geothermal features are located in Yellowstone, with the other third scattered across seven continents.

We thoroughly enjoyed seeing  <-Upper and Lower ->falls of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. While much smaller than its Arizona cousin, its 26 mile long canyon is up to 1/4th a mile deep and a mile across. We were impressed by the vivid colors in the cliffs at Artist's Point at the lower Falls where the crevass is deep and narrow

80% of Yellowstone is forested, and most of that with pinus contorta - lodgepool pine - the only tree adaptable enough to survive the extreme conditions. We saw massive areas of "ghost trees" where forest fires had raged through, burning off the graouncover and deasfall, killing the standing trees, and moving on. In many areas you see the 30-40 foot tall scorched trees amid the emerging new growth of lodgepole pines. There are several "rain forests" of mixed conifers which abruptly start and stop amid the lodgepole pine forests which will grow out of rock, gravel and sand other trees cannot survive and thrive in.

Back in West Yellowstone, after the 140 miles we didn't have to drive, we cleaned up, went shopping, had dinner and wandered in and out of some of the cute shops before heading home to bed. And since both my roommates have done just that, it is time for me to do so as well.  Tomorrow we will drive the Northern Loop around Yellowstone on our own, stopping and exploring as we did in the Grand Tetons - was it only yesterday???!!!