6-29-07: After working four 10-hour days, Chelsea and I take Friday off and decide to spend the weekend in Yellowstone and Teton Parks. We stop briefly in Jackson to buy food, the head north through Teton, where we stop briefly to take pictures. Wide-angle view:

Grand Teton at full zoom with my new lens:

Chelsea and me in front of the Tetons:

Photo break #2: Jackson Lake. A beautiful sight!

We continue north, reaching Old Faithful in time for its scheduled 5 pm eruption. I'm sure there are a million of these pictures on the net, but here's one more. Pretty cool, but perhaps a bit overrated with it's four-lane highway, vast parking lots, and half-circle bench seating.

We decide to camp near Mammoth Hot Springs and drive slowly that direction, stopping at roadside geysers, fumaroles, and hot springs. Most had beautiful colors made my thermophile bacteria.

Sapphire Pool, perhaps my favorite sight at Yellowstone - cerulean blue and perfectly clear.

One of many fumaroles - vents that spew steam but no water.

Grand Prismatic Spring - Yellowstone's largest and most beautiful hot spring. Only aerial photos do justice, but it is still something to see from the ground. The steam smells of sulfur but not particularly unpleasant.

After passing and photographing several waterfalls (not shown here) and traveling through some seriously beautiful country, we arrive at Mammoth Hot Springs campground where we are forced to pay $14 to camp and $9 for firewood. Despite the unfortunate cost, we cook a tasty dinner of campfire burritos and sleep well.

6-30-07: The next morning we explore around the Mammoth area. Most of the springs are dry, but the travertine stone deposits remain. At the base of the hill sits this oddly phallic "hot spring cone."

More bacterial colors at Mammoth Hot Springs.

White deposits from hot springs that are now dry.

At the top of Mammoth Hot Spring sits a large white pool that looks and smells strongly of eggs.

We leave Mammoth and drive the eastern side of the Yellowstone loop. When we find a traffic jam, we stop to discover that everyone is looking at this black bear.

Next stop: Petrified tree. It was a tree. Now it is petrified. 'Nuff said.

Tower Fall, one of the many beautiful cascades into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

As we climb the road past Tower Fall, we encounter another traffic jam, this one spurred by a grizzly bear. The bear is actually about 300 feet away - full zoom plus some cropping brings it closer.

At about 2 in the afternoon, we reach our main destination for the day - Yellowstone falls. We hike about three miles along the canyon rim, making several side trips to see the falls. It is warm, pleasant day and there are too many people about, but the falls definitely deserve their fame - a large river falling 300 feet makes a sound that carries for miles.

We take a side trail down to the brink of the lower falls, which provides amazing views down the canyon through the permanent rainbow created by the falls.

Yellowstone Canyon! The orange and yellow rocks indicate past hydrothermal activity.

We leave the canyon at about 5 pm and head south, stopping along the way to see some mudpots and acid springs. These are interesting but smell strongly of rotten eggs and so begin to get old after a rather short time. At the first site, a wild bison was laying in the dust, eyeing the hundreds of tourists walking by.

A typical mudpot.

A particularly violent mudpot.

We leave Yellowstone and drive back to Teton in search of a campsite. Most of the good sites are full and, not wanting to pay for a spot in a crowed campground again, we follow the advice of a local and drive into National Forest land to camp in a quiet meadow. Another good evening with tasty campfire food and beer.

7-1-07: We hike in Teton, taking a three-mile trail to Hidden Falls (below) and Iinspiration Point. This trail was busier than any at Yellowstone and reminded me more of the state fair than a wilderness park.

Inspiration Point is home to a group of bold ground squirrels trained in the arts of coaxing food from the constant stream of tourists. They will literaly climb into your lap and try to take a bit of whatever granola bar you are eating.

The view from Inspiration Point is, well, inspiring - out across Jenny Lake and the Jackson Hole plain to the top of the Gros Ventre Range.

After a stop at Dairy Queen in Jackson and a side trip to bathe in some overly crowded hot springs east of Jackson, we return to Pinedale and plan our next adventure.