An Exercise in Absurdity

Blog post for 8/12/2014, posted late due to lack of internet access:

This morning I woke up and had myself a nice bowl of apple cinnamon oatmeal for breakfast at the lodge. Then I came back to my cabin, where the Australian biker gang was milling around. One of them called out to me, “Hey! We've been looking for you!” This statement was somewhat concerning as one should never have biker gangs looking for you, but they were a friendly bunch so I figured it was okay. Turns out that their support vehicle (some big Dodge truck) was dead in its parking spot and they needed jumper cables, which of course I had.

So that's how I ended up cramming my vintage pony car into a tiny alley to jump the battery of an Australian biker gang's giant truck. And that's how this post ended up being titled, “An Exercise in Absurdity”.

This was by far one of the most entertaining things that has happened to me on this trip. Just envision 20 or so bikers, all in their leather and chains, milling around shouting about this and that and praising my car and lauding me as their savior for lending them help. And in the midst of this is a dusty, ratty-looking little 48-year-old pony car with an oversized lawn mower battery struggling mightily to deliver power to a giant dead truck. Words cannot express how hilarious it was. I was very glad to help though (“Today you, tomorrow me”) and they were on the road again soon enough with their full entourage. That left me, my dad, and Jane with a full day of hiking ahead of us.

We started with the trail to Lone Star Geyser, a cone geyser which supposedly pretty spectacularly erupts every 3 hours. Unfortunately we had no way of knowing exactly when it was next predicted to erupt, so when we arrived (after a 2.5 mile hike) it was 2 hours away from erupting again. Oh well! Very cool to see anyways, and the trail up was beautiful.

A young buck mule deer

Lone Star Geyser being decidedly non-eruptive... bah.

Finally warmed up enough to use my sun shade! Red line is my travel line up to date.

After that we moved on to Fairy Falls, a trail that runs close to Grand Prismatic. We heard children screaming in the bushes and looked up the hill and saw that there were trails running up there – so up we went. Lo and behold we had an incredible view of Grand Prismatic from above!

Couldn't decide which picture was more interesting, so I'm posting both.

Fairy Falls was lovely, but couldn't beat Grand Prismatic in beauty. Nevertheless it was a nice hike full of great scenery and wildlife. We even found some ripe raspberries to eat along the way!

Reflection

From there we decided that we weren't done yet so we headed to Mystic Falls. This was one of my favorite falls because you could get pretty close to it and there were really cool hot springs bubbling up and down into the water. I put my fingers in the water near one of the springs and it was very odd – the super-hot spring water mixed with the very cold river water and created a really weird sensation where the two met.

Lastly we headed to Lake Yellowstone where we intended to spend the night. I finally managed to get a picture with Jane at the Continental Divide on the way over.

Lake Yellowstone is one of the biggest freshwater lakes in America. Crazily enough, it's so big that it supposedly makes its own weather. It also makes its own waves and, as a result, has beaches that are eerily similar to those found at the coasts.

The sun set on our last day at Yellowstone while we were at the lake. All in all it was a wonderful last day – adventures with Australians, 12 miles of hiking, and good weather and good behavior from Jane the whole day. Excellent! Now to head back to Jackson for a day of adventure... Kelly signing out.