Yellowstone part I:
This is on the way to Yellowstone, and it's called Shell Falls. And I'm a sucker for waterfalls. I figured that those of you who know me already know how much I hate heights, and stairs/ladders, but for those of you who may not know it, I HATE HEIGHTS AND STAIRS AND LADDERS!! But in this case, in order to get a good shot of the falls, I had to go down/up these stairs. Besides, Barby was poking fun at me for being slow.
And as we walked around the place, we could see evidence of why it might have been called shell falls. I was taken by the different colors in the rock with such clear lines between them.
Dirty Annie's was a farce. It was one of the cleanest restaurants we'd been in and there wasn't even an Annie in sight, clean or dirty. We're in WY at this point, and I want to know how that curly rock got up there.
After getting settled in at Fishing Bridge RV park at the upper end of Yellowstone Lake, we puttered around for the evening, taking in a ranger talk and enjoying the 7800 foot elevation cool night air. Next day it's off to play tourist -- and tweak my curiosity even more. The sign said the average temperature of the water was 180 F, and yet there's all this different kind of algae growing perfectly happily. How's it do that? And on the left, that rather bluish stuff in the upper right hand corner is Yellowstone Lake. Or maybe it's Lake Yellowstone. Some years ago somebody introduced (illegally) some lake trout into the lake from one of the other lakes/rivers around here. Seems they have a taste for rainbow trout, and while there's no bounty on them, there's no limit on them and if you catch a lake trout even if you don't want it, you have to kill it and report the catch to the rangers so they can see how the population is going. There are some reports of some large lake trout in there, but we were too busy sightseeing to do any fishing. Again, as usual. Harrumph!
Well, seems there are little geysers and big geysers. The little guy on the left is in the lake near the edge and just kind of piddles into the lake. The photographers from National Geographic seem to have missed him. The one on the right is, of course, Old Faithful. Most the geysers are fairly unpredictable when they'll go off, and there's a whole bunch of semi-scientific stuff I learned about the whole deal, but won't bore you here with it. Later maybe. But Old Faithful is fairly predictable, and was right on time for us. Noisy rascal.