Tracey:
So Yellowstone is starting to grow on us, now that the smoke has cleared and we’ve seen more of the park than geysers and mud pots. Not that the geothermal features aren’t interesting and unique, but hot stink isn’t what I drove 3,000 miles to experience (and the word stink doesn’t even begin to cover Mud Volcano - they need to invent a new word for that one). But Lake Yellowstone is lovely and the big bad bison are comical - they snort and grunt like pigs, go wherever they damn well please (this morning when we got back from breakfast we saw a woman staying in a nearby cabin who, from the looks of it, stepped onto her porch to head out for breakfast and found that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon because she was in the middle of a herd - huge brown bodies surrounded her cabin while she looked on, dumbfounded), and though they cover the plains in much smaller numbers than they did in the old western days, they still invoke those wilder times.
So Yellowstone is starting to grow on us, now that the smoke has cleared and we’ve seen more of the park than geysers and mud pots. Not that the geothermal features aren’t interesting and unique, but hot stink isn’t what I drove 3,000 miles to experience (and the word stink doesn’t even begin to cover Mud Volcano - they need to invent a new word for that one). But Lake Yellowstone is lovely and the big bad bison are comical - they snort and grunt like pigs, go wherever they damn well please (this morning when we got back from breakfast we saw a woman staying in a nearby cabin who, from the looks of it, stepped onto her porch to head out for breakfast and found that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon because she was in the middle of a herd - huge brown bodies surrounded her cabin while she looked on, dumbfounded), and though they cover the plains in much smaller numbers than they did in the old western days, they still invoke those wilder times.
Today we checked out the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is about 900 feet deep and a half mile wide, with the Yellowstone River falling dramatically down the rock and racing along the bottom. Every bit as dramatic as the geysers and more to our liking.
We’ve eaten every meal here at the Park, at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel restaurant - very good food and one of the things that’s been fun about the meals here is the staff, which come primarily from overseas. We’ve had several servers from Poland and the Czech Republic, and have seen other staff from Singapore and South America. They seem to be leading exciting lives - after their season at Yellowstone at least a few of them blow their hard earned money on seeing other parts of the U.S. - two of the Polish servers we spoke to were heading to Hawaii, and one of them was doing his third summer in Yellowstone and each year he manages to see more of the country (far more than we’ve seen). We’ve also noticed huge numbers of foreign-speaking tourists throughout this park (more so than in the others), so much so that at some of the overlooks or other places we’ve stopped, we heard all languages except English. It’s good to know that they’ll be taking back descriptions of our country that counter those of Hollywood, but as extreme as the landscape is here, this isn’t very representative either.
