day 4: hill and back

Sunday, aug. 29, 2004   |   0 comments

Today was a good day. We’re in Yellowstone! And we took a break from the driving for the whole day! And I got up late and Jill brought me a latte while I was showering! And the water was hot and pressured me in all the right ways!

Sufficiently fortified, I got dressed (there was still sand in my shoes from Sand Mountain!) and made us sandwiches out of hippie peanut butter (a gray, defeated color) and white trash jam (with a name like Smuckers, it better be good). Then we set off with our pack lunches on a degorgeous hike to Cascade Lake (we saw bison!).

Bison!

Lake!

Yellowstone Tip from a Reader Named Bryan Please let me advise you to not stop in the town of West Yellowstone. Unless, of course, you need five million Yellowstone t-shirts, or a few billion snow globes. The motels are way over-priced, so stay in Twin Falls if you can. West Yellowstone is a gaudy tourist trap that will make you sad.

After gazing at the lake just long enough not to appear rude, we pushed upward and onward to Observation Point. But after two miles of climbing, we turned back about a mile from the top re: my sore ass and Jill’s allergies, which put a brick-like weight on her lungs. And good thing we pussied out when we did because we got back to the lake just in time to catch a glimpse of a black bear trotting its way across the hill — so bearably exciting! It was far, far away from us, but considering bears can run up to 30 miles per hour, and when one attacks, the only thing you can do, according to “Essential Yellowstone,” is “try to lie on the ground completely flat on your stomach, spread your legs [?] and clasp your hands over the back of your neck,” that bear wasn’t really all that far away after all. In fact, a glimpse is all you really want to see of a bear.

There are signs all over the park that say, “Wildlife is dangerous and unpredictible. DO NO APPROACH.” But of course, everywhere we go, we see people mere feet from a-gore-able bison, just … waving and snapping pictures. And cars, everywhere, stopped dead in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, to admire the … moon? It’s amazing we’re not all dead. Then again, the first time we saw elk, we screeched halfway off the road and frantically took pictures, too. But … one of those elk was a BABY elk!

Anyway in conclusion, seeing a bear is a very rare and thrilling thing, and it warmed my cockles to their marrow.

Pussing out aside, the hike was about nine miles long all told, and afterward we drove and walked around some waterfalls and bubbling and belching geothermal phenoms, and tonight I am plenty tired. I am rocking the tired straits, and it’s only 9pm. It turns out I am old.

One of Yellowstone’s blurbling geothermal features.

Jill in a swirling mist of meningitis.

The sulfur-decorated ceiling of the bathroom adjacent to the geothermal blurble.

Weird shot of hikey me and hikey Jill in front of some waterfalls, taken by a kind yet elderly ranger.

The falls themselves!

Oh but wait. The neighbors just moved in and they have an angry, angry baby on board. Sad, sad baby. Sad, sad Jill and Evany. Oh earplugs, is it too early to renew our vows? Earplugs!