and on to another stop

On the blog tour.

http://romancingthewest.blogspot.com/2012/03/mm-justus-repeating-history.html

Jacquie was a very good interviewer, and on Thursday she will also be posting an article I wrote with some photos I took.

another blog interview!

The Dames of Dialogue are graciously hosting me, with an interview about how Repeating History came to be.

Montana museums

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet.  I hope you enjoy the article.

my first blog interview!

Over the weekend, I was interviewed by L. Lee Scott, a fellow author I met through Women Writing the West, an organization I belong to.   It was a fascinating experience, and she asked me a number of good questions that really made me think about Repeating History and about the writing process. 

If you would like to read it, the interview is here.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being interviewed.

progress, and an interesting Yellowstone link

I've been head down in NaNoWriMo, so haven't been blogging properly, but I do want to report that I'm up to over 23,000 words on True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History.

And here's an interesting link to a series of photos made by NASA about the recovery from the 1988 fires in Yellowstone.  I hope you find them as fascinating as I did.

Oh. My.

Today Repeating History received its first reader review on Amazon.  It's by Janet Chapple, who wrote the definitive guide to Yellowstone, Yellowstone Treasures. 

And, not that I'm trying to pull a Sally Field here or anything, but -- she liked it!  She really liked it!

Five stars. 

Wow.

Go check it out:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005E8S8UM

aw, shucks

According to this article and some scientists in Hong Kong, time travel isn't possible.  Nobody'd better try to tell that to Chuck McManis, though.  Who is Chuck McManis?  He's the hero of Repeating History, my new novel now out on Amazon and Smashwords.

Maybe they should have tried using a geyser.  Or an earthquake.  Or maybe both? [g]

what's in a name?

I always knew I was going to have to change some of the names in Repeating History, which, if all goes well, will be available for purchase at Amazon or via any of the formats Smashwords will provide, by the end of this month. 

Some of the characters in this story are real historical people.  Those who had only fleeting walk-ons have kept their names, but several -- mostly members of a family in 1870s Helena, Montana, and the man who married the eldest daughter of that family, are central characters in my novel.  I don't want to offend any of their descendants, so I've spent the last several days figuring out new names for all of them.

Speaking as someone who once fictionalized the small town of Libby, Montana, by giving it the name Campbell (okay, the reason is obvious to me, but I may be dating myself if no one else remembers the commercial jingle "Libby, Libby, Libby on the label, label, label"), I needed the names to be similar in ways that may not make sense to anyone but me.  Not just ethnically, although I did take that into account.  But the way they sound, their resonances and associations, and whether or not they come with nicknames were important, too.  For instance, I wanted to give a name that had a nickname to a man whose real name did not come with one.  This would have added some serious unnecessary editing time as I chose where he'd go by his nickname and where he would not, so, reluctantly, I chose another name.  Fortunately, as it turns out, I like this one better, anyway.

Why didn't I do all this at the beginning?  Back when I first started the novel?  Because, frankly, I didn't know who these people would turn out to be.  Generally speaking, most characters who show up in my head come complete with first, middle, and last names, and with entire backstories.  But most of the characters who show up in my head are not in real history books.  I wasn't sure how much they would change from their real lives as the story was written.   

And so this was my last editing chore before I sent the book off to be proofread. 

Now all I have to do is correct any errors found in that process, format the book for Amazon and Smashwords, finish monkeying with the cover image, and upload the darned thing!

I love the whole process of naming, whether it's a cat or a character.  Do you?

11 years ago today, Day 13

This was the first day on the trip that I didn't take any pictures.  We woke up to find our entire world hard frozen again, our breath quite visible as we dug out mittens and scraped car windshields. 

I left my friends, who were going to visit the canyon and then head north to Great Falls where their plane home to Atlanta awaited them, and headed south to Fishing Bridge, then east around the north end of Lake Yellowstone and up over Sylvan Pass out of the park.  Unfortunately, I was driving under the influence of a migraine (two things I'd rather not have inherited from my father -- migraines and extreme myopia), and my main purpose was to get to the nearest city, find myself a motel, and hole up for the afternoon until I was human again.  Which is basically what I did.

I got as far as Cody, Wyoming, and arrived there about noon.  Bought myself a Sunday paper, found myself a nice little cabin that looked, as I remember, rather like the auto camp in It Happened One Night only with its own bathroom, closed the curtains, dumped the paper on the table, and went fetal for several hours. 

Late that afternoon, I ventured out to find food and a large glass of caffeine (Mountain Dew, if I remember correctly), then, feeling better, I began my new Sunday routine of cleaning out and reorganizing the car, then read the paper (a Casper Star-Tribune), watched a little football, and went right back to sleep early.

Probably the least exciting day of the trip so far, but then when I travel for long periods of time, I really do need some downtime.  I could have done without the migraine forcing it, though.

The next day was much nicer and more interesting, I promise...

11 years ago today, Day 12

I was in another national park, Yosemite, on the September 11th.  I woke up in a tent cabin at Camp Curry to a bunch of schoolkids outside yelling about how someone had bombed New York.  I briefly wondered what movie they'd been watching the night before, then went for an all-day hike up the Mist Trail.  It wasn't until I got back that evening that I found out the tragedy was for real.

Of course, two years earlier September 11th was just another day.  A three-ring-circus of a day, but just a day.

My then-friend H was a whirlwind.  There's really no other word to describe her.  We'd been email friends for a year or so at that point, but we'd never met in person before.  In retrospect, I should have known she'd be as hyperactive as the science fiction hero she'd introduced me to (Miles Vorkosigan, whose author is Lois McMaster Bujold) who is still my alltime favorite fictional character, but how was I to know?

And she was determined to give her friend V, who'd never been to Yellowstone before, the, well, whirlwind tour.  So we climbed in the car and during the course of that day "did" Mammoth again, and Norris, and Lower, Middle, and Upper Geyser Basins, before heading down to the Tetons for a dinner cruise on Jackson Lake. 

The cruise was wonderful, and something I'd not have thought to do on my own.  It was a beautiful cloudless evening, and several dozen of us piled into the large motor launch that took us over to an island in the middle of Jackson Lake for a cookout.  The scenery was spectacular, of course:

The Tetons from the boat

And from the island.

My friend (on the left) and her friend, the one time I was able to get her to stand still long enough to have their photo taken

The food was good, too, a choice of steak or trout.  Since H hadn't let us stop long enough to eat all day, hunger sauce probably made it even better.

After supper, watching sunset

Those barely visible specks in the sky are a flock of sandhill cranes, according to our guide

We drove back into Yellowstone in the dark, arriving at Canyon to check into a cabin just before midnight.  The drive along the shore of Lake Yellowstone by starlight was beautiful, but unfortunately my camera wouldn't do it justice. 

Not to mention that I was half asleep by the time we staggered to our beds.  Whirlwinds are something to behold, but as traveling companions?  Well...

11 years ago, Day 11 -- over the mountains and through the woods

To Gardiner, Montana, I went.  Along the way I saw the Mexican flag, and a bear, and the Roosevelt Arch.  And a very nice person who didn't laugh at me.

My first stop of my last full day in the park was at Norris Geyser Basin once more.  I had walked the Back Basin trail a couple of days before, but I wanted to see the Porcelain Basin:

Coming down the hill into Porcelain Basin

It's the most barren place in the park, I think.  There are trees around it, but, unlike the other geyser basins, there's not any in between things.  I'm not sure why that is, if it's the acidity, or the heat, or the shallowness of the soil, or what.

There are some growing things, though:

Including algae the colors of the Mexican flag.  Sort of.

After my stroll through Porcelain Basin, where the very ground sounds like it's blowing a raspberry, I drove east towards, but not to, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, instead heading south at the junction into Hayden Valley, where I promptly ran into another buffalo jam on my way to the rather evocatively named Mud Volcano area.  Mostly it's a lot of muddy-looking hot springs:

Sulphur Spring

And, in my humble opinion, the stinkiest place in the park.  The geyser basins do give off a faint smell of sulphur occasionally, but the Mud Volcano area reeks of it.  Your classic stench of rotten eggs.

Heading back north, I went over Dunraven Pass, the highest elevation reached by road in the park at 8859 feet:

Those trees aren't dead -- they're aspens that have already lost their leaves.

And I got stuck in another animal jam.  This one was caused by my first bear of the trip, though, and I managed to get pictures.  Very exciting stuff.

North end of a southbound bear

When I reached Mammoth, I had the crazy idea to stop at the park library (which is open to the public, and was in the basement of the Albright Visitor Center, one of the old Fort Yellowstone buildings, at the time) and see what I could learn about park history after the brainstorm I'd had at Grand Geyser the day before.  A very nice gentleman kept a perfectly straight face while he listened to me burble on about my idea for a time travel novel with a geyser as trigger, pointed me to a number of very useful historical sources, then handed me his business card and said to contact him if I needed any further help. 

I looked at the business card, and discovered I had just been monopolizing the time of Lee Whittlesey, the park archivist and author of a number of books on Yellowstone history.  I swear I will be forever grateful to him for not laughing at me...

Still blushing, I headed for my night's destination, Gardiner, Montana, where I was supposed to meet with an email pal and a friend of hers from Atlanta, who were on vacation and had just driven down from Glacier National Park that day.  Gardiner is where the Roosevelt Arch is:

"For the benefit and enjoyment of the people"

We did manage to meet up, and have supper, and then my friend got the crazy idea to do Mammoth Hot Springs by moonlight.  It was fun, but silly.

The bed and breakfast we stayed at in Gardiner had every room done up in a different theme, and the one we stayed in was the Teddy Roosevelt room.  Bears everywhere.  The lamps, the wallpaper border, the furniture...

11 years ago today, Day 10 -- waiting for things to go off

My third full day at Yellowstone was spent entirely in the Upper Geyser Basin, waiting for things to go off.  In order to really get to see the geysers properly, you need a couple of things, plenty of patience, and plenty of time.  I had the latter, or at least a whole day, and I helped myself out with the former by loading my daypack up with a picnic, a book, my journal, and my camera, and then stopping by the visitor center to collect eruption predictions.

Oh, and good walking shoes.  I must have walked at least six miles that day.

The first thing I did was walk down to Morning Glory Pool:

Morning Glory Pool isn't as blue as it used to be because of vandals throwing stuff in it.  How can people be that stupid?

Riverside Geyser was due to go off next, so I stopped there and waited:

Riverside erupts out over the Firehole River, and afternoon eruptions (which this wasn't), often have rainbows in the steam.

Next was Grotto Geyser.  Ahem.  Okay, this is a G-rated blog, so I'm not going to make the obvious comment, but honestly.

Grotto Geyser.  'Nuff said.

Those are supposedly trees that have been coated with sinter over the last few thousand years.

Next was a geyser I'd wanted to see ever since my ex absolutely refused to wait through its four-hour eruption window thirteen years before.  I've talked about Grand Geyser here before, how it's the tallest predictable geyser on the planet, and how it was part of the inspiration for my novel Repeating History, and just generally how amazing it is.  So I won't go on and on and on, even though I could, quite easily.  But I will tell you that my first-ever eruption of the Grand was a five burst eruption, which is quite rare, although I didn't realize it at the time.  I do remember the gazers with their walkie-talkies going practically ballistic, though.  Anyway, here's one of the first photos I ever took of Charley's geyser:

Isn't it Grand? (sorry)

After that, well, everything else, while wonderful, was something of an anticlimax.  Still, I also saw Giant Geyser's crater, which looks like an enormous hollow tree stump:

Giant is not a regular eruptor, and while I saw an eruption on a later trip, it was not cooperating today.

I saw Sawmill Geyser, which erupts much of the time.  It's one of my favorite smaller geysers, mostly because of its sheer exuberance.  But I could say that about most geysers -- I've never seen an eruption where the geyser in question didn't look like it was having one heck of a good time.

Sawmill in the distance.  Grand's pool is just in front of the hillside to the left.

And Castle Geyser, which is, of course, named after its cone, which from many angles does look kind of like a ruined castle.

This is Castle's steam phase, which is incredibly noisy.

All in all, my best, if most footsore, day in the park.  Not least because of my epiphany while gazing raptly at Grand, when I suddenly thought, wow!  Wouldn't that make a terrific time travel device!

11 years ago, Day 8 -- geysers and mudpots and history, oh, my

It's hard for me to think about Yellowstone as anywhere but one of my favorite places on earth anymore, but on my first full day in the park on my Long Trip, it was just somewhere I'd always wanted to come back and spend more time after one visit I wasn't old enough to remember, one day when I was nineteen, and two days with my ex who wouldn't sit around and wait for anything to erupt.

That was the one thing I wanted to do more than anything.  Spend an entire day in the geyser basins waiting for things to erupt. 

It was cold that morning.  I had to scrape frost off Owl's windshield -- I never did explain Owl's name, did I?  My first car was a 1966 Ford Falcon, painted the green equivalent of navy blue.  I inherited it from my father when it was fourteen years old.  I'd owned three vehicles between that one and the 1998 Chevy Cavalier I drove eleven years ago, but the Chevy was the first green (my favorite color) car since the Falcon.  I toyed with the idea of calling it Falcon II (doesn't everyone name their cars?) but that was a bit pretentious.  So, I thought, what other birds of prey are out there?  And that's how Owl got his name.

So.  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Scraping frost in my heavy coat.  In early September.  Anyway, I headed into the park and promptly saw a pair of sandhill cranes along the Madison River, who flew away before I had a chance to take their picture, then headed north towards Norris and Mammoth Hot Springs.  On the way, I stopped to walk the trail to Artist Paintpots, which I remembered from the "ex" visit as being these beautiful pools plopping in the trees, but which had been hit by the 1988 fires, and now were in an open meadow with dead snags scattered about.  The paintpots themselves were still beautiful, though.

My goal for the day was Mammoth Hot Springs, and Fort Yellowstone:

Old and new terraces at Mammoth

The red-roofed buildings are old Fort Yellowstone, and the others to their left are the Mammoth village.  This is taken from the road that goes up above the springs.

Fort Yellowstone has an interesting history.  Yellowstone, as everyone knows, was the first national park in the world.  But when Congress set the land aside back in 1871, it didn't provide any money to take care of it, or even to protect it from poachers and vandals.  The first civilian superintendents were alternately severely hampered in their work or incredibly incompetent, and by the 1880s, things were in such a mess that the Army had to be called in to take up the slack, temporarily, or so they thought at the time.  Fort Yellowstone's beautiful stone buildings:

Elk grazing on the lawn at Fort Yellowstone

Are the legacy of the Army's thirty-year tenure in the park, which ended with the creation of the National Park Service in 1917.

After lunch at the hot springs village, I headed back south, stopping to drive the little byway that goes above the springs, and to see

Cthulhu, otherwise known as Orange Mound Spring [g]

My last stop for the day was the Norris Geyser Basin, named after Philetus Norris, the second civilian superintendent of the park who during his tenure back in the late 1870s, had a penchant for naming everything he saw after himself, and was otherwise quite the character. 

I was there, as I said before, to watch for something to erupt, and I was lucky enough to see Echinus Geyser. 

It's a lot more impressive in person -- the boardwalk viewing area is actually on the hillside above the geyser, and the water you're seeing there is about 40 feet tall.

When the ex and I had been here in 1985, Echinus was erupting regularly enough to be predicted.  This was no longer the case in 1999, so I was extremely fortunate to see it again.  But not fortunate enough to witness the most memorable part of what we saw in 85, which was just after the eruption, when the water drained, sounding just like a bathtub emptying.  It was still pretty darned cool, though, and a great way to end my first full day in Yellowstone.

11 years ago today, Day 7

Eleven years ago today, I began a love affair that hasn't ended yet. 

But I'll get to that in a bit.  My first stop that morning was in Virginia City.  Now, I know of at least two Virginia Cities that started out as mining camps and ended up as tourist traps, which may be a bit more derogative a term than I intend.  I liked Virginia City, Montana.  Most of the town is on the National Register of Historic Places, and many of the buildings date from the 1860s, when gold was discovered nearby, including the Wells Fargo office:

And the courthouse:

After Virginia City, I kept going east, and soon enough was back on familiar ground.  I'm told that my first visit to Yellowstone was when I was four.  I don't remember it, unfortunately.  When I was 19, in 1978, my parents and I came to this part of the world to camp and go trout fishing.  When I was 26, in 1985, my ex and I visited Yellowstone on our way from Oregon to Colorado to visit his parents and fought the whole way, which was par for the course at the time since it was less than a year before we got divorced. 

Anyway, my parents and I had stopped at the Forest Service Visitor Center that tells about the Hebgen Lake earthquake, the largest earthquake that ever occurred in the state of Montana, and, at the time, the third largest earthquake ever felt in the lower 48 states.  I didn't realize when I revisited the site on this trip that it was going to become fodder for my fiction, but I'll get back to that later.

It was far too windy to picnic at the visitor center, so I went on down to a forest service campground, where I was about the only person there, and watched over my shoulder for bears while I ate my lunch.

I didn't stay long, and not just because of supposed bears, but because I was eager to go on to what has since become one of my favorite places on the planet, Yellowstone National Park.  I arrived in West Yellowstone, a small tourist town on the western border of the park, about mid-afternoon, and found myself a hostel, which was in an old log hotel that was one of the first buildings in West, back around the turn of the last century, across from the then brand-new railroad depot.  Movie stars like Gable and Lombard once stayed in that hotel.  As I found out a few years later on another visit, it's also haunted.  But that's a story for another time.

I couldn't wait to go in the park, so as soon as I had my bed paid for I headed out again.

One of the first things I saw on my way in was a herd of elk, bedding down for the night:

They look rather like tree stumps, don't they?

I got as far as Old Faithful that late afternoon, but the only other pictures I took were at Biscuit and Black Sand Basins. 

This is Biscuit Basin.

And this is Black Sand Basin.  I'm almost positive that the geyser off in the distance is Cliff Geyser.

These pictures were taken 11 years after the Yellowstone fires of 1988, and the evidence of them is clear, in all the dead trees looking like snaggletoothed combs on the ridgetops and marching down the hillsides.  But there were literally millions of new young trees springing up around them, at the time all just about my height.  It really was a most encouraging sight.

And now, here at the end of this entry, I must make a confession.  I spent the next five days in Yellowstone, and took more pictures of steam than I'm willing to discuss even here.  I will try, very hard, not to inflict any upon you where you can't actually see what I was photographing through that steam.  I promise.

today

Is the 51st anniversary of a day that changed my life.  Although it didn't actually do the changing until eleven years ago...

The Hebgen Lake earthquake was the largest earthquake ever to hit Montana.  It struck just west of Yellowstone National Park, and changed the landscape of the park forever.

It also was part of the inspiration for a trilogy of books I've been writing on ever since.  I don't know why I combined it with Grand Geyser to make a time travel device, but that's the way my brain works.

I don't mean to trivialize the devastation this quake caused -- it killed 28 people and caused over $11 million in damage in 1959 dollars, which was a terrible thing.

But my fictional hero learned to bless it for the changes it caused in his life.  And I have to say I appreciate the inspiration it has provided in mine.

geyser gazing

It has occurred to me that some people might not know what a geyser gazer is (see my profile, at left).  If you've ever been to Yellowstone, to the Upper Geyser Basin in particular, you may see some folks walking around, or sitting around in strategic places, with walkie talkies and the occasional notepad.  You might even hear one of the walkie talkies go off, with a staticky, "Daisy, 1114, ie," or "Riverside, 1420."  IE, by the way, means "in eruption," meaning that the gazer who saw it did not see the beginning of the eruption.

Geyser gazers are the people who make geyser eruption time prediction possible.  They are volunteers, most of whom belong to GOSA, the Geyser Observation and Study Association.  Many of them also subscribe to a mailing list, which is associated with GOSA but not part of it.  Some are professionals, but most are enthusiastic amateurs.  All of them are passionately interested in geysers, and spend as much time as possible in Yellowstone observing, communicating, and recording geyser activity, in conjunction with the park rangers and the visitor center staff.

Since most geyser prediction is predicated on average intervals, lengths of eruptions, and other, more complicated algorithms, knowing when and for how long a geyser erupted is crucial to being able to predict what it will do next.  Making a good educated guess (geysers are not faucets) as to what a geyser will do next makes it possible for more people to see it. 

I don't lay claim to being anything more than a very beginning apprentice gazer, and I can't spend nearly as much time in Yellowstone learning more as I'd like.  But I do have a walkie-talkie (gifted to me by a very good friend), and I have had the excitement of being the first to call in an eruption. 

I called this eruption of Daisy Geyser

It's all terribly addictive [g].

So the next time you see someone walking around the Upper Geyser Basin with a walkie talkie and a notepad, be glad, because that next eruption of Grand?  Just may have been predicted with their help!

Obligatory Grand Geyser photo (it's my favorite)

"Yellowstone is my happy place"

Days 7 and 8.

All good things have to come to an end.  L and I packed up a week ago this morning and headed out of the park.  We did make several more stops on our way out towards West Yellowstone, that I'd saved to the end of our visit.

The first was at Black Sand Basin, where we saw Cliff Geyser erupting.  This geyser has significance in True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History that I'm working on right now.  It's also one of my two favorite lesser geysers, the other being Sawmill in the Upper Geyser Basin near Grand.

Cliff Geyser

Biscuit Basin was closed because they were rebuilding the boardwalks, so we didn't get to walk out there, but our next stop was Midway Geyser Basin, where we walked the boardwalks in the company of a busload of tourists, and peered down into the steam of Excelsior Geyser Crater and across enormous rainbow-tinted Grand Prismatic Spring.

Excelsior Geyser Crater -- in the cool morning you can barely see the

Caribbean turquoise water for the steam.

Grand Prismatic Spring, with its rainbow in the pool and strikingly-shaded algae mats surrounding it.

We made one last stop at the Fountain Paintpots, where Clepsydra Geyser was doing its usual thing (Clepsydra, which means water clock, really isn't a geyser, which implies periodic eruptions -- it's a perpetual spouter).  This is where, on another trip to the park several years ago, a woman, who did not appear to speak English, stepped off the boardwalk so that her companion could take her picture, while everyone around them stared in dumbfounded horror waiting for her to fall through and boil herself to death.  I know that couple went home to wherever home was telling stories about the crazy American woman who freaked out when all they wanted was to take a picture, but I yelled at her until she got back up on the boardwalk.  I did not wish to see another entry in Lee Whittlesey's book Death in Yellowstone, thank you very much.

Clepsydra Geyser

On this trip Fountain Paintpots is where I saw a wildflower I did not recognize (this doesn't happen very often [g]).  My friend M helped me identify it from this picture when I got home.  It looks just like a harebell, except that harebells a) don't have foliage like that, b) don't bloom this early in the season, and c) don't come in bright yellow, or indeed yellow at all.

Yellow bell fritillary, aka Fritillaria pudica

I'd never have guessed it was a fritillary, but it is.  A new-to-me wildflower is always a bonus.

On our way west from Madison Junction to West Yellowstone, we saw some elk cows grazing alongside the road.  They didn't look nearly as healthy as the ones we'd seen up at Mammoth.  The grazing along the Madison River is excellent during the summer, but it's much better at Mammoth in the wintertime.  The one I got a picture of looks pretty sad.

Cow elk

Tuesday was the first overcast day we'd had in the park, but the rain really didn't start letting go until about the time we got to Butte, on our way home.  When it did, though, it came down with a vengeance.  It poured on us off and on all the way home.  This last picture was taken at a rest area near Deer Lodge, Montana, and shows some of the huge clouds and rain we dealt with all the way home.  You can't tell from the picture, but it was pretty darned windy, too.

Clouds over Montana

We were incredibly lucky, though.  The day after we got home, it snowed not only over Snoqualmie Pass (and, I suspect, Homestake and Lookout Passes as well), but in the park.  And that's the way it's been all week, while it's been cool (10 degrees below normal averages) and rainy here in western Washington.

I miss the park already...

"Yellowstone is my happy place"

Day 6.

Our last full day in the park was spent mostly geyser-gazing.  In the morning I checked the predictions at the visitor center, of course, and learned that Grand's window was in the afternoon.  L needed to do some gift shopping in the morning (she has grandkids, among other people, who would have been vastly disappointed if she'd come home without something for them), and then we ate lunch on the balcony at the Old Faithful Inn, while being entertained by Old Faithful itself, of course.

Old Faithful from the balcony above the Inn's porte cochere.

Afterwards we wandered around the inside of the Inn, and I took a few pictures.

From the mezzanine on the second floor.

It is a spectacularly beautiful building, inside and out.  All the hardware was hand-forged on the site in 1903, including the enormous clock on the chimney in the above picture.

By that time, it was time to wander down to Grand so that L could see an eruption (I wasn't about to turn down a second viewing, either).  We had to go back to the cabin first, and on the way we saw a geyser in the distance that, to the best of my knowledge, was either Aurum or Anemone (see if you can tell from the picture in the park service webcam link).

Aurum or Anemone geyser -- the steam plume at the left edge of the photo is Old Faithful

On our way over the boardwalk on Geyser Hill, we saw some bluebirds.  I don't think I've ever seen so many mountain bluebirds as we did on this trip, either.  Here's a picture of a pair.

Female on the tree stump, male on the ground.

The big excitement on our stroll to Grand took place when Lion Geyser erupted just as we were approaching it.  I've seen Lion erupt from a distance before, but never close up.  It was extremely exciting [g].

Lion Geyser

And, finally, we arrived at Grand.  Which promptly went off a whopping 20 minutes into its window.  I kept telling L how spoiled she was, that she hadn't had to wait two hours as I had day before yesterday.  Of course, I took more pictures, just a few this time.

Grand again.

After that, I wasn't quite sure what to do with us, since I hadn't planned on an almost free afternoon.  So we wandered back to the cabin along the other part of the Geyser Hill boardwalk loop, and then L rested while I decided to take another stroll.  No pictures, really, just enjoying my last day at the Upper Geyser Basin.

As it turned out, this early in the season you don't have to have reservations to dine at the Old Faithful Inn, so we splurged on our last night in the park and ate trout and salad and rice.  It was delicious.  And I took another picture of the inside of the lobby as we were leaving.

Balconies inside the Inn.

It really is a most spectacular building.

And that was our last full day in the park, one week ago today.

"Yellowstone is my happy place"

Day 5.

One week ago today I saw five different kinds of large mammals, plus a jackrabbit.  ETA:  Actually, it's a snowshoe hare, or so I am informed by a reliable source [g].

Sunday was the best wildlife-observation day I've ever had in the park.  Partly this was due to the time of year -- bears just out of hibernation, nobody having headed up to the high country yet, etc.  Partly it was due to having a passenger in the car who could devote her eyeballs exclusively to looking for critters, and partly it was due to having a travel companion to drag me away from the geyser basins, where I tend to stay when I'm in the park by myself, to look for critters.

So.  We headed out east from Old Faithful on Sunday morning, and crossed the Continental Divide twice on our way to West Thumb.  The snow was pretty deep on either side of the road at the Divide and part of the boardwalks at West Thumb were snowed over, but not all.  We got out and were strolling on the clear parts, enjoying the springs and the views of the lake, when L said, "look!"  And there was a rather large jackrabbit snowshoe hare sitting by the side of the boardwalk, his mouth full of the grass growing there where the soil was warm.  It was the first time I could remember seeing a jackrabbit snowshoe hare in the park, which was nifty.

West Thumb geyser basin

Jackrabbit Snowshoe hare

After we left West Thumb, we headed north and drove around the shore of Lake Yellowstone, stopping to take some rather panoramic pictures along the way.  I have seen pelicans and gulls and other waterbirds along this drive, but not when the lake has been frozen over. 

Absaroka Mountains across Lake Yellowstone, with West Thumb steam

When we got to Lake village, I showed L what I've always thought of as "Tara on the Lake," then we headed on towards Fishing Bridge and the Hayden Valley.

I am accustomed to seeing bison in the Hayden Valley, which is where one usually finds the herd of females and their young offspring during the summertime.  I'm not used to seeing wolves there.  But we did, across the Yellowstone River from the road, close enough that when I enlarged my photos to 100% on the computer, you could actually tell they were wolves as opposed to the dots in the pictures from my other sighting four years ago.  They are beautiful animals.

Wolves in Hayden Valley

Wolves enlarged

After goggling at the wolves for a bit, we stopped at the Mud Volcano, then drove on to Canyon and went out to Artist's Point.  The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone still had some snow in it, but the falls were running free.  It truly is a lovely place, and this time of year it wasn't crowded at all.  We stopped for a bit at the fabulous new (not more than five years old, at any rate) visitor center at Canyon, then ate lunch on the road between Canyon and Norris.

Mud Volcano area

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Lower Falls

Somewhere along in there I got frustrated at the lack of bison herd, among other things, so decided to take L up to the Lamar Valley.  Dunraven Pass (the shortest route from Canyon to the Lamar Valley) being still closed due to snow, we took the long route -- Canyon to Norris to Mammoth to Roosevelt to Lamar, then back to Old Faithful.

It was so worth it.  Bears, one of which was actually close enough to photograph on two different occasions (coming and going), antelope, which were flopped down practically next to the bison, a coyote (the only critter I didn't manage to get a picture of), and the bison herd!  with red dogs!  (red dogs are the local name for baby bison, for good reason). 

Oblivious bear

Antelope

Bison herd, waiting for their shot in Dances With Wolves [g]

Red dogs!

I drove almost 200 miles that day, all in the park, but it was the best animal-sighting day I've ever had in the park, or anywhere else for that matter.  I was exhausted by the time we got back, but I am very glad we went.

Oh, and what was the fifth kind of large mammal?  The elk at Mammoth Hot Springs, of course.

Tomorrow, more geysers and the Old Faithful Inn.