Weather... Scenic wonder
I woke up early, snuck off the bus. Sneaking off was tricky. With the bus miracled into a giant bed, we didn't wear our shoes inside; we would have tracked dirt. Thus I stepped off the bus in my bare feet.
Thus I put my bare foot into a slushy-ice-mud puddle.
It was just above freezing out; that puddle was as cold as it could be without being solid; if it had been solid, then I wouldn't have been able to put my foot so far into it. I've thought a lot about why that puddle felt so cold. It's weeks later as I write this, and I still remember that sense of cold.
On my way back from the showers, it started sprinkling. Then it started raining. I hadn't needed yesterday's poncho during yesterday's hike. I brought it out now.
Back at camp, folks were eating breakfast. They were eating quickly now, inspired by rain. I wolfed down some food, then started helping with the breakfast cleanup.
I haven't talked much about chores. We shared chores. I haven't talked much about them because not much happened. But heavy rain makes things special.
The rain came down harder. We put things away. We were shorthanded at breakfast cleanup as campers hurriedly packed up their tents. The rain came down yet harder. I was washing dishes. Washing dishes involved washing in soap, two water rinses, and a bleach-water rinse. Thus, there were four dishpans: soap water, water, water, bleach water. I considered skipping the water dishpans, just holding the dishes up in the rain. And then it rained harder. I washed faster. And then the dishes were done and it was time to carry buckets of dishwater to the dishwater-flushing toilet. Maybe I should have been demoralized to carry a heavy bucket that was getting heavier as rain landed in it. I thought about ancient civilizations. I thought about water carriers. I thought about riding on a bus full of hippies. Age of Aquarius, Aquarius the water carrier. And then it rained harder, and there was more stuff to do... but I'd moved past thought into some Git-R-Done zen state. Stuff got done.
Then I snapped out of it. We were out of stuff to clear away. It was time to get on the bus. We were going to Yellowstone!
Yellowstone, it turns out, is next door to the Grand Tetons. And so we drove for a while through the Grand Tetons and then we were at the gate to Yellowstone. Traffic was backed up. Why was traffic backed up? We hopped out to take photo. We hopped back in when traffic started to move—but why was the traffic all pulling U-turns and heading out?
Jimmy got out to talk with a ranger. There had been a bad accident on the road into the park from this, the south entrance. There was snow on the road, and a bus had run into an RV. So... the weather was bad enough to cause an accident. And there had been a road-blocking accident. And the rangers weren't sure when the road would be clear. Not any time soon. "Call us in a few hours".
Oh, and the east gate road was blocked by snow. And there was a pair of French tourists in a car a ways who didn't understand the announcement; if our bus had a French speaker who could relay the news, that would be swell. [Fabrice hopped on over].
We were in for a delay; perhaps we were blocked. Here, Jimmy figured out a pretty good way to keep us from grumbling about the delay: he asked us if we wanted to just head straight down to Utah. Skipping Yellowstone was a possibility, solid.
So nobody complained about the idea of spending a few hours in a nearby parking lot so that we could call up the ranger again and ask for more news.
I actually thought that we would skip Yellowstone. I figured that the few-hours delay was just to give some tourists a chance to come to grips with the fact that fate had messed with their travel plans. But in hindsight, I think I mis-read what was going on.
We parked at the Flagg Ranch Lodge, a ways outside the gate. There wasn't much to do. Some folks walked in search of a reported hiking trail. Later on, Tristan said that their trail had just twisted around after a few minutes and dumped them back in the parking lot.
I didn't go for a hike. After the rainy breakfast, I'd stuffed my rainjacket and poncho into a garbage bag to keep them from dripping on my fellow passengers. Now I sat out in front of Flagg Ranch Lodge, sat on a thoughtfully-provided rocking chair, and read, airing out my wet stuff. Some folks paused to chat. A few wanted to make fun of the out-of-towner who didn't know that it snows in Yellowstone summers, sitting here in shirtsleeves and sandals. One guy had more to say, though.
He was a pastor from Sundance, WY. He was also a hobbyist programmer who likes watching TED talk videos—so when I said I was reading about behavioral economics, he was all over that. He said that he'd been working with Javascript. He wasn't used to object-oriented programming, so he was making a library to let you lay out a web page with a series of procedure calls. Which just goes to show that you can bump in to geeks in the most unlikely places.
Gossip trickled out: the road was open. We could head in to Yellowstone. We waited around a bit—everyone thought that they had a couple of hours to spend here, so everyone was scattered. I watched the Parisians work a puzzle in Jeux magazine; it was one of those with the clues written in the grid and with different grid structure than you'd see in a USA crossword puzzle. Eventually, everyone was together again at the bus and we could keep going.
And so we drove on in on a road through a conifer forest, a dusting of snow on the ground (but not on the road). Pink Floyd on the stereo, lake and trees going past. Hills, mountains, more trees, scenic wonder.
And then we came around a bend of one mountain and I looked out the window and saw steam rising up from behind trees. And I realized that this steam came from geyser-ish activity. But this wasn't just steam from one geyser. It was at this time that I figured out what folks meant by an area of geyser activity. I was seeing steam from several geysers spread out over a couple of square miles. This wasn't one plume of steam. This was a big area. We were heading towards something big.
Later on, we'd see these features close up. But somehow, it wasn't so easy to realize the scale when I stood amongst these things. But that moment on the road, seeing that steam from far away, that was amazing.
Old Faithful is a sea of parking lots and tourist facilities to allow people to walk up and see a geyser. Old Faithful is a big geyser, bigger than my local geyser ("Old Faithful" at Calistoga). On the other hand, a geyser doesn't need to be that big to be impressive.
Better than Old Faithful were some other geysers to walk amongst behind Old Faithful. I recognized many of these: I'd seen them in photos that my friends had taken in Yellowstone. There's a reason they took so many photos back there. There are some pretty multi-colored mineral thingies back there.
I cut my stroll back there short; I had to hurry back to civilization: I had got food poisoning from the place where I'd eaten lunch. Now I'm going to tell you the name of the place where I had lunch: the Geyser Grill. In hindsight, eating at a place named "Geyser Grill" was a bad idea. Its name was appropriate, but not for the reason I'd assumed.
We camped at a campground. In theory, we'd already eaten dinner back at Old Faithful. But I pulled out a bagel—I'd bought it so that I'd have something bland to test on my stomach, make sure it had calmed down. But when Driver Jimmy saw that bagel, he worried that us tourists might not have been resourceful enough to get food at Old Faithful, so he busted out a bunch of sandwich fixings. And Driver Charlie offered hot dogs to anyone daring to camp outside despite the threat of rain. I suppose it would be possible to go hungry on one of these trips, but you'd have to work at it.
I have vague memories of a campfire, of Andy singing and playing guitar, but I was basically asleep by then; and soon I was on the bus and sleeping for real.
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