It Looks Like It Grew There

I was thinking of naming this post “Double Double Toil and Trouble,” or some truncation of that, but it sounds kinda silly and so do any pieces of it I might use. But that really would be an appropriate summary of the day, minus the toil and trouble part. This whole place is basically a giant bubbling cauldron of strange unearthly materials that, when put together in just the way that Yellowstone has them, produces a potion unlike anything else in the world. 

Hellfire and Brimstone

At 3:00pm I had given up on Yellowstone. I had written it off as just another Grand Canyon experience, and had begun counting the hours until I could move down to Grand Teton.

It had been a day filled with nothing but frustration. The day had an ominous start as I hopped back on I-90 for 30 miles on the way into Yellowstone. Of those 30, 29.5 were under construction. When I say construction, I mean that half the road was closed and there was nary a construction vehicle nor a sign of any construction project in progress. And no, we do not have construction like that in the northeast. We have road work, but you will never see a 30 mile stretch of continuous interstate brought down to 1 lane.

After fighting my way into the park, my first stop was Mammoth Hot Springs. All I knew about it was that it was some sort of geothermal feature, which meant it should be cool to look at. Well, it kinda was, once I got past the veritable city surrounding it, complete with a post office, 2 gas stations, a police station, and a courthouse. The one thing that wasn’t marked on the signs was the actual location of the hot springs. Eventually, though, I found them.

The Hunt for Mt. Rainier

Last night, since I didn’t stay out to watch the sun set, I was able to make and eat dinner relatively early, which allowed me to finish my writing early, which allowed me to go to bed early. By 11, I was in-tent with the flashlight off. What followed was some of the best sleep I’ve gotten on this entire trip. With a fleece jacket on, the temperature inside was perfect (I’d assume it was probably around 45 last night). I remembered to orient the sleeping bag the right way this time, so that my head wasn’t constantly rubbing against the pockets where I kept my wallet and other toys. I had a good 10 hours before I needed to be up. To top it all off, after my adventure gathering firewood, there was no way my blood sugar was going to go high on me in the middle of the night.

Speaking of that adventure, it occurs to me that I neglected to mention it yesterday. Since I’m camping in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and not Mt. Rainier National Park, I’m allowed – nay, required – to gather my own firewood. This has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, I get more of an authentic camping experience like the ones I had as a Boy Scout, where the entire afternoon was spent wandering the wilderness looking for, cutting, and chopping wood for the night’s fire. (I’m not sure why we needed so much wood, though.) On the other hand, now I have to go out and find, cut, chop, and haul back my own firewood. With my hatchet and saw in hand, I was bounding over 5-foot diameter logs and scaling steep hillsides. When I finally had an armload of wood, enough for a 3-4 hour fire, I was ready to get back to campsite B-1. That’s when I realized I would now need to do all that bounding and scaling once again, in reverse, carrying a hatchet, a handsaw, and a cord of wood. Suffice to say the return journey involved lots of throwing of the wood over said giant logs, followed by then throwing myself, and then retrieving it all to do again. By the time I got back to my beloved B-1, I was hot enough that if I wasn’t going to use this fire to cook dinner, I would have been warm enough without it.

So that probably had something to do with the great sleep I got last night, too.

Anyway, on to today.

The Mountain Is In

As I’ve said before, there are certain things about the natural world that some take as fact, but of which I deny the very existence. No, I’m not talking about global climate change (the condition of Yosemite Falls, the amount of snow at Crater Lake, and my surroundings this afternoon basically prove that one). I’m talking instead about moose and bison. People assure me they exist, but I haven’t seen either with my own eyes, so I can’t be sure. And as of today, you can add one more item to that list of objects of questionable existential status: Mt. Rainier.

Life Finds A Way

In one of the early scenes in Jurassic Park, the 2 scientists nervously ask John, the park’s creator, how he could prevent the velociraptors from reproducing. Easy, he says, all the dinosaurs are female.

Despite his reassurances, the orientation video for visitors at the park reveals the fatal flaw in his plan – frog DNA. Later, when Jeff Goldblum discovers hatched dinosaur eggs, he remembers that some frogs, in the absence of males, spontaneously change gender in order to perpetuate the species. He deduces that the same thing must have happened here, enabling baby dinosaurs (and crappy sequels). Life finds a way.

In few places on earth is that more evident than at today’s destination – Mt. St. Helens. Just over 30 years ago, all life within a 17.5 mile radius of the volcano was annihilated and scientists feared it would take hundreds of years for the ecosystem present before the blast to rebuild itself. Today, only 31 years later, the state of life around the volcano has surprised nearly everyone.

Jed has cholera... Jed has died.

Way back in elementary school, when we finished our work early we got to play games the computers (mostly Apple IIe’s, but a few state of the art Macintoshes). By far, the most popular were from the Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail. In the Oregon Trail, you were a 19^th century prospector who wanted to go west to mine for gold. Your job, as the player, was to assemble a party of 5 people and get them all to the Northwest alive. Along the way, you faced thieves, natural disasters, hostile natives, river crossings, and disease. If all went well, hopefully, when you had 1 person alive and 1 clinging to life on starvation rations, you would make it to the Willamette Valley and win the game.

Today, I won the real-life game of the Oregon Trail.

Greggle Turns North

The statement that this was not the best day of the trip so far would be a massive understatement.

Mainly a transition day, I began by wrapping up my time in San Francisco by heading back to the Marin Headlands to see the bridge and the city at their most picturesque. I must say, this city certainly has no shortage of tailor-made scenic overlooks. Someone should stick a mountain just outside of Boston so that people could have just as good a view of the entire city.

Only minutes after arriving, a near disaster struck.