Today we drove from the Grand Tetons to Yellowstone and got here around noon. Now Yellowstone is a BIG place. It’s 63 miles by 54 miles, so moving from one place to another takes a long time. Today we visited Old Faithful and a few other geothermal locations. Some of them bubble, some come in pretty colors, and some steam and smell really nasty. Old Faithful was really neat though. It “erupts” about every 90 minutes. Big crowds of people gather and wait for the show. We saw a lot of deer today, but the moose was still way cooler.
Another interesting fact about the park is that there are a ton of dead trees lying on the ground. In some places there are so many they look like big pick-up sticks. Now having paid attention in biology, I know that bacteria and fungi and all that jazz help decay stuff like dead trees. So why all the dead trees? Because it’s too cold for those microbes to survive, and thus, little decaying. Instead the trees become fuel for fires. There was a really big fire in 1988 that we read about at the visitor center.
Tomorrow we plan on seeing the northern part of Yellowstone. We saw a bison today from REALLY far away, but I’m crossing my fingers we get a better view tomorrow.
