Well I made it to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons and spent all day yesterday and all of this morning driving/hiking/running around seeing stuff. I'm currently in Jackson, WY about to head to Salt Lake City.
Arriving in Yellowstone was a very cool experience. Five minutes after leaving the entrance gate I'm driving behind a few other cars up a mountain to Sylvan pass. The weather is not looking all that great and the next thing I know it begins to hail! It was crazy! Little pea sized hail everywhere. It was almost like nature is saying: "Welcome to the wild." Needless to say five minutes later it looked like this:
It turned out that would be a microcosm of the whole day. It must have stormed for about 15 minutes at least 5 times that day. After each one it would clear up and be sunny for about 45 minutes. It was very weird. It also meant that I couldn't go on any very long hikes for fear that I might get caught on top of some hill with no shelter and little golf ball sized hail pelting me in the head. Instead I went to visit the geyser area over near Old Faithful.
The geysers are pretty cool and I managed to see Old Faithful erupt from the top of a near by hill. It was pretty cool to see, but I still thought some of the other geysers were more interesting. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some of them just bubbled, while others would send periodic jets of water into the air at random moments. It was cool, everything except for the pungent odor of sulphur permeating into every part of my nasal cavity. Speaking of strong smells, at least the sulphur wasn't life threatening. Earlier in the day, while I was driving to Yellowstone I stopped to take some pictures of the Rockies and I noticed a rather curious smell emenating from the region where my disk breaks reside in my wheel wells. Turns out my breaks were REALLY HOT! And if you're wondering, this is what the road looks like that causes your breaks to almost light themselves on fire:
The point is I made it safely, but don't ever let your GPS make you take US 14 through the Rockies and remember that shifting down one gear is not nearly adequate enough, sometimes you have to down shift two or three gears! Lessons learned.
Alrighty, well my computer is about to die some I'm going to post this and try and put some pictures up. I'll write about the Grand Tetons later. Check out the pictures.
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