The trouble occurred at around one in the morning when I woke up to a banging on the outside of the van and Andy saying “We’ve got company”. There was the sound of a quad bike outside and some illegible voices coming from outside the van. I should probably say here that our van has curtains for all the windows so nobody can see inside. I was throwing clothes on so I could get out and ‘have a word’ as they started making bear noises and banging more. They then hopped back on their quad bike and left.
I did a sweep of the area and the outside of the van with a torch. There could have been two people or ten out there but there was no sign of anybody. Our theory was it was just a couple of people on their way back from the pub. I slept in my clothes for the rest of the night so I was ready to go but it wasn’t necessary.
After driving into the park the next morning and getting a camping spot for the following night we set off on our ‘Geyser Day’. The park had over three hundred geysers, around two thirds of the world’s total amount. The biggest draw is Old Faithful which we set off towards on a fifty mile journey through the park.
They get a lot of snow here so we were driving through a bright white landscape, along roads surrounded by lodgepole pine trees each with a sprinkling of snow sitting delicately on its branches. It was like the opening scene to The Shining. All the snow had melted by mid-day and the water dripping from the roofs of the buildings made a fast-paced rhythmic drumming on the floor below.
Our first stop was at a large geyser basin. The geysers all emit a sulphur smell which is basically the smell of egg. The basins consist of small pools and deep holes full of water where the water sits as well as the geysers. There are also many steam vents which pump out into the air. It’s feels a bit disgusting at first strolling around and then having to go through a warm mist which pretty much smells like somebody’s gone off egg mayo sandwiches but you have to keep telling yourself its sulphur and you don’t notice it eventually. All the areas have different levels of activity. Some just sit there and don’t do anything for years whilst others constantly bubble or erupt.
You are guided around the basins by slightly raised wooden walkways. You are restricted to the path for obvious reasons...
...but it does really limit the angles you can take a photo from. The pictures can say a lot but you can never really understand the experience without physically being there. Memories are the best souvenir you can take from a landscape as spectacular as this. I think the best views were actually of the quieter areas where there wasn’t much activity but there are some truly dazzling colours.
The water is full of living bacteria which provides some amazing patterns of startling colour. This creates a living thermometer, changing shade depending on what temperature the water is and which minerals are present. Rust coloured reds lead into deep blue-greens as the static water leads away from the centre of the pool.
We came at the wrong time year really. I’ve seen pictures of other times of year where there is more water about so the pools are bigger and the rainbow they create are even more astounding. I’m sure we saw every shade of blue throughout the park, from the cloudy just off white to the almost purple of the deep pools which seemed to go down forever. The water can spread out thinly over quite a wide area and these ‘bacterial mats’ throw up some astonishing patterns. Some like marble art and some like veins growing their way outwards like a virus. Some of the scenes were like the backdrop from a sci-fi movie set on a distant wasteland planet.
There were many more geyser basins on the way to Old Faithful but we decided to do them on the way back as we’d spent so long at the first. Old Faithful is the biggest regular geyser in the park and they can predict when it will fire to within ten minutes. However for us, it didn’t seem that faithful. We turned up ten minutes before the expected blast time which was something like 12.26, a quite acute prediction. Luckily we took a book because like hundreds of others we had to sit and wait about a fifty meters from a gently steaming hole in the ground.
Every now and then it would give a small spurt and Americans near us would say something like “Oh here it comes” just for it to stop again. This happened several times but they didn’t learn their lesson so would jump up every time the geyser farted. Eventually, about half an hour after the expected eruption... it erupted. It was definitely worth the wait as water shot up into the air during a show that lasted about sixty seconds. It’s a shame there wasn’t more of a breeze though as a lot of the blast was masked by steam.
On our way back to the campsite we stopped off at every basin to walk around and took a lot more photos.
In all our time in the National Parks we’d seen a lot of wildlife but we’d never had an encounter with Yogi and Boo-Boo. When we came across several men at the side of the road with two foot long lenses pointed into the woods and I caught a glimpse of a black ball of fur moving through the trees we just had to stop. We pulled over in a conveniently placed lay-by and walked over to join them. Soon a black bear plodded out into a clearing on the other side of a stream about a hundred meters from us. It then began scratching around for roots or shrubs or whatever it is bear eat when they’re not eating meat or stealing from cars.
It wasn’t long before every car passing had stopped and there was what we in the business call an ‘Animal Jam’. Luckily there were a couple of park rangers moving along the cars that had stopped in the middle of the road. Once it started to get dark we moved on got back to the campsite with only a few bison and elk to distract us.
The next day we went for a short (for us) walk through the centre of the valley, to the Hellorawlings River and back. It was a good hike through some open plains and as well as some pleasant woodland. On the way we spotted another black bear with a cub and also some bird in the middle of a lake which was too far away to tell what, any help?
The trees in and around the basins don’t really thrive, most just about survive. They do twist and contort themselves into some great sculptures before they absorb too much calcium carbonate and die.
The drive from the park to our stop for the night was my favourite of our travels so far but that can wait for its own post.
J.
No comments:
Post a Comment