Hell on Wheels

July 31, August 1

Sunday we went from Jackson, Wyoming, to Livingston, Montana, by way of something that may look a little bit like hell. At least, it smokes and smells faintly of sulphur. I don’t know what brimstone smells like.

From town to town is a 4 1/2 hour drive. We made good time and did it in 10.

First, of course, we passed the Grand Tetons again. They are amazing every time we look at them, and this time the air was a little clearer than it was a couple of days earlier: wonderful soaring stones dressed in bits of glacier.

We stopped at a historic site, the J.P. Cunningham cabin, which is on a large piece of prairie in sight of the Grand Teton Range.

It looks like the Pony Express stop in dozens of Western movies. It has two separate log rooms separated by a roofed breezeway. 

The gaps between the logs and the space between the dirt floor and the walls show no evidence of having been chinked with plaster or clay. I have no idea how anyone could have wintered there in Wyoming. Or hell, even in the Carolinas.

But Mr. Cunningham and his wife, we read, lived there for several years while he built a farmhouse.

Like most ranchers, he was originally opposed to the idea of turning a large part of the Tetons into a playground. The hard economics of cattle raising, or persuasion, or something eventually turned him around to being a booster of the idea. 

He not only sold his property to John Rockefeller for the project, but got a lot of other ranchers to go along. Rockefeller put together 33,000 acres, about 50 square miles, to donate the park. 

Resistance was rife in the area. A rancher and several others including, for some reason, the movie actor Wallace Beery, led a herd of cattle across part of the park shortly after it was set aside, I guess to show that they could.

The rancher (whose name escapes me) later became governor of Wyoming. By the time he took office, he had developed an apparent conservationist state of mind. He supposedly once remarked, “Thank the Lord that we lost that fight.”

I came this far west partly to confirm that, yes, Yellowstone is a truly bizarre place.

There are active sites with bubbling pools of mud, geysers of boiling water, and plumes of steam. Some of them, like Excelsior Crater and the Artists Paint Pots are very colorful, mineral deposits tinged red, yellow, white, and orange. Often the water in pools is sky blue, or a smoky opal, if the water carries enough dissolved white stone.

A novelty we didn’t expect is Lake Isa, a large pond covered in water lilies that strides the Continental Divide. You cross the Divide often out here because it snakes its way through the Rockies.

One side of Lake Isa drains to the Gulf of Mexico and the other to the Pacific. Don’t ask me how that works, but I saw the lake, and there it is. So if its water hasn’t learned to run uphill, it’s flowing two ways.

Of course, we had to see Old Faithful. It makes you feel like a confirmed tourist. We got to the parking lot, which was extensive and packed. We couldn’t see any useful directions. We followed a drifting crowd instead. 

The geyser erupts at various intervals. The timing of an eruption, they say, can be calculated by the duration of the previous blowout.

The geyser was already spitting a few false starts when we got there. We stood in the shade for maybe 20 minutes and then it took off. As advertised.

We saw steam in the distance from other geysers. They steam and sometimes send up small eruptions of water. For some, that’s all they do. Old Faithful hits the ceiling. 

It’s hard to judge scale, especially at a distance. I’m told the jet of water will reach somewhere between 100 and 200 feet in the air.

We had read something about the Great Prismatic Spring. It is in one of the geyser fields, along with Excelsior Geyser Crater. 

Excelsior is steamy. It bubbles. 

This field is a very popular site and it took almost half an hour, I guess, to inch our way into the parking area to find a space.

You get out and walk a long boardwalk. (There are lots of boardwalks here, not only in parks, but also in Laramie and Jackson, just like board sidewalks in Western movies.)

In Yellowstone, the boardwalks protect the delicate and dangerous ground. 

The Excelsior Crater and Prismatic Spring don’t shoot up water, although the park warns that one fell dormant, then a century later became very active, and then went silent again. 

No telling, it said, when another massive eruption can take off. The subtext is travel at your own risk.

So it was a gamble. It looked calm enough. But if it went off while we were on the boardwalk, then we were parboiled meat.

Grand Prismatic Spring gets its name because of the variety of mineral colors it sheds. Water runs into the Firehole River, which goes somewhere. I keep losing track of which side of the Continental Divide we are on.

Another treat came near the end of the park run. There is a cluster of buildings that look like a village. It consists of hotels, eateries, cabins, park offices, all at a place called Mammoth Springs.

It was raining when we got there, and a herd of several dozen elk had taken over the place. They were on all the lawns and for the most part ignoring everybody (including us) who were staring at them and snapping photos.

There was one group behind a building and we pulled into a parking lot to get a better look. That group included two young bulls. 

One had single-point antlers, and the other had double-point. Both racks still had moss, indicating that they were newly grown.

There may have been several dozen elk, mostly cows and calves, spread through the place. 

We went on to Livingston, where we had dinner at Neptune, a brewery that enouraged us to “drink like a god.”

They served an American pale ale, an amber, and an IPA that were all good work. The amber was a little bit sweet, but not too much. The India pale ale was a little sharper and more bitter than the American.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the IPAs I’ve had out here don’t have the strong floral fragrance of hops. That may be intentional, and a regional preference. I miss it.

The food was hit or miss. Joanna had some boneless fried chicken, and I had a couple of bratwursts. The brats were good. The chicken too dry.

Good thing I went for the beer, not the food. 

The bar wisdom made up for the dry chicken. One sign reminded me, “Beer is the reason I get up every afternoon.” A sticker on the wall made a keen observation: “To err is human, to arr is pirate.”

Another stop well worth the trip.

Monday morning, we covered 50 miles or so to go back to Yellowstone. We took a different loop through the park with fewer steaming things, but other strange sights.

One was a petrified tree. I expected to find rocks lying on the ground. Instead, we saw a bit of trunk standing maybe a dozen feet high. It was covered millennia ago with volcanic ash that buried an entire forest. 

Silica embedded itself in the cells of the tree and preserved it in stone.

Somehow, genetic information was taken from the tree, enough to identify it as similar to the California redwoods. It stands behind a fence because it is the only surviving example of three petrified tree trunks. The other two were destroyed by souvenir hunters chipping off bits of stone.

The route brought us to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, dizzyingly deep. We stopped to see Tower Falls, a 120-foot step waterfall that comes down between eroded pillars of natural rock. 

You can follow a path past the grocery and souvenir store to a wooden viewing platform. I grew a little disoriented by looking down.

From the same place, we were able to see another formation across the chasm that looks for all the world like the columns of a temple.

We also saw a corral of horses. Joanna was disappointed the other day because she wasn’t quick enough to grab a photo of horses clustered very near the highway. Not her fault. Speed limit out here is 70.

Most of the horses we see are dots in the distance.

I told her we would see more horses up close. I didn’t know that. I was making it up. 

So when we passed the corral near a cluster of park buildings named for Theodore Roosevelt, we turned around and went back for a closer look. 

Joanna got several shots of horses, including some only of their tails. That’s because, as my father used to say, there are more horses' asses in the world than horses.

We saw the Paint Pots on Monday. A trail climbs the cliff behind them to give an overview of the colors that stain the ground.

One of the most fascinating pots here is not colored at all, but dead white. It is a large pool and two small ones of a substance that looks like pancake batter, but is really dissolved rocks, bubbling and popping. 

The rock gets tossed up at the margins of the pools and, when it hardens, looks like piles of salt.

Most of the Paint Pots walk is a boardwalk tour. According to signs in the park, the surface over the thermal areas is a thin crust. Walking on it, you can fall through and cook to death.

One of the Paint Pots, called Blood Geyser, gets its color from iron oxide, or rust.

We read that one place in the park, the Mineral Springs, I think, has no access trail because the ground is very unstable. Geologists have fallen through the crust there and taken severe burns.

The Mineral Springs are the remnant of a gigantic eruption. A huge valley was formed 600,000 years ago when a massive volcano blew it out and sent volcanic glass as far as Texas. 

The springs are kept hot by slowly mounting pressure of volcanic lava, or something like that, so geologists expect that eventually there will be another volcano. 

Watch out for flying glass, I guess.

We rode up and down mountain roads, and every once in a while, we’d see something smoking. Well, to be more accurate, steaming.

We were getting tired, and headed back toward Livingston. We had to wait for 15 or 20 minutes because of road work in the park, but even so were back before seven.

We went to Montana’s Rib and Chop House for dinner. It’s a chain with locations in several towns out here. Joanna had been craving fish and the place has a catch of the day on the menu, so it’s fresh and not frozen.

It was good. I tried a bite of it. But I was in the mood for brew and red meat. I had an IPA that was exceptionally bitter (a good thing) but oddly not strongly fragrant (a missing thing). I also had an amber ale, hoping that it too would be bitter. It was OK, but not quite as nutty as an English bitter.

Back at the motel, drinking more beer, I am almost out of supply. 

That is nature’s way of telling me it’s time for me to conk out.

What’s more, these are all the tall tales that I can remember to tell.

Good night, all, and all be well.