After a three month stint house- and cat-sitting for a friend in Colorado early last year I traveled north and east a short way for a visit, then headed back west by way of Interstate 90. This highway stretches the length of the continent and is the longest in the U.S. I really enjoyed this drive, as highways go. It wasn’t terribly busy and the scenery was beautiful, although the winds were unreal. A few months later I saw on the news that a few trucks had been knocked to their sides on this highway due to high winds. I wasn’t surprised at all. When I was driving on it I thought my van must be using at least as much fuel fighting the sidelong winds as it was in propelling itself forward. Crazy!
I turned south at Livingston, Montana and headed for the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. My pictures of it are somewhat limited due to a problem I’ve had retrieving photos from my phone (which I over-explained in full ridiculous detail in my Devil’s Tower post and won’t bore you with here).

I’m so glad I’d taken this picture with my actual camera. This is an old abandoned radio station that’s outside of the town of Gardiner, just north of the entrance to the park. I think it’s a classic.

This road, which leads into and goes through the park, is the same road that washed out in heavy rains a few months later….

….and this is a part of the river that overflowed its banks. Serious weather they’ve got in them there parts.

Dangerous, indeed. It looks downright apocalyptic.

But then things turned incredibly beautiful.

So beautiful, in fact, that I pulled Clem (my van, Clementine) over, got out, walked a little way off the road and took this picture. Then I had the thought, “You idiot! There are bears here! Get back in the van!” But, I’m glad I got the shot anyway. I love the reddish-rusty color of the dogwood (I think that’s what it is) nestled in with the dark greens of the pines. So pretty.

See the steam coming out of the ground? You see that everywhere here.

Just your random geyser.

This is called Beryl Spring due to its color (being the same as the mineral of that name). The temperature of the water here is a few degrees below boiling but it is agitated by the volcanic steam rising from below. It’s one of the hottest springs in the park.

Beauty here, beauty there, beauty, beauty everywhere.

There are a lot of places like this (above) that aren’t necessarily ‘beautiful’ but display the variety of ways the heat escapes from underground and how it effects a given area.

This (above) picture is one of my favorites at Yellowstone.

I’ll never forget this area. I tried filming this geyser. It was pretty active. But I could barely hold my phone camera up and aim it due to the fact that the wind was just about knocking me over!

This, to me, was such a strange sight. The striations you see are a type of bacteria that grows in this hot, mineral-rich water.

It was interesting to me that bacteria could be so beautiful. Kind of eerie, but beautiful!

A raven and a chipmunk. I don’t think I’d ever seen a raven before. Plenty of crows, but no ravens. It doesn’t look like it in this picture, but this is a big bird!

And last, but not least, Old Faithful. Now, I know this doesn’t look like much. I did ‘film’ it with my phone camera but only as a secondary effort to seeing it with my own eyes. There was no way I was going to watch Old Faithful erupt through my phone camera! So, I made my best attempt at aiming at it while I watched the event. It’s a passable attempt if you don’t mind watching it from the right hand fifth of the screen! My aim was not great. But I’m not worried about it. Anyone can get online and see Old Faithful erupt and have a much better idea of it than anything I could’ve filmed even if I had been aiming correctly! It’s really quite a sight.
It all is. All of Yellowstone is quite a sight.