Every spring and fall some roads in Yellowstone are closed to cars but open to bikers as they get ready for the changing of the seasons. Yesterday I experienced this for the first time with a 42 mile trip from Mammoth Hot Springs to Norris Geyser Basin and back. I bought a new bike last week, a Giant OCR 1. It is a road bike. I’m excited about it. Yellowstone without any cars is rather grand. The weather was fairly warm (despite there being an abundance of snow that hadn’t melted yet). The 42 miles went by quite quickly. Riding a bike made for the roads is a lot faster than riding a mountain bike with some slick tires on it.
The 3rd picture is the Boiling River. It is a lot of water that emerges from underground after being heated inside the earth. It is quite warm and swimming directly in it is illegal. However, right after the spot where the picture was taken it meets with the very cold Gardiner River, and that is where you can swim.
The really hot water meeting the cold water makes for a very good temperature. Its like a giant outdoor hottub that is continually flowing past you. I’d driven past it many times, but never actaully checked it out. It is quite awesome, I’ve never seen anything like it. You just hang out in this warm water and watch the elk around you, (we actually saw a bald eagle as well). Pretty classic stuff, I was feeling very spoiled by my surroundings yesterday.
The last one is Luke pondering. When I learn how to put text inbetween these pictures I will, but its not really that easy to do if you don’t know how.
Got back into town Friday evening and have spent the weekend adjusting to being back. It has been warm in Bozeman, about 65-70F for the weekend. Most of the snow that was on the ground before Spring Break has melted. Its pretty spring-like here although I’m not getting my spring pants on just yet because I expect more snow.
There are some pictures on my Plogger gallery from the trip. Here’s the direct link to the new ones Spring Break Pictures
The pictures from Zion have some captions located above the picture. None of the other’s do yet. I had done a bunch but I refreshed the page and they all went away. 🙁
Also, when you first come to a picture, you can click on it to get a bigger, nicer one. And depending on what browser you’re using, another click might make it even bigger! whoa!
It was an awesome trip. I’ll update more in a little while. Right now I’m back at school and there are some things I need to attend to.
The snow is melting and grass is coming out. This is a continuation of the pattern that has been relatively persistent over the past month or so of snowing quite a bit and then warming up. Its not all bad for us snow-sports enthusiasts because it makes me feel like I’m not missing as much as I spend my day off doing schoolwork in the office.
Spring Break is next week and I am planning to use it to travel down to the Grand Canyon and maybe Zion or the Moab area as well if there’s time. It will be my second time there and I’m extremely excited as it is one of my favorite places that I’ve ever been to. I’m hoping to be able to spend a couple days hiking and camping in it but that depends on the availability of permits. Either way it’ll be nice to have a week off and travel to a different climate.
Thats the report from their website. I was already planning on going today anyways and with the new snow it turned out to be pretty epic. I think that was the most snow I’ve ever been in. There would be times where you would be up to your waist going downhill and snow would be totally covering your face. You would be inhaling snow and just totally blinded. It was a little crazy. It’s like you’re floating, you move up and down as you turn but you don’t actually hit anything hard.
I was proud of myself today for getting myself in the position where sometimes I can go to school, teach my own class, and learn quite a bit in the process, and then other times I can drive 25 minutes to a mountain where I can have some of the best snowboarding of my life.
Here’s a little video I took on my very last run. I think I almost got frostbite trying to get this video. Ok, not really, but my hand was definitely in pain afterwords. You’ll notice that I’m basically following someone else’s path. This is because if it wasn’t quite steep, there was so much snow that it was quite difficult to make forward progress unless you were mostly following where someone else had already been .
Also, thanks for all the birthday well-wishes, I felt very loved.
