Given our illicit position in the campsite, the drivers decide to leave at day break, though there is some disagreement about whether this means five o’clock (Charlie) or six o’clock (Jimmy).
After stopping to eat breakfast at a picnic site, we get a chance for a morning hike through Yellowstone Valley. The trial is another very pretty hike through the forest by Yellowstone River, but I really want to see Yellowstone Falls. Upper Yellowstone Fall seems to split out like a great claw just before the water falls over the ledge, and though it is only 110 feet / 33m high it kicks up a colossal fuss as it hits the river below.
Lower Yosemite Fall, a quarter mile down the river, falls more than twice the height of Niagara. There’s a story going around that somebody once jumped from the waterfall ledge. Their body was never recovered as the force of the water collision below is enough to disintegrate a human body.
Later we do some more geothermal tourism. Firstly, there is the Norris Geyser Basin Trail. With its bubbling steaming grounds, and the landscape like white ash interrupted by the occasional shrub, it looks like the aftermath of a scorched earth bombing policy, or a massive plane crash.
Though each site is intriguing in isolation it is easy to grow weary of viewing the bubbling pools and geysers. Each geothermal area has a trail map and information boards which I will summarise (and paraphrase):
- Steamboat Geyser eruptions can throw water more than 300 feet into the air, twice the height of the highest ‘Old Faithful’ Geyser spray, but the eruptions are entirely unpredictable and uncommon, so you are unlikely to see one.
- Porkchop Geyser exploded in 1989 after four years of continuous spouting, throwing rocks 200 feet up into the air and nearly killing some observers
- Monarch Geyser was really cool a hundred years ago, but is now dull
- Minute Geyser used to be good, but has now been clogged up by people throwing coins into it
- Pearl Geyser looks strangely like ice
In the evening at Yellowstone Village, I join the two Czech girls to go for a pizza. Petra and Adele didn’t know eachother before this trip but they both came to the US as au pairs. Petra, an athletic beauty, is really desperate for a beer, but we are deep in the mid west now, at the join between Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. When we pop into the first pizza place we find, I am met with a stern ‘no’ when I ask if they sell beer or wine.
It is not that it is hard to find alcohol or cigarettes here, but there is certainly an element of cultural prohibition in these parts. However, the next place we go to is a restaurant with a bar attached to it, or perhaps a bar with a restaurant attached. The pizza I have here is with extra tomato topping to make sure it is not too dry, but the crust is too thick for my liking. 7.5/10.
Before dinner, we had taken a walk around the village, stopping at the Visitor’s Centre and souvenir shops. In the latter there are T-shirts emblazoned with such puzzling gems as ‘Local Legend – if you don’t know me, you’re not from here’.....which strikes me as an odd thing to sell in a tourist shop. Then there was the greatly witty ‘we shoot trespassers, we shoot survivors twice’. Where were the nice ‘Welcome to Yellowstone’ t-shirts with a bear, bison or even ‘Old Faithful’ on them I wondered?
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