Two Hams on the Road

Sunday, August 11, 2013

I went to bed early Saturday and didn't blog, so I'll bring you up to date.

Saturday, we left Canyon Lodge, Yellowstone and started on our way to Cody, Wyoming.  Steve was a bit excited, as our exit route would take us back through Hayden valley, where we had seen lots of buffalo 2 days ago.  He wasn't disappointed.

This one decided to climb up on the roadway, stopping traffic.

What do you do when a buffalo decides to walk down the highway?  Follow him.

This was taken through the windshield, which is why there is some glare.  We followed him until he decided to walk beside the road instead of on it.  Then we came upon valley after valley of buffalo.  This is one of my favorite pictures.

A few feet away, I was able to set up this picture for someone to take for us.  I think it's a great shot.

At least it shows we were near some buffalo!

The buffalo had traffic backed up forever that morning, as they kept deciding to cross the road.  The rangers try to keep traffic moving, but when the buffalo is in the middle of the road, there's not much anyone can do.

We decided to stop at the mud volcano, as we'd passed it by twice.  This mud pot used to be a mud geyser that shot mud up into the air until some earthquakes in the 1970's changed things underground.  This is one of the pools at that site.

The bubbles I hope you can see indicate that the water is in fact boiling.  In this next pool, the water is just steaming.

If you notice the green hillside beyond the pool, that used to be covered in pine trees.  They all died after the 1970's earthquakes, not because of the quakes, but because the ground temperature had been raised to 200 degrees!

We had some more excitement at this stop.  The buffalo decided to invade the parking lot.  I was back at the car and managed to get this shot.

 

Steve managed to get this one.  The buffalo is actually standing on an area they don't want people on because of the danger.

People are always ignoring the danger signs, why not buffalo?  I think he's giving Steve the evil eye.

 

We finally left the buffalo country and turned off onto the road leading out of the park.  It was lunchtime, so we stopped at the general store at that intersection and pick up some lunch to picnic with.  Picnic areas are plentiful in the park and don't seem to get a lot of traffic, so we were sure one of the first two areas on the map would work for us.  We were wrong. 

 

Almost immediately after leaving the general store, we ran into burned forest, which extended for miles.

 

Much of this had to be recent fire, as trees hadn't started growing back or were less that a foot tall.  It's so sad to see.  Maybe between the volcano, the earthquakes and the forest fire, Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.

 

We finally got back into mountains with trees on them and found a nice picnic area for lunch.  The picnic areas are quite nice, all things considered.  Tables and outhouses, which are equipped with toilet paper and hand sanitizer.  About as good as you can get if you don't have flush toilets.  We had a nice peaceful lunch under the tall pines and then got back on the road.  We finally left Yellowstone and the scenery changed.  We were still in a mountainous region, but it was dry, with little green.  It looked more like what we are used to seeing in Arizona.

 

 

As we got close to Cody, we came upon the Buffalo Bill dam.

Steve couldn't get a decent picture of it.  It was built in such a difficult place that the American Society of Civil Engineers designated it a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

 

Then we headed for Southfork B&B, where we have terrific Internet access and I'm managing to upload pictures without it taking forever.  Yeah!

 

Sunday morning we got up for a home made breakfast at 8.  It was worth it.  Scrambled eggs, home made sausage, hash browns, home made biscuits and strawberries.  The owner is a former chef.  We ate too much.  All this eating out is going to show up on the scales when we get  home.

 

We then headed for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.  It's really about 5 museums in one.  One wing is, of course, devoted to Buffalo Bill.  But there's also a wing devoted to the Plains Indians, a Whitney Western Art Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum and the Draper Natural History Museum.  Huge place and very interesting.

 

Buffalo Bill was the rock star of his day.  He took his wild west show all over the world.  He even did a command performance for Queen Victoria.  But before his show business days, he hunted buffalo for the railroad and the army to feed the workers.  He also worked for the pony express, for a month or two during it's 18 month existence.  Any longer would have killed him he said, as it was a dangerous and exhausting job.  He then became a scout for the army.  His knowledge of the West was real.

A lot of the art was very good, but expected subject matter.  There must have been 10 different paintings of the lower falls of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.  But there were several unique pieces.  Steve and I each took a picture of this piece.  The plaque beside it said something along the lines of ".. a traditional subject with a modern twist."

 

I don't know if you can tell, but the modern twist is that it's painted like a paint by numbers painting, except for the shadow.

 

One unexpected offering was a raptor show.  The Center has a few birds that have been injured and cannot be released to the wild.  We saw a turkey vulture, a red tailed hawk, a horned owl, and my favorite, a golden eagle.

 

Tomorrow morning it's another home made breakfast (at 8 am) and then we are headed for Custer, South Dakota.  Steve made some planning errors and we have a 7 - 9 hour drive tomorrow.  We'll be tired after that long day and probably won't have much to report, so I may not blog again until Tuesday.