One day in the life of Andy and Jen Stateside

In a deviation from our normal blog format, we bring you here a little insight into our daily life whilst on our coast-to-coast trip across the USA. While no two days are the same, the day we chose was as “normal” as our days get!

The day begins when we wake in the back of Grayham (our Chevy Astro van) at 7:45am. It's chilly outside of the covers – the temperature dipped to 4 celsius overnight. However, as the sun rises over the steep valley walls of Mammoth Hot Springs campground in Yellowstone National Park, the van becomes pleasantly warm.

After dressing and folding away the bed, it's time for a breakfast of cereal and coffee. As we have no refrigerator, we use dried milk, which actually tastes surprisingly good! We heat the water for the coffee on our propane stove.











From our campsite we must climb the walls of the valley to get to the site of today's activities – a mile away at the hydrothermal terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. Unfortunately for us, a large male elk and his harem are occupying the footpath to the top of the valley wall. We have been told that the elk are pretty aggressive at this time (it's the rutting season), so we have to make a detour around them.








Despite the detour, we make it to the springs just in time for our 9am ranger-led tour. Ranger Chris leads us around the 2 miles of board-walks explaining the geology of the hot springs.















The hot springs here in Mammoth permeate the sedimentary rock limestone, whereas in most other places in Yellowstone, the springs permeate igneous rocks, which are formed through volcanic activity. As a result, the spring water here carries high levels of dissolved limestone (the acidity of the water means that the limestone dissolves readily). The springs here also have a low flow rate, which means that as it pours out of the ground, pools are formed. The dissolved limestone carried by the water is deposited around the edge of the pools, forming white stone boundary walls. The deposited limestone is known as tavertine. As water overflows from the walled pool, additional tavertine-walled pools form terraces below.






Unlike most geologic processes I've heard about, visible changes in the hot spring terraces are observable over time-scales of just years or even months. Indeed Ranger Chris told us that 4mm of tavertine can be deposited at the edge of a pool in a day! Trees get cooked alive by hot springs and then swallowed up by tavertine, all in a matter of months.








The springs can form rapidly, but equally they can dry up overnight. If you came to Yellowstone before 2004, one of the major attractions would have been Minerva hot spring, here at Mammoth. It was the picture-perfect terraced spring on the front of many a Yellowstone brochure. But after one of the several hundred small earthquakes that Yellowstone has per year, Minerva just dried up! But even as Minerva's terraces begin crumble, new springs are building new high-rises – such is the dynamism of Mammoth.









After the tour, we head back to camp, collecting firewood for the evening on the way. Downed wood is scarce here, so we have to make do with some pretty scraggly bits!


















Lunch today is instant noodles. Yum yum.




















For the afternoon we head out in the van to Gardiner, a small town 5 miles north of the campground, just outside of Yellowstone. Here we take the opportunity to go to a supermarket and stock up on fresh food – we haven't been near a town for 6 days.
















On the way back to base, we stop to take a dip in the Gardiner River. The rivers in this area are mighty chilly, as they are fed by melt-water from the mountains, but we have heard that if you walk along the bank awhile, there comes a point where a hot spring feeds into the river. Indeed, we find the spot and it makes for a pleasant dip.














Much refreshed from our dip, we take a drive to view some of the more distant hot spring formations in the area, before returning to camp for dinner. Andy stokes up a fire, while Jen makes a salad.


















When the heat is right we grill the goodies we acquired in Gardiner – two Buffalo sirloin steaks (we're not usually quite this extravagant, but they were reduced for quick sale!!).













Having toasted some marshmallows for dessert, we head to the amphitheatre in the campground for the nightly ranger talk. Tonight's talk is about the 1990s reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, following their eradication in the 1930s.














After the talk, all that remained to do was sleep...

The Wilds of Wyoming

With fresh oil and a quick health-check, Grayham was ready to take us into the Bighorn Mountains of north-central Wyoming. We quit stopping to gawk at the breathtaking views after about the sixth scenic overlook off the road in as many miles – suffice it to say the climb to 10,000 ft above sea-level was quite spectacular. There was even snow on the ground in places around our campsite!

On our first night in the mountains, an uninvited guest caused a bit of a stir in the campsite. An enormous moose wandered across our neighbours' pitch, sending everyone rushing to their tents for their cameras, and then as he got too close for comfort, rushing to their cars for safety!

Over two days we hiked to two impressive waterfalls and a native American historic site known as the Medicine Wheel. The Medicine Wheel is rather like the various stone circles one finds dotted around England – it's basically a bunch of cryptically arranged rocks on some inaccessible hillside that is much hyped by guide-books and hardcore hikers, but is actually pretty darn dull when you get out there (though no-one ever says it out loud)!

We mustn't grumble though - we've been wowed by majestic mountain vistas at every turn and the alpine meadows are currently in riotous bloom. The short snow-free season means that the flowering shrubs all don their finery at once, around now.

The dramatic descent from the snowcapped Bighorn Mountains led us into the stifling heat of the Bighorn Canyon – all within a 30 mile drive! After one night cooking in the Canyon we moved on to Cody (named for its founder William “Buffalo Bill” Cody), where we stocked up on fodder for our forthcoming trip into in nearby Yellowstone (god bless Walmart!).

Our entrance to Yellowstone through the Shoshone National Forest was dramatised by a forest fire burning off to the right-hand side of the road. Once we were in Yellowstone, we spent 9 days touring the 85 mile loop road around the park. Although Yellowstone has some great mountainous terrain (the photo shows us atop one of the most scenic peaks), the two main attractions of the park are the hydrothermal features and the wildlife, the sheer abundance of both of which took us by surprise.

Much of Yellowstone sits over the Caldera of a still active super-volcano that last erupted 650,000 years ago, covering a fair chunk of North America in ash and lava. Today, where cracks permeate the thin crust of the caldera, water seeps in and is heated by the underlying magma. The hot water and steam produced are then ejected above ground through one of the 10,000 hydrothermal features in the park. The form of these ejections varies depending on the pressure and temperature of the water. From the countless hydrothermal features we saw, it seems that every imaginable combination of size, colour, viscosity and violence is possible. But there's one thing that all the hydrothermal features have in common...

be it a colourful hot spring...

or a steaming fumarole (like this one that had opened up in the car park!)...

or a burping, bubbling mudpot...

or a majestic geyser, like Old Faithful himself...

THEY ALL STINK!!

Yes, the stench of hard-boiled eggs pervades Yellowstone, which is probably just as well, as none of the campsites have showers!

As for the wildlife, it seems there's a critter at every turn. In and around Yellowstone we've seen moose, elk, deer and bison by the truck-load as well as the odd coyote, muskrat, marmot, black bear and even a grizzly bear. Wolves are the only large mammal that has evaded us thus far. And for any other biology geeks out there, Thermus aquaticus (of Taq fame) was first discovered here, among the thermophiles in the hot springs of Yellowstone (for non-geeks, this bacterium helped make modern DNA experimentation possible).

Our next stop is Grand Teton National Park, which adjoins Yellowstone to the south. Hopefully it won't be so long until our next post, as there seems to be more WiFi potential here!

Badlands and motor-cowboys

Interstate 90 took us the 350 miles from Pipestone, Minnesota across southern South Dakota to the Badlands National Park. Our only noteworthy stop was at one of those impressive, yet mystifying, all-American temples to the bizarre.

This particular temple is known as "The Corn Palace", located in the small agricultural town of Mitchell. It is simply a building that contains an auditorium (an apparently rarely used auditorium, being crammed full of Corn Palace souvenir tourist tat). The real "draw" of the place is that the exterior and interior walls are decorated annually with murals entirely made of corn. 100 varieties of corn are alledgedly used. The cost of the murals? $125,000 annually. The result? Pointless.

Having given the Corn Palace the full 20 minutes of our time that it deserved, it was on to the Badlands. They call it "the wall" - one hundred miles of tortuous peaks and bone-dry canyons extending across the South Dakota prairie. The Badlands wall forms a natural barrier between the upper and lower prairies, its name deriving from the first French explorers' description of the place: "les mauvaises terres a traverser" - bad lands to cross.

The elaborate patterns of erosion that form the landscape are caused by occasional torrential showers in an otherwise very dry climate (the Badlands are in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains). The sudden gushing waters carry vast quantities of sediment away to the White River (it's white due to the sediment), leaving deep gullies carved through the soft sedimentary rock.

We spent two nights in the Badlands, but with temperatures around 100F (and no showers!), we soon moved on to the relative coolth of the nearby Black Hills. The geek (and tightwad) in Jen had deeply enjoyed the (free) ranger-led activities, which focussed on the geology, ecology and astronomy of the Badlands, but we couldn't stand the heat, so we had to get out of the kitchen!

Our visit to the Black Hills of western South Dakota held more in store for us than just the usual hiking and swimming. We had (semi-intentionally) timed our visit to coincide with the world famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Week! It certainly did not disappoint. Around 400,000 bikes cram into the hills annually for bands, beer and scenery (oh, and this being the USA, a hell of a lot of merchandise). During this week, anywhere within 200 miles of Sturgis swarms with throngs of hairy biker males with their scantily clad (though frequently lardy) biker laydeez, on the back of their roaring Harley-Davidsons.

Of course, without our bikes, we were not exactly at one with the crowd but we nonetheless enjoyed the atmosphere, meeting biker-dudes and checking out the machinery. The photo shows our friendly campsite neighbours, Hal and Mike with their Victory motorbikes, in Custer State Park (near Mount Rushmore).

The Sturgis circus extended to all the other small towns in the vicinity. Historic wild-west towns like Deadwood (home of calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok) took on a fresh wildness as the choppers and cruisers choked the town centre and the bikers spilled out of the saloons onto the streets.

After a few days in the Black Hills, we decided to leave the bison, the oh-so-cute pairie dawgs, and of coures the bikers to move west again, crossing into Wyoming. We stopped yesterday for a hike around Devil's Tower, an immense rod of igneous rock protruding startlingly out of the rolling prairie. Oh, and course the bikers were there too!

Grayham is currently getting an oil change, following his 3000th mile with us on the road (the photo shows him admiring Mount Rushmore - top left). For the information of the Grayo-sceptics, he has not yet missed a beat thus far!

Next stop - Yellowstone - watch out Yogi!