We left Grand Teton National Park this morning and started our three-day trip back home. But we knew we had one more place to visit that was almost on the way: Craters of the Moon National Monument. It is in southern Idaho, the only national park/monument in Idaho. And it was lots of fun.
If you know us, you know that we like to visit things natural, especially those that involve geology. Craters of the Moon is an area that is full of a variety of volcanic features like lava flows, cinder cones, and spatter things. This area used to be on top of the very same hotspot that is now under Yellowstone.  As time (in millions of years) has gone on, the hotspot has stayed in the same place but the continental crust (our land mass) has moved across it so that the hotspot has bubbled to the surface across a large arc of the US.

Craters of the Moon is a very large 750,000 acre area. There is a visitor center and a park Loop Road that gives you a taste of the volcanic features and that allows you to get up close to them. It's interesting that so many varied volcanic features are right next to each other, and in some cases, right on top of each other. 
Since we didn't have a lot of time, we didn't take any long hikes but just took the short hikes that are easily accessible from the loop road. We got to see the different types of lava flows.  There are two basic ones with some variance, of course.  The park photos and videos illustrate some of the volcanic features by showing the same type of features active in Hawaii, and we have loved seeing them in the past, so we loved seeing them from the past here in Craters of the Moon.
Despite its name, the craters on the real moon are mostly made from meteor collisions rather than from volcanoes on the moon. But some of the astronauts trained here to learn how to recognize the features.
We would have stayed longer, like overnight, but the campground was closed as it is being rebuilt.  After our all-too-short tour of Craters of the Moon NM, we headed on down the road, stopping for the night in Twin Falls.  I assumed that Twin Falls must have twin falls but didn't realize that they were on the Snake River and deep in a canyon that was just north of the city. Our highway took us a bit downriver from the twin falls but I bet they are great.  The canyon we crossed over surely was but I was driving so no photos.

After the hike, we had lunch back at the overlook, then drove back up the park road to Mountain View turnout which has a great view of the mountain range.  In looking at the mountains, Jennifer noticed that there were some ski tracks in one of the very high snow fields on Grand Teton.  Could someone have hiked to the summit then skied down part way to the bottom?

Then we headed back to our camp site, and took the shore line hike just below our campground and behind the visitor center.  We followed the trail across a narrow spit of land which looked like it had been added so that you had access to the small island on the other side.  We hiked around the "island" or now the peninsula for about a 2 mile hike.  On this trail are great views across Jackson Lake to the mountains, including Grand Teton and Mount Moran.

That's it.  Two shorter hikes and some more great views of the mountains.  Today, there were no clouds in the sky as we started the day.  Later, there seemed to be some buildup of clouds, and at 6 PM, there is a light shower with the sun shining through the trees.
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After dinner, we went down to the Willow Flats Overlook to look for animals.  We didn't see a large elk herd like last night, but we did see two of them out grazing in the distant meadow.
And, of course, we stayed for the sunset and with the clouds we had around, the skies gave us a nice display of color for sunset.  It was really hard to pick a single photo so I'll include two of them.

Grand Teton National Park is a great place to see fabulous mountain peaks and lakes.  It doesn't have the range of short hikes we like to take these days but has lots of longer hikes, so it is not as great a place for a longer time.  We are here for two more days so we decided to take a leisurely time going around the driving tour.
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Today, the skies were much nicer.  Although there were some clouds at the peaks, we were able to occasionally see clear to the top of Grand Teton as well as other peaks.  

We followed the driving tour and saw the peaks and lakes from a variety of views including from the top of Signal Mountain.  We learned why it is called Signal Mountain as we drove past the cellphone and repeater tower. I know a lot more about repeaters given my new interest in ham radio. I set up my HandiTalkie with APRS so that our friends could track us as we drive. Of course, someone with an Internet connection must listen for our signal for it to appear on the aprs.fi map.

After Signal Mountain, we drove around Jenny Lake where you can see how steeply the mountains rise right from the shore of the lake. We had lunch there on the shore.  We won't get to see the lower Jenny Lake area as there is construction this year.  We have seen a lot of construction in the parks and although we don't care for the delays, we sure do appreciate that the parks are getting some needed attention.

We stopped at Menors Ferry where we saw a replica of the ferry that Menor built and operated across the Snake River at one of the few places where it flows in one channel.  We learned about some of the early settler life and about the history of the park.  It was quite the compromise that created this national park.  We have seen a lot of private dude ranches and other private dwellings and learned that this was part of the compromise. At least they are tastefully done and fit in with the character of the park.

Heading back north, we again saw the BOTD bison herd near Elk Ranch Flats but no elk. They must be here a lot since they didn't seem to have moved since yesterday.
After dinner and before the ranger talk, we went to Willow Flats as we had heard that this was a place to see wildlife.  We saw some elk including one large herd although it appeared too late for me to get a photo given the low light.  The two elk in this photo are really small even though I used my longest telephoto lens.  We waited for the sunset and were rewarded with the large elk herd as well as a nice sunset.
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The ranger talked about the geologic history and timeline that created the earth and the park.  It was interesting to us to learn that the Teton Range is made of very old rock that very recently was risen up into the mountains when the mountains went up and the valley went down along a fault line that is still active.

Our time in Yellowstone National Park was almost up.  Today, we are driving from Yellowstone to Grand Teton National Park, a leisurely 64 miles from our campsite in Yellowstone to our campsite in Grand Teton.
We stopped at West Thumb Geyser Basin as we departed from Yellowstone.  Although it is small compared to the other geyser basins in Yellowstone, it is really nice.  It is right on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, which became more understandable once we learned how the West Thumb bay on Yellowstone Lake was formed.  The lake itself was formed by glacier but West Thumb was a separate, much later caldera from a collapsed volcano, and is much deeper than the rest of the lake.  So you are where you might expect a hotspot to be, and you would be right. 

he boardwalk through the geyser basin takes you past the usual bubbling pools and geysers, although none of the geysers there are currently actively spouting.  There was some real beauty and some goodly bubbling, though.  As we walked down to the lake, we found two bubblers right on the shore.  They said that one of them was used by fishermen who would catch a fish and then drop it right into the pool so you could catch and cook it without taking it off your line.  That Fishing Cone wasn't active right now, but the adjacent Lakeshore Geyser was close enough to do the same thing and was vigorously bubbling.  There were some really pretty pools including the Black Pool. It is quite amazing how deep and clear some of the pools are.  And how blue.

But now it's time to depart Yellowstone and head south to Grand Teton National Park.  Since it was much less than a day drive, and we couldn't get into our new site until after noon, we took our time at West Thumb Geyser Basin and the Grant Village Visitor Center where they feature the Yellowstone fire of 1988.  We were last here in 1987. We learned that the fire was really fierce and burned about a third of the park.  They vigorously defended the park buildings including Yellowstone Inn which barely escaped but had to let the fire burn through the rest of the park.  They paid the price from the earlier philosophy of vigorously defending all fires when they shifted to the current philosophy of letting fires burn in areas except where people safety and park buildings are affected. But it sounded like they really couldn't do much in the face of such a raging fire and hurricane-like winds. The fire was finally put out in mid September when snow fell.  We remember in 1972 when snow fell on Labor Day and chased us from our tent to a small cabin at Yellowstone Lake Hotel.  We saw that those yellow cabins are still in use.

It was rainy off and on all day, and when we got to Grand Teton, we douldn't see much of the Teton Range. We got information about a driving tour so that seemed like the perfect thing to do.  We had time to do some of it and we saw some of the Teton Range. On our way back north after stopping in Jackson for groceries, we found a large bison herd in the Elk Ranch Flats area.

We decided to go to both the 7pm and 9pm ranger talks.  It is unusual to have two evening talks but they have them here.  The first was about bison mostly and that was fun to learn after seeing the herd early in the day. The second was about what you can see and do in the park and that was great, too, although we have no intention of trying to climb to the top of Grand Teton, which requires real rock climbing skills.

Between talks, we went out onto the deck at the back of the visitor center which overlooks Coulter Bay and Jackson Lake.  And there was a really great sunset which we should have expected given the inclement skies but I didn't bring my camera, so I went back to our camp site to get my camera. The color was mostly gone by the time I returned but we have two more chances to see a great sunset.
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We are staying in the Coulter Bay Village RV Park.  Like Yellowstone, it is a full hookup RV park.  Unlike Yellowstone, it is like a campground.  There is lots of space between sites, and it has a much more pleasant feel than did the RV park at Yellowstone.  While I would recommend Fishing Bridge RV Park in Yellowstone only if you really wanted hookups, I would recommend Coulter Bay RV to anyone. They don't allow fires but that is typical of RV parks. Showers here are extra cost while they were included in Fishing Bridge but we generally prefer to take showers in our trailer.  It is, after all, why we bought this new trailer. We even have Verizon coverage in the campground. The national parks have pretty good cellular coverage, surprisingly so given what I read on their web sites before our travel.  There is Wifi at the general store and this is also typical today that there is some Wifi at stores, restaurants, and visitor centers, although the vendor at Yellowstone charged for Wifi at their restaurants. The store at Coulter Bay is surprisingly well equipped especially with groceries and is reasonably (not tourist) priced.

At Black Sand Basin, we saw Cliff Geyser which exuberantly and frequently erupted.  I think we saw three sets of eruptions in the time we walked around this relatively small area.  The Opalescent Pool was a great example of a hot pool showing great variations of colors which they told us was due to the thermopiles, or heat loving organisms, that live in the water.  It's amazing to me that anything could live in this hot water, but truth is stranger than fiction.

Next, we visited Biscuit Basin where we saw Sapphire Pool.  This pool was a beautiful shade of, uh, sapphire, I suppose.  Remember, guys can only tell 16 colors. The water was amazingly clear as we could see down into the pool.  The photo doesn't do this pool justice. Then we saw Jewel Geyser which provided quite a show for us as it, uh, squirted really hot water out. We went on to see the other great "water features" at this basin but I'll only show you two of them. And it's really hard to show photos of things that stink but, trust, me, there was lots of rotten egg smell around.

We stopped by Great Fountain Geyser on Firehole Lake Drive next, but we learned that it wasn't expected to erupt until somewhere between 9:30 and 11:30 tonight.  I guess it puts on a great show but how can you see it in the dark?

After lunch along the Firehole River, we drove along Firehole Canyon Drive where we saw 400 foot cliffs that were pretty much straight up, and the Firehole Falls. Then we drove on north toward Norris and saw the Gibbon Falls, shown here.  According to the park service, these falls occur at the edge of the caldera.  This is THE caldera that defines the park as it is basically a collapsed volcano from about 640,000 years ago and the caldera defines the edge of what was near the top of the now-gone volcano.

We drove on to the Norris Geyser Basin and saw more things that bubble, stink, and squirt. After a while, how many of them can you take in?  So we walked the paths and saw some more but I think you get the picture.
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We stopped on our way back to camp to get some necessary supplies, including Gatorade (the trails were pretty hot and we were in need of more liquids) and beer (a good chaser for Gatorade). We haven't drunk much beer lately but are really enjoying one at the end of a long day of hiking in hot, high country.  We haven't been below 6000 feet since we arrived here, and are currently at 7700 feet elevation. and we seem to dry out faster at higher elevations.  So we headed back to camp, and in the Hayden Valley, we saw our daily BOTD (bison of the day).  He wasn't holding up traffic by being in the traffic as we had seen for the last several days, but he held up traffic anyway as he was just off the side of the road, up the hill a bit.  And everyone had to stop and look and take pictures, including us.  But so far, we haven't seen a bear or moose in Yellowstone.

I forgot to mention yesterday that we were slightly delayed while coming in to Yellowstone.  But now I can mention it again with a better photo of the bison that slowed us down.  Fortunately for us, he was on the other side of the highway.  Imagine the backup behind him in the other lane of traffic.  Shortly after I took this photo and drove slowly past the bison, the person in the car behind me left a few car lengths between him and me, and the bison took advantage of this to change lanes - into oncoming traffic.  That slowed down both lanes.
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Later in the day, as we were returning to our campsite, we encountered another bison strolling along the side of the road.  Then as we were driving in the same vicinity as the first bison of the day (BOTD), Jennifer saw another out in a meadow.  That didn't slow traffic too much except for getting around all the cars who wanted to see better for themselves.

When I was here about 50 years ago or so, bears were everywhere along the road as people photographed them and fed them.  Bear jams were everywhere.  The park service realized this was not good for the bears or the people and started prohibiting feeding the bears, and the result is that we haven't seen a bear in Yellowstone yet.

We drove back to Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone after viewing BOTD and the light was great.  We saw both the upper and lower falls as well as the canyon, and it is truly grand.  We could have taken a trail to the bottom of the lower falls but we decided that the 600 steps down might put a crimp in the rest of our day, so we satisfied ourselves with the views from the handy-to-the-road viewpoints.  There are a south rim drive and a north rim drive, and each have viewpoints of the upper and lower falls and each have trails to the brink (top) of the falls as well as to the bottom of the falls.  If we were young enough to take all those steps down and back up, this could be our whole day.

But more of the park awaited us.  We drove north across Dunraven Pass at 8859 feet then down through Tower Roosevelt (Tower Falls and Roosevelt Lodge) and west to Mammoth Hot Springs.  We had lunch at the picnic area and enjoyed watching the elk browsing on the front lawns of the employee housing.  One bull elk seemed to enjoy eating his lunch lying down, and another elk just couldn't seem to find the doorbell on the house, so she laid down in the shade of the house.
We walked around the lower terraces of the Mammoth Hot Springs, and then were tired enough to limit ourselves to the drive through the upper terraces.  The photographs of the terraces don't really do them justice.  You can see the spring water coming out across the terraces and running down the sides across the width of these formations, and it was great to see.

We started back toward our campsite and saw the columnar basalt formations along Sheepeater Cliff.  We tried to also see the Obsidian Cliff but the turnoffs were blocked by road construction.
The roads in Yellowstone are in decent shape.  Many are quite new and good, and some of the older ones like the one that held us up today are being rebuilt to be much nicer than before.  It is nice to see the money being spent in the national parks to improve the infrastructure.  I am sure more could be done and I hope it is as these are such important resources for us to enjoy.
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Everywhere we drove so far, we saw evidence of fire damage.  Yellowstone was devastated in 1988 by wild fire, a year after we were last here, and it is coming back but the progress is slow given the high altitude and short growing season here.  Our camp is at 7740 feet so lots of the park is really high.  If you have a lake like the one we are on the shore of, Lake Yellowstone, feeding the Yellowstone River that flows through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone down 100 and 300 feet falls, and then down the canyon, well, you know there must be a lot of altitude involved.  The park is rather dry here on the east side and really all over.

We arrived last night in Yellowstone NP after a very long day of driving.  We drove 487 miles in 10 hours to go from Glacier NP to Yellowstone NP.  We try to drive no more than 400 miles in a day, but we didn't want to spend an extra day traveling for 87 miles, so we made it through the long day.
 We decided to start by going directly to Old Faithful and see Old Faithful, of course, and some of the other geothermal activity in the area.  There is a lot of it. In addition to Old Faithful, which we saw erupt twice, we walked through Geyser Hill and its many features, and after a bit of a walk, we walked back to the village area to have lunch and go back to camp.  

Laundry awaited us, and if you don't have clean clothes to wear, the day can be miserable. We are learning that we need to program in laundry times.  We were able to do it in Idaho after we arrived at our overnight stop as we didn't have too long a travel day, but we weren't so fortunate this time.  The park can get pretty crowded during mid-day, so we saw some of the park, then did laundry, then saw some more when we hoped the crowds would be less.  
It worked, mostly.  
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We went to see the Mud Volcano area and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone after finishing our laundry, but we realized that the sun was too low to get a good view of the falls, and good photos. We scoped the area and will return tomorrow morning to see it when the light will be much better.  Still, this Grand Canyon is grand and we look forward to seeing it in better light tomorrow.

Actually, the layer of rocks that are at the top of the lake are red, hence the name of the falls and of the lake.

Along the way to the falls, we saw a moose and her calf, quietly munching in an open area. Fortunately, they weren't scared of us, although the mother moose kept a close watch on us, especially when my camera made noise.

There are two places to stay in rooms here, and one campground right across the street from the Manycurrent Motor Lodge, which looked nice but not nearly as nice as Many Glacier Hotel.  It is a great Swiss style hotel on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake.  The hotel is undergoing renovation this year, so it looked like only about half of the rooms were available.  Still, it looked like a great place to stay.

We saw two hotels that looked great: The Many Glacier Hotel and the Lake McDonald Lodge, also a Swiss style hotel on Lake McDonald, way on the west side of the park.  When Glacier National Park was being developed, even before it became a national park, there were a series of Swiss chalet style lodgings built about a day's journey by horseback apart.  It must have been a fabulous time to ride between the chalets.  About half of them still exist, although you must hike to the chalets that are not on a road.  The hotels were two of the larger places to stay.  You would take a railroad to a station near the park, then take a stage and/or boat and/or horse to get to your lodgings.  Then the auto happened, and opened the park to many more people than could afford to travel by rail to these great locations, many of which became national parks.

After hiking and touring at Many Glacier, we decided to spend our last afternoon here revisiting the Going to the Sun Road, so we drove from St Mary to Logan Pass and more, stopping at some of the places we couldn't get parking at before as we went late in the afternoon.  Since we were not planning to hike, the late time worked great.  We made it as far as The Loop where we learned that the Going to the Sun Road was competitive between an experienced Civil Engineer and a young Landscape Architect.  The Landscape Architect won, and the road was built so that it could be available for a longer season and would be much more pleasant to drive, as it was not as steep and had far fewer switchbacks.  It is an experience driving along the Garden Wall with a rugged rock wall on your one side, and the minimal guard rain on the other.  Fortunately, they have rebuilt the road over the last few years so we had a smooth surface to drive.  The road into Many Glacier needs the same rebuilding.  I hope it will get that soon.

We started the day driving up the east side of the park on the Going to the Sun Highway.  The east side is very different from the west side.  You immediately see the peaks and snow rather than driving through miles of forest.  You are right away along St Mary Lake which is just as nice as Lake McDonald on the west side. We decided to drive all the way up to Logan Pass even though we were late enough we knew we would have difficulty finding a parking spot there, so we didn't try.  We went right by it to Oberlin Bend and had to wait a bit for a parking spot.  We learned that most of the spots there were taken by people who were walking up the road to Logan Pass since that lot was full, so we were among the few enjoying the view from there.

 We drove down the east side to Lunch Creek and found a parking spot quickly.  At Lunch Creek, you can see the creek surrounded by lots of wildflowers.
Jennifer realized that the tall plants we saw yesterday along Two Medicine trails were more mature Bear Grass that had lost their flowers. We saw Bear Grass at higher elevations and looked at the base and there were the same leaves and bottom of the stalk. Another plant identified.
Global Warming has been hard on Glacier National Park.  While there were hundreds of glaciers a hundred years ago, today there are 25.  Jackson Glacier is one that is left and we enjoyed seeing it.  Another parking spot found.

We had lunch at the picnic grounds near Rising Sun. It is a short distance from the shore of St Mary Lake so we walked down to see the families wading in the water.  It seemed a little cold to me but the kids didn't seem to mind.
We had wanted to see St Mary Falls but we had a terrible time finding a parking spot.  We eventually gave up and went to the St Mary Visitor Center thinking we might try to take a shuttle bus back to see the Falls but they don't run frequently on the east side and we decided since it was later, we would try again to find a parking spot.  This time, we did at St Mary Falls Trailhead.  We walked down the trail toward the falls.  This is the area that burned last year.  We walked through what was a lovely evergreen forest, I am sure, but we saw only burned tree trunks.  The forest is reclaiming itself, though, and we saw many wild flowers, especially Fire Weed, of course.
One nice factor to the fire was that we could easily see the mountains through the, uh, trees.
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St Mary Falls were lovely and we enjoyed the hike down and back even though we walked through the burned area so, of course, it was hot as there was no shade.  Today, the temperature was just over 70 degrees, so we did fine.
After the hike, we decided to go back to camp where cold beers awaited us.  The refrigerator has been working great this year, always a concern with the gas absorption camping type refrigerator.  We have learned that if we can keep the refrigerator side of the trailer out of the afternoon sun, it does fine.
I am typing this back in camp and hoping that the WiFi stays strong enough for me to send this post to the web site.  Last night, it was.