4 Parks

I visited 4 National Parks while on my trip through the Western USA. Here's my review:

1. Yosemite National Park, California

Half Dome at Dusk

I think we've all seen pics of the main Yosemite Valley, including Half Dome, el capitan, the Sentinels, Glacier Point, etc. etc. But I'm gonna have to say that this was the highlight of the park for me. And it was awesome, especially if you are into granite walls. I had a terrific swim in the Merced River, under the Half Dome. I was very, very small on that landscape.

watch the road!! that's a couple thousand foot drop!

historically crazy ladies

But if you like anything else about the landscape, other than granite, this is not the place for you. There is not much forest here. Why? Because there's no soil. Because it's all granite. In the Yosemite Valley, it's vertical, but elsewhere, it's sorta rolling. Granite. Grey granite. A bit like a skateboard park. But granite, not concrete. Weird. Not sure really why this needed setting aside as a park, as you could make enough granite coutertops for the entire world, and Yosemite would be kinda the same. Huh.

Did I mention it's all the same colour? I drove across the park, and got excited that the colour was finally changing. WHOO-WOOO! NOT GREY! That was the park boundary. :-P

2. Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho (ok, technically, not a park)

bigger rocks and lichen on a field of pumice

This is sort of off the beaten track in Idaho, but hey, it sounded cool so I checked it out. And I really liked it! It is an area that a geologist in the 1920s or 30s said, "If you went to the surface of the moon, it would look like this." Hmmmm, maybe.

imagine that the lava was soft enough to be gently pushed into waves

It is a little outcrop of the Yellowstone formation, and there are lots of mini-volcanoes, calderas, cinder cones and lava formations. It is barren. But I happen to really, really dig lava. It blows my mind that liquid rock was ejected out of the earth, started to harden as it flew through the air, so landed in a semi-soft blob. And in other places, it slowed and hardened from the outisde, leaving hollow tubes of rock. And that sometimes the rock looks like bread dough or rope. And other times the cooled rock floated on top of liquid rock, and occasionally even really big pieces of rock floated on liquid rock. Seriously, liquid rock!!! That's so groovy.

a blob of rock that cooled as it flew through the air!

a-aa or pohoihoi? I can never remember. Rock that looks like bread dough.
a tube that formed when the outer lava cooled but the inner lava was still flowing

3. Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming


This park is heaven on earth. My mountain friends, RUN, don't walk, to this place immediately! Well, I guess you could fly or drive, actually, but do it fast.

There is a flat, open, grassy plain with buffalo and elk, some sparkling lakes, and then there are giant, jagged mountains that verily shriek,

"ACK! LOOK AT US!!! WE
ARE SO BEEEYOOOTEEEFULLLL WE
WILL POKE YOUR EYE OUT WITH
OUR LOVELINESS
AND SHARP
ROCKINESSSSS!!!!"

And of course there is Jackson Hole just outside the boundary. Hello, Powder Hounds, we're talking serious dumps here!! I would have thought it might be all snooty like Whistler, but hell no, Jackson Hole was fabulous! Every single person I met in Wyoming (who were mainly in Jackson) was absolutely friendly and hysterically funny. And the Snake River brewpub has delicious brews, fyi.

The park has 250 miles of day-hiking trails. I went into the Ranger Centre (ooops, it's America, I mean Ranger Center) and asked about a trail of, say, 10 to 13 miles. So she recommended a loop at 19 miles, with elev change of 4500 feet, with top elevation of over 10 000. YIKES! I wound up going in and back out, for a total of 15 miles and elev change of 2500 ft. But this hike was AMAZING!! Jagged rocks, narrow valley, raging streams and more species of woldflowers than I've ever seen on a single hike. I'd estimate probably 30 species, and what was particularly cool was they were flowers I've seen many times, but slightly different. eg. white columbines; teeny lupines; different saxifrages. This was a fantastic hike (although I will admit that Blue Lakes between Smithers and Hazelton was both more gorgeous and more easy....but I quibble on this)

I didn't have time for a river float, and you could do that for whitewater or for for scenery.


I will absolutely come back to this part of the world, both for summer hiking and winter skiing. Absolutely. Gar-on-teed.

marmot saying, "Y'all come back to Wyoming soon, ya hear?!"

another smiling face in Wyoming

4. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming and Montana and Idaho

Right on time - Old Faithful only made me wait 3 minutes!

This park is all about geysers. Did you know that over half the world's geysers are in Yellowstone? (most of the rest are in Iceland.) The geysers are kind of cool, in and of themselves, the colours of the tufa are awesome, and it's amazing that Old faithful can be accurately predicted to erupt/explode/shoot off. colours of chromatic pools: blue hot to red cool


I only drove through part of the park, and I will say it was not that beautiful, although of course I prefer to be poked in the eye by mountains. But I read an article in National Geographic, which explained that Yellowstone is on a big hot blob of magma which is welling and swelling and squishing and squashing. (please excuse the high tech lingo!) In fact, parts of Yellowstone have increased in elevation by several inches a year. It's as if a balloon is being squeezed at one end, so deforming at the other. But we're talking about molten rock here, pushing up the surface of the earth. OK, that is really, really cool. And this squishing hot liquid rock is heating water that has trickled down from the surface. The water is heating to super-steaming, the steam is stuck under the cooler water above and in cracks, so finally shoots out as a geyser of hot water. Seriously, that is really cool. Earth science - you gotta dig it. ;)