Friday, June 22, 2007

Yellowstone (6/21/2007)

6/21/2007
Today we went down the west side of the top loop again passed those things that we had seen the first day. We started at this pull off.

This is called Roaring Mountain. I don't know why it wasn't roaring when we were there. We were there in the morning and have passed it on the way back to the campground three times now. It still has never roared and in the afternoon you can't even see the steam.

The next stop was the Norris Geyser Basin. This is just one small view of it, it is very large. The trail around it was two miles and we made it all.

This one they called the Green Dragon Spring. I think that is the one I saw 40 years ago and they called it the Green Dragon Calderon and the tunnel part of it was not nearly as large then.

This is Gibbon Falls. Fortunately it was right along the road at a pull off. After the walk around Norris Geyser Basin we were so tired we just went to a picnic area and had lunch. Then headed back to the campground. It still was forty miles back from there. As you go down in altitude you can feel the air getting warmer. We have an altimeter with us and we are usually around 7000 feet. So it is cooler up there than at the campground at 5300 feet. There are more geyser pictures in the Yellowstone Album. Almost forgot to tell you. On the way back I was getting so sleepy I pull over to a pull off to take a stretch and walk around a little to get the blood flowing again. As I got out of the car and was standing there I noticed some movement between the trees in the field beyond the trees. I got out the binoculars and at first thought what I was looking at were some Turkeys. The longer I looked the more I realized they were not turkeys. The video camera we have has a much longer telephoto lens than my still camera so Peggy took some videos of the birds we were looking at. The next day we showed the video to a ranger to find out what they were. He told use they were Sandhill Cranes. At first we confused them with the Wooping Crane that are almost extinct, so we thought we saw something rare until we looked them up on the Internet and found out they are the most common of all cranes. However, they are large birds and it was neat to see them since we had never seen Sandhill Cranes before.

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