Geyser Watch

Heading into the Park

4 June 2011

The week prior to my trip, I noticed the weather forecast showed the weekend to have promising weather. Photos of the thermal features works ever so much better with sun and warmth. Too cold and you get great fog photos, but poor feature photos. Too overcast and you have a hard time showing the depth and colors of the pools. So, I made my reservation at the Old Faithful Inn, hoping they could get me into one room for both nights.

Sylvan Pass has been a hard one for them to open and keep open this year. Due to avalanches, the East Gate was open from 8 PM to 10 AM – during the coldest hours when avalanches are less likely to happen.  It’s a three hour drive from Cody to Old Faithful if you don’t stop, but I planned to make a few stops along the way. One was to take a photo of the entrance sign – I’ll soon have this available for free downloading on my Field Journaling blog – before I changed things over on that blog, a bad photo of the entrance sign was one of the most popular, so I’ll be giving the full resolution version away for free for any who want it.

As I drove up Sylvan Pass, I took photos – simply holding the camera up and shooting. To get workable shots, I had to keep the shutter speed pretty high – minimum of 1/800 and a fairly high F-stop to keep things in focus. Over the years I’ve been getting better at this one handed, blind shooting, though the horizon lines still aren’t always straight.

I was curious to see if the lone tree on the Pass was still there after all the snow and avalanches. It was. It should have a name simply because of it’s luck/persistence.

And then I passed the first pullout at Sylvan Lake:

And then did a blind shooting photo over my shoulder – actually took a string of 4 or 5 shots – this one’s not bad:

At the pullout where you can see all the way down across Lake Yellowstone to the Tetons, I had to stand in the door of the pickup to get up high enough to see over the snowbank:

A few switchbacks later, I pulled up behind a car that had spotted a bear. My first grizzly of the season – a subadult munching away on grass and such.

I don’t have a great wildlife lens (which is one reason I don’t bother with spending a lot of time with animal shots), but I decided to drive up farther and turn around to get a shot of this one with better light, but decided to go for the more interesting (at least to me) overview shot.

As I made my way down to the lake, I came upon a stoplight just above Sedge Bay. Road damage. Had there not been any cars behind me, I probably would have found a spot to pull over and walk to investigate. At first, I assumed it was just a washout, but as I drove by, a bit of steam rose from behind the barrier, and steam rose from the ditch along the other side of the road. That was enough to at least wonder if it might be a new thermal feature breaking out at an inconvenient location for the road crews. Time will tell. (please excuse the bug spots on the windshield…)

More coming soon.  This post also appears on my other blog, Field Journaling.