Soup?! Midway geyser

This is a very large pool of water - maybe the size of a small pond (a hundred yards across). What is cool is that the whole thing is simply boiling non-stop. On the far side is a large stream and water fall from the run off which is pouring boiling water into the river. You can't see it in this low-res scanned image, but the water is churning just like when you boil water in a pot on the stove. It does appear on the negative (maybe when I get my good Nikon scanner hooked up again I'll scan this frame again).

Devils Tower

The folklore is that some boys were out for a walk when a giant bear chased them. They ran up on top of a large rock and the bear clawed at them. Hence the huge "claw" marks all around the sides - and that is a pretty good description of what the feature looks like. I saw a painting of this story in the visitors area but couldn't find an explaination of the story - so I had to use my friend wikipedia. (read the folklore section).

Crazy Horse Bus tour

I think it was worth the extra money. This is how close you can get (I was using a 300mm lens)

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was never photographed - so nobody really knows what he looks like. This was a really neat memorial carving and definetly worth the stop. They have a nice visitors center with a small movie theater that plays a mini-documentary detailing the history of this monument. We paid extra to take the bus tour up the side of the mountain. It doesn't go all the way to the top - but it does get you close enough to take better pictures. They only allow visitors at the top once a year (see their web site for more info).

The one statistic that I found amazing is that all four of the heads on Mt Rushmore fit into the single head of Crazy Horse. This thing is huge. They had their largest ever blast the day that I was there. I knew about it before hand but we couldn't make it fit into our schedule.

This was the day we drove to Devils Tower in Wyoming and then came back around to Crazy Horse in the afternoon (with a second and longer stop at Mt Rushmore in between). We ate dinner at the Crazy Horse Memorial center.

I'll also recommend the Holiday Inn Express in Custer, SD (a short distance from Crazy Horse Memorial). It rivals many of the Hilton's and Marriot's I've stay at.

Grand Tetons

The Grand Teton National Park is not part of Yellowstone, rather it is its own park. The road between the two is called the "John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway." Mr. Rockefeller didn't want all of us paying twice to get into these two parks, so be bought the land between the two and gave it over to us. I learned a bit more about our national park system and the visionaries who created it (Rockefeller being one of them).

Of course the next day was clear and sunny. What is amazing is that the road is at an elevation of about 7000 ft above sea level... and those darn peaks just keep going up. I'm on a flat road that is higher than the top of Mt Washington!

Not so faithful

I didn't realize this before I arrived, but old faithful stopped being faithful back in the 1950's. Apparently it is still "almost every 90 minutes" plus or minus 10. It depends upon the length of the previous eruption. Eruptions less than 2 minutes will cause the next one to be 65 minutes away, and eruptions more than 2 minutes will cause the next to occur within 90 minutes (makes sense, takes longer to recover).

Anyhow - all of these geysers are really cool to watch. There is an extensive boardwalk setup that allows you can get up close and personal with some of them. It's neat to watch the water recede and the hole to become empty, then it slowly rises again and begins to peculate violently until finally it shoots up into the air. Some of them don't shoot into the air, they just keep sloshing water up over the sides like an ocean wave pounding a rocky shore.

Badlands South Dakota

They get their name from the french for "it sucks to hike across this area." (les mauvaises terres a traversers). Okay - it really translates to "bad lands to travel across." It was a really cool stop. There is so much to see - we only had time to drive through the ring road and make several stops along the road. However there is so much more to see.
In some areas the colors of each layer are very different (yellows, reds, gray). In one area the hills looks like little piles of salt that were poured from above. The green in the photos are plants that are attempting to grow.

Hunter

I caught this guy hunting in the river just beside me. He was almost directly overhead.

Mad dog

Prairie dog at Devils Tower. As you drive into the Devils Tower park there is a prairie dog colony along the road. You can actually see their mounds in the satellite photos from Google Maps.

Follow the red road

I took this photo from Rt-14 in Wyoming at this turn-out. (looking west). As you can see the pavement is red. I saw this throughout Wyoming - even parts of I-90 used this material. I found it interesting how the local rock changes the color of the asphalt - I think I've only ever seen black asphalt.