Day 29

Yellowstone is designed differently than the other national parks I’ve visited. Instead of featuring one main road that guides visitors on a distinct path, it features two loops connected in a figure eight—the Grand Loop. This encourages more freeform exploration. As such, I will present today’s thoughts, learnings, and observations in no particular order. Feel free to bounce around.

• Yellowstone sits mostly atop an active volcano, which is why it is home to geysers and other geothermal features. Some scientists believe the next eruption won’t take place for at least another ten thousand years; others think it’s overdue.
• The predominant species of tree in the park is the lodgepole pine. These trees freak me out. They look like someone glued an unwanted Christmas tree on top of a telephone pole.

• Several visitors commented on my license plate. They had no idea where New Hampshire was. However, they did love the motto: Live Free or Die. 
• Speaking of license plates, the most boring ones are Ohio plates, and the funniest ones I’ve seen are from Idaho. Their byline? Famous Potatoes.
• I spent most of my time today among the geothermal regions of the park. I stopped at Artists Paintpots (no apostrophe, we’ll get to that later) and was rewarded with benching mudpots that spat hot clay at me. The area was awash in red, brown, blue and green, depending on the dominant chemical makeup of each region.

• The smell of sulfur, which rises up from magma vents, has dozens of different variations. Not one is pleasant.
• Remember how Devils Tower is missing an apostrophe? I have discovered why: I do not believe that commas or apostrophes exist in Wyoming. The good people at Yellowstone have posted interpretive signs with so many run-on sentences that I had to suppress the urge to buy a Sharpie and set out on grammatical vigilantism.
• The most wondrous thing I saw was at the rest stop, where a crusty old dude with a Santa Claus beard shoveled armload after armload of Bang cans into the recycling bin. He must have had fifty of them. I pray that he is still alive.
• There is a small community of geyser-watchers throughout Yellowstone. Every day, they log the times and durations of each eruption, communicate via walkie-talkie, and make predictions for even the most unreliable geysers. Some are retirees, while others work remotely from the basin. I sat and talked for over half an hour with a woman observing Vixen Geyser, which is officially considered to have no clear eruption cycle. She has watched the geyser since 2015, and claimed to have figured out its cycle. Sure enough, it erupted within five minutes of her predicted time. I am now listed as an observer at geysertimes.com, which will take a place of pride on my resume.

• I left the Norris Geyser Basin around 2:10 to explore Mammoth Springs. I drove back past Norris about two hours later, and was greeted by a three-hundred-foot spew of steam lingering in the air. I had missed an eruption of Steamboat Geyser, the largest geyser in the world. Better luck next time.

Tomorrow, I’m heading to the last two major attractions in the park. What are they? FIND OUT NEXT TIME!