O, Yellowstone
Let’s begin with this: I ran out of superlatives somewhere between Mt. Rushmore and Meeteetse, Wyoming. They just don’t have enough sparkling adjectives in the English language to properly communicate the absolute wonder and sheer beauty that this country has to offer, and we’re less than a week in. I really can’t describe the awe and inspiration, the astonishment and adulation, the exultation, the reverence I have for the things I have seen so far on this trip, so excuse my repetition and take my word for it when I tell you that no combination of noun, verb, adjective, or otherwise could possibly do for you what getting out there and seeing it will do. Some things go beyond words. That’s where divinity lies. By my own estimation, at least.
And despite the large amount of photographs I’m about to share in this post, I feel the same about them as I do about words. They are flimsy, foolish representations of the thing which they attempt to depict. No matter how beautiful or glorious the lighting, how clever the angle, how perfect the composition, how brilliant the colors, it is all a laughable, completely vain attempt at bringing you the sublime power of the genuine article.
Was that a bit heavy-handed? Oh well, let’s move on.
Yellowstone National Park. This place is just gargantuan. From Thermopolis to the east entrance was about a two hour drive. From the east entrance to the Madison campground, somewhere around the middle of the park, was another two hour drive. Gar-f*cking-gantuan. 22 million square acres of pure natural American beauty. Of towering mountains, sprawling valleys, rolling rivers, shimmering lakes. Of strange and fascinating hot springs and geysers and mud volcanos. Of holy beasts: noble bison, venerable elk, mighty bear.
You wind around bend after bend of jaw-dropping scenery that will raise the hair on your arms and bring tears to your eyes. You get to a point where you think you’re finally overamazed, that it can no longer blow your mind, as if you’ve had one too many bites of the most delicious meal you’ve ever had and your stomach has finally turned. Then you come around the next bend.
I know I’m being intense about all of this, but it really was that intense to us. We drove over 250 miles around the park, perhaps more than that even, and never grew tired of it.
When we first pulled in, the ranger at the entrance booth handed us a guide. In it, we read that one man could spend a lifetime wandering this park and never see all that it has to offer. I scoffed. To this memory of my own arrogance, I now scoff.
This place turned me into a poet. I became Robert Frost and Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I saw ever-standing mountains and ever-flowing rivers and thought of Time. How these things have survived eternities before man and will continue on for eternities past.
I saw herds of faultless animals and rows of flawless trees and had the strange thought that they were all just different manifestations of the one same thing, of Heaven itself. I do not consider myself a religious man, but this place is where religion lies.
Enough of my inane hippie talk. Take a look at these images and concede to the fact that I’m not just some raving, flower-mouthed madman.
Thank Gab for most of these pics.
There were majestic creatures everywhere you looked. The only major ones we missed out on were bears (maybe not such a bad thing) and wolves, although I did hear a pack howling at the yellow moon one night before bed…
Then there was Mammoth Springs, or as we called it, Elk Town.
Gabby thought that last one was in poor taste.
Then finally you have the most legendary of all Yellowstone attractions…Old Faithful…
….kind of hard to get a good shot of her but this one’s sort of obligatory, right?
So there you have it. Yellowstone. The high point of the trip thus far. It was so transcendent that it proved this whole blogging venture completely pointless. Why should I bother attempting to synthesize truth through letter and image when I know it’s all a total charade? That in fact the very thing I seek to describe and depict actually defies both description and depiction? Well, I’m honestly not quite sure. Yet still, like the great stony mountain and the mighty rolling river, I carry on.
