So, I inadvertently spent the Fourth of July in Canada (bad trip planning – but I did sing the Star Spangled Banner on my way to Customs and Immigration, and paid homage to the red poppies I keep in the car), and on the way back to Yellowstone the next day, I drove Going-to-the-Sun Road through Glacier National Park.  I understand now why it is consistently rated among the top 10 best drives in the country, and here are the pictures to prove its awesomeness.

Wild Goose Island

Bluest water in Montana

Jackson Glacier in the background

Random tourists included for scale

Snowmelt waterfalls

More snowmelt waterfalls

A mountain goat and her kid, traversing the ranger station parking lot.

Idiot tourist getting way too close to the mountain goat. Surprise!

Rain is on its way ...

A new way to leave your mark. In snowpack.

Glacier National Park is an amazing place, and I hope that one day I have the chance to go back and spend some quality time, rather than just driving through (still more than worth it!).  And, before I sign out, one of my favorite wildlife photos from this summer.  Monsieur Elk says, “Huh?”

That's quite a rack you've got there.

Disclaimer: We did actually do a lot of work in the map room this summer.  In fact, we did this much – http://www.nps.gov/yell/historyculture/upload/archive_maps9-11-09.pdf – 500 pages of inventory, plus weeding duplicates, and compiling misplaced sets.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, the map room was a place for mild insanity to thrive – it was like a sensory deprivation chamber that made us all a little loony.  The fact that we would find materials such as the following only made the silliness worse.

But it did make things more fun, too.

All photo credits belong to Sam(bo).

Chris in the Map Room

^^^ We did not do that. It's just a stellar example of professionalism in times past.

A valid point, indeed.

Hey, it was funny at the time.

The infamous fire map. This is only one of the many offensively entertaining captions on said map.

O, Map Room … you were an interesting place.

Yes, I know that I have been neglecting my blog.  However, things have been going smoothly in general, and my internet access is iffy, at best, when I’m not at work.  Greetings from work.

I actually wanted to write today to express some disappointment in some of the democratic processes of this country.  When the fellow interns and I heard that President Obama was going to be in Bozeman on Friday (only an hour and a half away) we were all really excited to drive over and see him speak.  Then, come to find out, the program starts at 12:55 pm.

It makes no sense to me to hold a public forum about public issues and exclude anyone who works during traditional hours.  It’s not even during the school year when a lot of students would be able to make it.  So, I don’t get to go see the President speak because I’m fortunate enough to have a job for the moment? (It ends in a week and a half)  This forum is about health care, and my federal job presently doesn’t cover anything health-wise that I can’t take care of at the park clinic, and my high-deductible policy premium just went up this month … I’d like to have a chance to see the people that I helped elect into office talk about issues that are relevant to me.

1pm on a Friday?  Really?

So here are a smattering of the photos that I’ve taken since I got to Yellowstone. The last couple weeks of May here, there was still a lot of snow cover on the ground.

Between the Tower and Canyon areas

Between Tower and Canyon

Right after getting here, Manny and I drove through as much of the park as we could before I started working.  The canyon area was really pretty, and this is one of the more famous views of the park (but with snow!)

Waterfall at Canyon

Thomas Moran painted this waterfall from what is now known as Artist Point, to which I will hopefully be hiking at some point this summer.  Also, we went by Beryl Spring, so named for the vivid color it exhibits.

Beryl Spring

One of the cool things I get to do while working here is Bookmobile, which means that I get paid to drive around the park all day once a month.  Win.  On my first venture out, I took a picture of Old Faithful erupting from the Bookmobile site near the geyser:

Old Faithful as seen from the Old Faithful Clinic.

One of the really cool sites that’s near to the dorms is Sheepeater Cliff – when the Sheepeater tribe was still around (before they were presumably absorbed by the Shoshone) they lived by this feature, which was obviously created by volcanic activity.  They were the only tribe that is thought to have lived in the Yellowstone area continuously for a significant amount of time.

Sheepeater Cliff

The following are a few photos of the Norris Geyser Basin:

Norris Geyser Basin wide view

Scary unstable part of boardwalk.

Thermophiles in the geyser water

Constant Geyser - or, "Not so constant geyser" since it never erupted while we were there.

Then we went to the Artist Paint Pots with some pretty cool mud pots … although this one did spit on my foot, which at geyser temperatures really hurts.  In the future, always wear close-toed shoes to mud pots.

Artist Paint Pots

And before I close out this post, I’ll leave you with pictures from the snow we got in June.  It didn’t stick for very long, but it was pretty while it lasted.

Snow in June outside the dorms.

Snow in June

The next photo entry, when I have reliable and fast internet to get around to it, will have more wildlife, but there’s a lot of geothermal areas in the park to cover, so that’s that.  I will hopefully be back soon with more pictures!

I am finally telling the story of how I got to Montana.  That makes it sound much more important and serious than it actually is, but the trip was exciting, and as you will soon be able to tell, very beautiful.

The first day of the journey took Manny and I from San Antonio to Albuquerque.  As you can imagine, there are not too many pictures from this leg, since as much as I love West Texas, it’s not the most exciting landscape.  To sum up: there was a lot of sand and sky, and the wind just about blew the brats off the charcoal BBQ pit we stopped at to heat up lunch.  However, we did stop to gaze upon the world’s second largest roadrunner in Fort Stockton (Manny is in front for scale):

Manny and the world's 2nd largest roadrunner in Fort Stockton

From there we drove through Roswell (not as fabulous as I had hoped, though the UFO shaped McDonald’s was a nice touch) and into Albuquerque.  After waking up bright and early the next morning, we drove into Santa Fe and had a classic New Mexico breakfast at Tecolote Cafe (sooo good – put Christmas chili on anything and I’ll eat it), and then headed up to Taos.  We bummed around town for a bit, and then took a short out-of-the-way drive to the Rio Grande gorge to check it out:

The Rio Grande gorge outside of Taos

It’s hard to do justice to the actual size of the gorge.  We also saw 3 bighorn sheep there (my pictures didn’t come out very well, they were down near the bottom) and there are only about 300 of them in all of New Mexico.  And here is another picture just because I like it, and because it sums up my love for northern New Mexico:

Big sky country

From there we drove back up I-25 to Colorado Springs and spent the night so we could wake up early again the next morning to drive into Rocky Mountain National Park.  Originally, we were planning on going the back way up through the entire park, but thanks to my weather nerd, Manny, we ruled that out due to bad weather and decided to go in via Estes Park.  This ended up being a great decision, because as we got up to about 11,500 feet, this is what everything looked like:

Fog worse than San Francisco

Between zero visibility (literally, I could not see more than 20 yards in front of the car) and no frame of reference while close to what I knew from memory was a steep precipice, we decided to head back out of the park, thankful that the awesome guy at the gate let us in for free with my new National Park Service intern status.

This left us with lots of extra time in Fort Collins, and we got to recharge and plan the detour through South Dakota that we were both really looking forward to.  The next day we got up bright and early (pattern, yes – it’s still going on right now) and drove up through the rolling grassy hills of eastern Wyoming into the rolling grassy hills of South Dakota.  By the time we saw the Black Hills, they were a welcome sight indeed.

First stop in South Dakota was a sandwich place in Hot Springs (awesome food on this trip – why anyone sticks to the chains when they don’t have to is beyond me) and then onto Wind Cave National Park.  Here we saw our first buffalo of the trip, including one we have since christened “Jowlie” because he was having a grand old time scratching his face on a guardrail and slapping his jowls against it.

Jowlie

Also, an antelope posed for us.  This was the beginning of what would end up being a series of insane animal encounters that are still happening.  In what is now referred to as the Miracle of South Dakota, I avoided hitting two deer and a turtle that all decided to cross the road at a very disadvantageous time.  All I can say is that the wildlife out west is very lucky that I react to even the smallest shadows that move in my line of sight when driving.

Photogenic antelope.

From Wind Cave we drove through the Black Hills to Rapid City, contemplated checking into the hotel, and then decided that, surely, there was enough daylight yet to get out to the Badlands – and there was!  Sunset in the Badlands is truly beautiful, and everyone should experience it at least once.

The Badlands near sunset. A whole lot of sandstone.

Badlands - you can see the striping in the formations here.

Jagged edges of the Badlands.

Manny at the Badlands.

Sunset at the Badlands.

Oh, and before we went to the Badlands, we saw the world’s largest groundhog!!

World's largest groundhog!!

The next day we went to Mount Rushmore – here are the Presidents under the Texas flag.

Mount Rushmore.

And after the world’s largest groundhog, here’s a real groundhog who is super cute :)

Groundhog!

And here’s Devil’s Tower from a distance, from the parking lot of the place we had buffalo burgers out in BFE, WY.  It’s a huge rock born of volcanic activity – and it really is HUGE – that picture doesn’t really do it justice.

Devil's Tower.

It got darker as we drove through the Crow reservation and into Montana – through Billings, Livingston, and finally to Bozeman where we camped for the night.  From there we drove into the park, and that is another entry that is on its way very soon!

All in all, here’s how far we drove (not including short stops and detours that added another 500 miles onto the journey, necessitating an oil change the week after getting here).

View Larger Map

And you know what makes a lazy Sunday morning even better?  When you know that you have Monday off as well.  Three day weekends are awesome, I love the 10/4 work week.  You get a day to crash, a day to have fun and be lazy, and then a day to be productive during business hours.

Michaela and I are at the internet cafe in town, both talking to our respective boyfriends – me on email, and her on Skype chatting away animatedly in Italian.  We’re getting another Italian intern next week, she says, and promises to cook for us.

Also, most amazing idea – I almost hugged her when she said this – they do a drink in Torino where they spread Nutella on the inside of a small coffee cup, and then add some coffee and a bit of steamed milk.  Genius.  I will be trying that soon.

I drove all the way up to Livingston for groceries on Thursday (100 mile round trip) that was instigated by me running out of Greek yogurt.  When I get to the store, do they have it?  No.  Thankfully Maeve (the other library intern) found some yesterday.  At least I like driving.

Also, it is cedar season here.  I did not get to escape that particular allergy this year, pollen be damned.  I’ll probably head to the Mammoth clinic soon and see if they can give me a steroid shot or something – Claritin is just not doing it.

In other news, elk still like to run out in front of my car.  I swear, they hear the car, look up fromeating, and think, “Yes, yes … that would be the best idea ever to run out in front of that thing … yes …”  The antelope do it, too.  I saw a rattlesnake by the road a couple days ago, and was very happy to be inside a car when that happened.

To anyone who anticipates visiting a national park in the future, they are not petting zoos.  I thought this was self-explanatory, but apparently people have a hard time grasping this concept.  We have taken to calling stupid tourists “tourons” as a hybrid of “tourist” and “moron” because of the stupid things we see on a regular basis.  Parents trying to put their kids on top of bison, or encouraging their kids to pet the elk.  Not a good idea.  Maeve saw a kid get kicked the other day because the parents thought petting one would be a banner idea. I’ve also seen people litter here.  IN THE NATIONAL PARK.  It makes my head hurt, people.

Anyways, moral of story: being on vacation is no excuse for being stupid.  Being lazy, silly, or any combination thereof?  Yes.  But stupid?  No.

First update from Yellowstone – still no pictures because I left my external hard drive back at the dorms, which is a 6 mile 1000 foot climb away up in BFE.  Technology can be hard to come by, so I will update when I can.  People here are chatty, which leave me uninclined to hang out at the local internet cafe all that long, since I already listen to people talk all day long every day living in a dorm.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though.  The job is good, and I like the people up here, I just don’t get nearly as much quiet time as that to which I am accustomed and enjoy.

I was the only intern to get here with a completed background check, so the other interns had a week to hang out and hike, and since Manny was here that week, he got to go out hiking with them.  Since then, the weather has been crap (including some snow yesterday), so I have yet to get out and hike.  I keep telling myself that it will happen one day …

At any rate, things are good, and I will put together a photo essay in the near future.  In the meantime, I’m going to go do the 100 mile roundtrip to the grocery store in Livingston.

Some crazy dude at the cafe is showing me his green card … that isn’t really a green card.  It’s a Latino caucus card that he had in his passport.  I think it’s time to move on ….

Let me sum up the last two days:

Yesterday, Manny and I were on the road at 645am trying to beat rush hour on 1604 – we drove out I-10 to Fort Stockton (pictured above with the giant roadrunner), and then took Highway 285 North into New Mexico.  This included several small towns with names the likes of which I have already forgotten (or maybe that’s because they were more like speed traps than anything else …) and then drove through Roswell which included a drink stop at the flying saucer McDonalds.  Then we drove another forever and finally ended up in Albuquerque.  And promptly passed out without a blog entry.

Today, we got up and went to Santa Fe, had breakfast at the famous Tecolote Cafe – complete with Christmas red and green chiles – and hung out around the Plaza for a bit.  Then back on the road and up to Taos.  If you’re ever in Taos and in need of frybread (because it’s freaking awesome), I highly recommend Tiwa’s Kitchen on the reservation by the old pueblo.  We got some frybread sticks with chokecherry juice and a couple of Indian teas to go – SO GOOD.  Then we took pictures at the Rio Grande river gorge:

Rio Grande river gorge

We saw 3 of the only 300 bighorn sheep in New Mexico there, which was pretty cool.  Then we drove forever again (part of which involved narrow mountain roads in a rainstorm) and ended up where we are tonight – Colorado Springs.

Tomorrow the itinerary involves attempting a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park, weather permitting.  I would also like to take the time to sing praises for Priceline, who has come through for us twice so far this week, and we’re working on getting a 3rd reservation for Saturday night.  Friday night we’re staying in a room that’s  normally $180/night for $40.  Who knows how to travel cheap?  <– This lady.  No namby-pambys here.

I’m currently drinking my last St Arnold’s Divine Reserve No. 5.  It is both wonderful and painful, because it is my favorite beer, and yet there is no more.  With what could I possibly bribe the St Arnold’s people?

Seriously, I want to know what it would take to get them to make more!

This beer has aged really well.  I wish I had some Blue Bell vanilla to go with it, but I’ll be okay.  It’s gotten thicker and fruitier … and it still looks like used motor oil.

Ah, love.

Loooooooooooooooooove.

My time thus far in Houston has been good – I have been to two high school sports banquets, hung out with my family, saw my good friend Lucas, and ate like half a chocolate cake that my mom made.  My mother has made this particular cake on only one other occasion in my life to date, and this stuff is really.freaking.good.  My dad’s face lights up when he takes it out of the fridge; it’s really cute.

I am re-registered for this next fall – I registered before, but ended up re-arranging some classes, adding some, swapping, etc.  New schedule:

15 graduate hours – I just might be insane.  I’m getting my cognate out of the way, and I’m really excited about taking a graduate-level history class.  Maybe if I end up working in a university library one day, I can use my one free class per semester to get my MA.  Which will take like 4 years that way.

Back to San Antonio tomorrow for a couple of days to go to my friend Vicki’s birthday party.  I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about Vicki on here before, but I would like to take this time to gush about her, because she is more awesome than you.  Seeing her – and even just seeing her name pop up on my caller ID – makes my day.   So thank you, Vicki, for being such a joy in my life – for your encouragement, your laughter, your strength and wisdom, and your empathy.  You are amazing :)