When We Got Home
Here’s what I saw when we got home from Yellowstone:
Author: Leslie Kimel
Yellowstone: Day Two, Three, and Four
I decided I was being too long-winded in describing our trip, so here are the last days at Yellowstone in pictures. Well, I’ll just say a little. I’ll just say this: We saw elk, bison, mule deer, a coyote, waterfalls, and geysers, and we stayed …
Yellowstone: Day One
Wednesday, September 15, 2011
This morning before dawn we checked out of our little cabin at Colter Bay and headed to Yellowstone!
The first thing we did was stop at the West Thumb Geyser Basin, which is full of hydrothermal features–hot springs, paint pots, mud pots, fumaroles (steam vents), and geysers. It was raining, and a cold wind was blowing, and we found ourselves in the strangest, most alien environment. The ground was white, like the surface of the moon, and great plumes of steam hung in the air.
The mud pots were busily gurgling and bubbling and belching, and the hot springs were steaming and sometimes boiling. The hottest springs were bright turquoise blue, and the slightly cooler ones were orange or milky white or green or muddy brown. Each pool and mud pot and geyser was special and had a name: Abyss Pool, Black Pool, Fishing Cone, Bluebell Pool, etc.
A boardwalk wound its way among the pools and geysers, and despite the freezing rain, we followed its entire length, stopping often to pose for pictures in the warm steam that smelled like rotten eggs.
We sat in the car for a few minutes and ate peanuts and tried to warm up. Then we followed a nearby trail to the top of Observation Hill. We ascended through meadows and woods, passing various steam vents and pools as we went. The steam vents were just sitting there in the meadow land, not marked or fenced off, so it was as if they were our own discovery. “There’s Rob’s Vent,” Rob said, pointing. “And Leslie’s Vent. And Pittle’s Vent.” (Pittle is our beloved cat.) The top of the hill was bald, and there was a little bench there, among the boulders and wildflowers. The view stretched for miles. We could see Yellowstone Lake, which looked like the ocean, so big.
We had lunch at the old-fashioned lunch counter at Fishing Bridge. People were having Cokes and milkshakes and piles of french fries; it was all very cozy and festive. We had the most delicious veggie burgers with all the trimmings–lots of pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, ketchup, and mustard. We had fries too, and everything was served in a basket lined with checkered paper.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said.
After lunch we toured the Mud Volcano area, where we viewed lots of sinister-looking boiling, steaming cauldrons of mud that gurgled and roared and splashed and smelled like rotten eggs. I found all the various geothermal features in this area to be vaguely disturbing. For example: Sour Lake, whose water can burn your skin like battery acid.
Dragon’s Mouth Spring was also wonderfully alarming. It snorted and belched and roared (it sounded like sound effects), and the mouth, a cave in the side of a hill, released steam, breathed smoke.
“This seems like something I’ve seen at Disney World,” I said. “You know, while waiting in line to get on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.”
“So you’re saying it seems fake?” Rob said.
“Precisely.”
We drove on toward Canyon Lodge, where we spent the night. On the way we saw some Canada geese swimming in a lovely cold mountain lake, and Rob said, “They look so nice in their native environment . . . instead of waddling around in a Staples parking lot . . . which is how we usually see them.”
We saw a bison too, standing by the side of the road. He was very grand. “Look at him standing there like a statue,” Rob said. “He looks like he’s modeling for the national parks symbol. It’s such an iconic profile. It’s really amazing to see.”
Grand Teton: Day Three
This morning we set off in the fog for the Jackson Lake Lodge. Behind the lodge, we walked a trail called the Lunch Tree Hill Trail. It took us up a big hill overlooking a flatland full of little ponds and wet meadow. The hill was called Lunch Tree because it was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s favorite lunch …
Grand Teton: Day Two
This morning we hiked to Swan Lake and Heron Pond. Swan Lake was covered in yellow pond lilies; we were there when the morning light was at its most golden and inspiring. At Heron Pond we saw a mother wigeon and …
Grand Teton: Day One
We just spent the last week on vacation at Grand Teton and Yellowstone. It was great, the best vacation ever! Here’s a journal excerpt about our first day:
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Even though he’d only gotten two hours of sleep the night before, Rob stayed up really late last night in the motel in Jackson, watching the original version of True Grit. He was drinking beer and eating corn nuts in bed while I was trying to sleep. Rob hates eating snacks out of bags, so he was being really fussy and fancy as usual and had poured the corn nuts into a plastic cup. He ended up spilling his stupid corn nuts in the bed, of course, at about two in the morning.
“What are you doing?” I asked irritably, with my eyes closed.
“Nothing,” he said sheepishly. “I just spilled a few of my corn nuts.”
He spent the next several hours (it seemed) noisily cleaning them up. I don’t know what time he finally went to bed.
In the morning, at about 6:30 local time, we set out for Grand Teton National Park, which was just a short drive away. As we drove out of Jackson, we stopped at a convenience store and picked out a weird breakfast of pumpkin seeds (for me) and mini doughnuts (for Rob).
We got to the visitors center at Moose pretty early, before it even opened. Rob parked in the parking lot and said in his fussy way, “I thought while you were enjoying your pumpkin seeds, I’d get out my special food items.” And he reached for his mini doughnuts.
The visitors center opened at 8:00, but it was only 7:40.
“What will we do for 20 minutes?” Rob asked as he he opened his doughnuts very daintily.
“Well, it will probably take you 20 minutes to eat your doughnuts,” I said, rolling my eyes. (I’ve known this guy for 20 years. I know what he’s like.)
“What?!” he said, all offended. “It will not! I’m not going to sit here and dine on them!”
I must admit I was wrong. It took him 25 minutes.
We looked around the visitors center and then we went on a little walk through a nearby meadow, the Tetons in the background. The morning light was so beautiful, and the meadow was full of yellow grasses and purple asters and wild rosebushes laden with cherry-like hips. I took lots of pictures, forcing Rob to pose on countless fallen logs.
After our warm-up in the meadow, we took a five-mile hike to Hidden Falls near Jenny Lake. We walked along and had little dumb conversations like this:
Rob: “I love these colorful western grasshoppers. When they open their wings, they look almost like butterflies.”
Leslie: “Ah. Oh, yes, they do. Neat.”
From the trail, we saw a female moose standing in a little pond. We were up high, in the mountains, and down below we could see the little pond sparkling in the sun . . . and the moose standing in it eating soft, sparkling aquatic plants.
We had lunch at Signal Mountain, at the Trapper Grill, which had a cozy lodge-type atmosphere, with a huge stone fireplace, log beams, and a view of the mountains that looked like a painting. We each ordered a chickpea sandwich called The Trailhead (and fries).
Rob was being so funny about the sandwich. “This is a fine sandwich,” he said, “but five minutes in the deep fryer and it would have been outstanding. . . . It’s a little soft. Just saying.”
At about 4:00 we checked into our cabin. We’re staying three nights in a cabin at Colter Bay. It’s perfect! It’s a log cabin! And it is so cozy. There are so many little glowing lamps . . . and there are red-checkered curtains and a braided rug on the floor. There’s a little dresser with a marble top, and an oval mirror with a beveled edge. There’s a wooden desk too, and the bedspreads are really neat, with Indian designs and stripes decorated with rows of canoes and rows of trout and rows of stylized lodgepole pines. Here’s how Rob just described them (the bedspreads): “They look like they’re old-timey, from a kids’ camp. . . . They’re exactly right. They look like they’re from a 1950s dude ranch.”
All the furniture has a wonderful soft, used, scuffed look. It’s real wood and kind of old. And all around the cabins, wild roses and asters and sagebrush and grasses are growing, and the ground is polka-dotted with round rocks, some pink and some gray.
The Tiniest Improvements Yet
This weekend was extra nice because it rained three inches, a welcome relief after months and months of burning, dusty drought. Florida is supposed to be a rainy place. When I was a child, the summer rainy season could be counted on, was always drenching wet. …
Orange Julius
I was so happy to have the day off today because I had time to do little fun things, like make vegan orange julius. I also had time to pour it into a wine glass and take a picture of it. The picture-taking was more time-consuming …
Banana Walnut Muffins
In the ironweed patch
Last night, as Rob fried up some delicious beer-battered seitan sticks and the kitchen floor became dangerously greasy, I made vegan banana-walnut muffins using this recipe. It was another cozy, fun, unsanitary baking session, with Carl on the table cuddling with an over-ripe banana and myself sliding around in grease in my sock feet. (Carl was finally removed from the table after he sampled the beer batter.)
The muffin recipe originally called for whole-wheat flour, but since we couldn’t find any in our tiny town forgotten by time, I substituted regular flour, which seemed to work out fine. I made a few other little changes too, so here’s my version, adapted for small-town living:
Banana Walnut Muffins
Ingredients:
½ cup almond milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 ¼ cups flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 ¼ cups mashed over-ripe bananas
1 cup sugar
½ cup canola oil
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
1 cup chopped walnuts
Topping:
2 Tbls melted Earth Balance
1/3 cup sugar
Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Whisk together almond milk and apple cider vinegar and set aside for 10 minutes, allowing the milk to curdle. Mix flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a large bowl. In a separate mixing bowl, mix together mashed banana, curdled almond milk, sugar, oil, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and vanilla extract. Pour wet ingredients into bowl with dry ingredients and stir until just mixed. Stir in walnuts.
Line a muffin tin with cupcake papers and pour in the batter. Bake for 30 minutes or until you can stick a toothpick in and it comes out clean.
When muffins are finished baking, wait until they are cool enough to handle, then dip the tops into melted Earth Balance and roll in sugar.
In the sun room
