I’m not going to type much. There’s simply no way to adequately describe Yellowstone National Park – in words or in pictures, it’s better than I remembered, more fantastic than I can express.
As a gift to my Lovely band I’ve sprung for a room in the Old Faithful Snow Lodge and I’m thinking it was well worth the absurd cost. We got a relatively early start out of Pinedale, WY this morning and headed-mostly north, slowly becoming surrounded by mountains – snow-capped and stunning, every time you had an impression that the park must’ve been right around the corner, the landscape leapt HIGHER and another sign told you that you had a couple of dozen miles to go yet. I think we got into the park as late as three in the afternoon, and yet – knowing I ain’t seen nothin’ yet, I still feel like we’ve had a remarkably full day and that we’ve seen SO MUCH stuff – jetting geysers and steam pools – dozens of random animals, even a couple of bison – not as ubiquitous as my friend Jennie had lead me to believe (and indeed, one of my most potent memories of visiting this place as a child was of being caught behind a bison for a long time at some point) but still huge and beautiful.
As we climbed the mountains of Colorado we stopped at a particularly awesome gas station and made friends with a giant stuffed bear. An old school windmill providing mere mechanical energy – and one of those omnipresent collapsed structures. I’m sure these abandoned barns and homes and houses have relatively mundane stories, but I find that they’ve been left to simply dissolve rather than being repaired or stripped and scavanged fascinating. As we entered the immediate environment of Colorado Springs we spotted distant planes and I was eventually able to get a couple of shots of what appear to be some fun planes getting up to aerial antics. Yay zooom lens! Stopping at a random roadside antiques and junk place shy of Colorado Springs, CO. It was run by a wizened woman who followed us around trying to determine what it was we might be interested in collecting. We found a new mailing list, but there’s no way we’d have been able to describe what we were looking for.
We’re all pleasantly exhausted after a late night, an early start and a LOT of driving and a LOT of walking and running around. I was worried that I’d feel like I was missing out on a lot by not having a better-defined plan, but so far just driving to points on the map circling slowly around the park has had the desired result…
SO –I’m emptying my camera, charging all my batteries in preparation of filling the former and depleting the latter, glutting myself on the aesthetic excellence around us. My only lament is that despite the egregious price tag and the freezing temperatures outside, our room’s heater is stuck on “sauna” and we’re waiting for a repair person to come save us from the temperatures. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can sleep tonight.
A last note before bed : the staff here are all gathered from across the world – apparently you work a season and are paid and provided room and board in the park while waiting tables or collecting recycling or, indeed, fixing the heaters. Our repair person was a cute short-haired woman from South Carolina who’d visited her friend at MICA in Baltimore none too long ago and made a djembe for herself at Bonnaroo this year. She wrangled our heat back under control and betwixt her shutting our radiators down and us leaving the windows open to the 29 degree temperatures outside, we’ve at least hit 80 degrees…. And a comfortable temperature probably isn’t too far off.
Tomorrow its more Yellowstone until about 4pm at which point we’ve GOT to be on the road for Spokane if we want to arrive there before midnight. I have the sneaking suspicion we’re not going to be eager to leave.
One of the many fun cat-themed smatterings of artwork scattered on the walls, counters, floors and ceiling of Alley Cat Coffee in Fort Collins, CO. I took plenty of photos of the coffeehouse we went to after the show. This is the ONLY thing at Alley Cat in Fort Collins, CO that WASN’T cat-themed – but this sink WAS obviously made from a repurposed mixing bowl and fastened with pennies. I think so far in the trip this has been the BEST iced coffee and the cinnamon bun was… wow.
So – after playing in Colorado Springs we drove two hours north to my friend Jennie’s house in Fort Colins, CO. We rolled in just around midnight, and then had a 9am sound checkat Unity Church. It was a really wonderful service, and strangely enough we sold a LOT of CDs. Between services someone handed me this dirt. At first I was concerned that I’d been entrusted with some sort of holy task – but it turned out that the woman who handed it to me had just cleaned a table and was looking for some place to put it. Upon meeting me, she decided I was a worthy recepticle… for dirt. I left it in one of the potted plants. Kristen and I and the Labyrinth of Unity Church at Fort Collins, CO. Another truly holy place – the stars from my friend Jennie’s garden.
