Yellowstone 2009 Trip Video

I just downloaded Picasa 3 and it has become my picture editor of choice. It really makes it easy for me to post pictures to blogs, email pictures, make videos, make collages, and many other things that I didn't have time for yesterday. As I was playing around with the 500 pictures that we took from Yellowstone I decided to make this video. It took me about 1.5 hours, so if you don't appreciate it, then don't tell me because I want to think that my hour and a half was time well spent. Joking aside, it was easy and fun to make the video and reminded me of the great time we had in Yellowstone.


We saw a lot of wildlife. You'll see on this movie that we saw some ducks, squirrels, groundhogs, pelicans, mooses/meese (two babies with their mother), a bald eagle, wolves at night, buffalo, deer, elk, mosquitoes, and pretty much everything but a bear, and the irony was that I had intense desires to see a bear while Michelle was secretly praying not to see a bear, and of course we didn't see one, but we came within 3 minutes of watching a grizzly bear swim a 2oo yard river and then dart into the woods. We actually went to look for that same grizzly bear 30 minutes before his supposed swim (everybody gladly showed us their awesome pictures of the swimming bear). We received a tip that there was a bear siting on the other side of the bridge so we quickly crossed the bridge and decided to take the trail on the North side of the street. 25 minutes after searching for the bear, I saw people in the distance running across the bridge- we sprinted back to the bridge just in time for everybody to tell us how cool it was and to show off their photos. If we would have gone South I am confident we would have seen the bear but we barely missed him and thus we are still alive and unscathed.


I highly recommend Yellowstone, and if you want to see a bear, ask people all day if they have seen one, and then when they tell you where the bears have been sited (get specifics), go directly there, do not stop and go South. I did learn that you don't want to sneak up on a grizzly, so you want to sing, clap and make noise (which, yes mother, we did).


When you see old faithful try to be closer to the South side or to the far right of the geyser as you are facing it. We were really close and all we saw was a bunch of steam and we missed most of the water show.


Perhaps my favorite part of Yellowstone was when we saw this group of "Geyser Gazers" "Geyser Geeks" or "Geyser Gurus" that had stationed somebody at Fan Geyser all day so that they could alert people of "activity" of the geyser that would possibly indicate a 90 ft fan like explosion of water and steam. We decided to watch with them, but after watching the same 2 ft spring of bubbling water. The young kid got on his walkie talkie and with the disappointment of a kid that waited in line for 1/2 hour for a lollipop just to be told they were all gone said, "the activity of the water has ceased and I think you'd be wise to turn around." I heard his voice through all the walkie talkies of those people standing within whispering distance, and I asked him "who does that all go to"- he replied " oh all these people here (there were 12 of them, and half of them were his family). I laughed hysterically once they all turned around and walked or biked back with their faces facing down but with hopeful hearts that next year they would be fortunate enough to see it go off (it only goes off every 5-12 days). Despite my ridicule, I secretly wish I was a "Geyser Geek/Guru/Gazer".

Double Rainbow

Michelle and I went on a hike last week and as we reached the waterfall and started to eat our dinner a rainstorm urged us down the mountain. I was grateful to see this double rainbow as we drove back from the hike.<