The Times and Travels of Nolan
Documenting trips I've taken and places I've seen.
If you haven’t heard, Elizabeth and I are getting married next summer.We chose a venue way up in the heart of the Colorado Rockies near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park without having ever seen in person. Our reasoning? Simple logic. By the end of the first week of January, all of the wedding …
Continue reading “Spring Break 2022 – Breckenridge, Part One”
It’s been a long-ass time since I’ve gotten to do fieldwork. The chance to do fieldwork was at least a minor reason that I chose grad school and OU specifically over other options, drawing on the time-of-life experience during TORUS. Of course, that was three years, a pandemic and a hell of a lot of …
I was rapidly running into a problem: I didn’t realize we were going to be on the road for multiple days – an initial deployment in central Oklahoma had led me to believe I would be sleeping in Norman on the night of May 22. Now it was May 24 and I was kind of …
It was time to put in work. In Yellowstone, freed somewhat from the binds of family slowing her down, Elizabeth was ready to embark on an ambitious agenda of sightseeing and activity-doing. To be able to see a reasonable chunk of a national park the size of Rhode Island in about 96 hours, you have …
If Lamar Valley is “The Serengeti of North America”, then its nearby cousin the Hayden Valley must be at least the Pampa of North America. The Hayden Valley frames the Yellowstone River as it flows northward from Yellowstone Lake towards its date with the Upper and Lower Falls, only 20 miles away. Those 20 miles …
For the first time since May 18 (and the first of many days in a row), I awoke on May 23, 2019 in a hotel room. The TORUS campaign had had some incredible highs on May 17, and some of the lowest lows in the historic May 20 and 22 busts. The latter two were …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: A Monster in the Murk (May 23, 2019)”
This is going to be my first-ever attempt at live-blogging the entirety of a winter storm. I’ve wanted to do it in the past, but lacked the discipline to do so. If I’ve published this, that means my discipline improved for this event! The upshot: it is Monday, January 31, 2022. By Wednesday the 2nd …
I know Elizabeth’s hangry vibe, and we were rapidly approaching hangry status. We had been supposed to get an early lunch with my family at Leeks Marina in Grand Teton, but they had decided to head out for Jackson Hole before lunch. On top of that, Leeks Marina wasn’t open, so the deliciously-advertised pizza wasn’t …
Our first geyser basin! My expectation going in was never that West Thumb would be the highlight of the entire trip, but since it was the first one I expected that maybe it would hold a special place in our hearts – a premonition that I would say played out exactly correctly. Some of the …
For the first time in a couple of days, we were going back into fully uncharted territory. Having seen most of the vantages of Grand Teton south of Colter Bay, we were now seeing the northern reaches of the Tetons and moving into the rolling terrain of Yellowstone’s southern plateaus. It was kind of hard …
Continue reading “National Parks Trip: Yellowstone’s South Entrance”
