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 …
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National Parks Trip: Hayden Valley
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 …
TORUS 2019: A Monster in the Murk (May 23, 2019)
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 …
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Winter Storm Blog: Groundhog Day 2022
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 …
National Parks Trip: Mud Volcano
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 …
National Parks Trip: West Thumb
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 …
National Parks Trip: Yellowstone’s South Entrance
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 …
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National Parks Trip: Last Morning in Grand Teton
I awoke on August 16 full of the conflicting sadness that my family was leaving and excitement to see Yellowstone. I did want to get one more sunrise from one of the greatest sunrise spots on Earth. The boundary layer aerosol load over northwestern Wyoming may have disagreed, but that was neither here nor there. …
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National Parks Trip: Final Night in Grand Teton
The theory of relativity applies no where more than on vacation. Go back through and look at the “national parks trip” tag on my blog, and this is already my 17th post on the trip. In a way, our night in Laramie felt like it was weeks ago, and yet hadn’t we just gotten to …
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TORUS 2019: The Day It All Went Up In Smoke (May 22, 2019)
We all needed a down day. May 20, 2019 had shaved months off of the lives of field researchers, forecasters, and myself. The Mangum tornado, its low visibility, the inadequate and overstressed road network, and the unexpected collapse of the rest of the severe weather outbreak left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth that night …
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