Prepared for Yellowstone

On Sunday, July 30, we had an off-day between the two honors program conferences. After mass and breakfast, I was able to journey to and through our nation’s first national park, Yellowstone with my colleagues Enza and Judy.

Yellowstone is certainly an interesting place. As land set aside for enjoying, it contains the elements of order and chaos all in one. There is chaos in the sense of the wildlife and the “wild” side of nature that you can observe. I saw herds of bison and elk; geysers, hot springs, and even a canyon. However, in a national park, there is also order to all of this wild chaos. You must drive through one of the park’s many entrances, manned by park rangers who charge $25 per car for parking tags. “It’s good for seven days,” said the ranger. “But I only have seven hours,” I replied. “That’s a shame,” he insisted, “you should come back more prepared.” Well, it was the one day off I had during my business trip, so two colleagues and I had a lot of driving to do around the park before we headed back to work.

Yellowstone is certainly doable in a day. Sure, we didn’t see “everything.” But we did see a lot, as described above. We got our share of order and chaos in one of America’s most scenic places. We even saw order and chaos blend at one point, when, on one part of the long two-lane road that circles the southern part of Yellowstone, a park ranger stopped traffic in both directions so that a herd of about 30 bison could run by. Most of the bison stayed about 30 feet from the road, but at least five or six of them ran right in our lane or crossed over the pavement. At the moment, things felt out of control, but after a few minutes of coming within feet of a bison, things seemed to return to normalcy pretty quick.

We also got to see Old Faithful, which after waiting for it for an hour and seeing it go up for maybe 3 minutes, we were not overly impressed. But, we saw it. Not sure it would be worth traveling thousands of miles for, but hey, it's nature working in a mysterious way, and as long as you remember that, it's pretty spectacular. Later in the day, we also saw the "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone." It was awesome. Not quite "the" Grand Canyon, but still high enough for me to be nervous and also appreciate the majesty. There were also lots of mountains, prairies, and even a beautiful (and very blue) Yellowstone Lake.

By the end of the day, we felt we saw more than the park ranger thought we would, so as we drove past the exit gate where we had entered 7 hours earlier, I rolled down my window and yelled (probably for my own peace of mind), "We came plenty prepared!"