Vacation Part 2: Five days in Yellowstone National Park

Vacation: Five days in Yellowstone National Park. 1

Getting There

Well, when we left New York we were running on just a few hours’ sleep. We caught our 7:30 am flight and I was soon asleep. We changed planes in Salt Lake City and I napped in the airport at the gate while waiting for the flight to be called. Then, I know this will come as a surprise, I napped on the flight from Salt Lake to Billings, Montana.

On arrival on Billings we picked up a rental car and I took the first part of the four-hour drive from Billings to Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park. The stretch between Billings and Livingstone is a highway with a 75 mile per hour speed limit, and of course you can’t just drive the speed limit, you have to go a few miles above the speed limit so I was probably going 80 mph (or about 130 kph) for about an hour and a half. Don’t tell my dad, though, he’ll get nervous.

Roads in Montana were originally engineered when Montana didn’t have a speed limit, so the curves on this highway are wide, there are two amply wide lanes and a broad shoulder on the side.

John finally got to take the wheel when we got off of the main highway and I took the chance to take some more photos as we drove along.

Yellowstone Park is quite large. Large enough that getting from one end to the other takes longer than an hour, of course you can’t go 80 mph in the park, the roads are too twisty, but the park is still quite big.

Now, there are members of my family who will be reading this and will want to know why I don’t put the exact size of the park in here. They will want to know why I’m not going and looking up the size of the park in an excellent book on Yellowstone called Yellowstone Treasures. The author is my step-mother, Janet Chapple with geologic consulting from my dad, Bruno Giletti and editing by Beth Chapple. Now do you see why we had the reunion in Yellowstone National Park?

So while I’m too lazy to pull myself off the couch and look up exactly how large the park is I still want to shamelessly plug the book. Just buy it, it’s good. Check out the website if you don’t believe me. Buy it even if you aren’t going to the park, but if you are going buy a few copies. Feel free to hand them out to people you meet unless they were about to buy the book for themselves.

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The road ahead	A turn in the road

More of the open road	A Montana rest stop
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Giletti-Chapple Family

If you are not a Gilapple there are an awful lot of photos of us. We were gathered in Yellowstone for a mini family reunion. Generally a reunion makes me think of either a vast group of people (as in over 100 people) coming from all over, or of a family that hasn’t seen each other for ages. Well, we’d all gotten together for Nancy’s wedding to Jens in July of 2002 so it hadn’t been that long.

In this case the happy occasion was Dad & Janet’s 20^th wedding anniversary--is it 20 years already? They got married just a few weeks before I left for college so that ages me! The first photo (topmost leftmost photo) is similar to one we had of them on their wedding day, looking happily at each other. Gilapples, if anyone can scan that photo of them at the fountain near the Turks Head Building in downtown Providence, please email it to me and I’ll post it so people can see!

We had all five sisters (three Chapples and two Gilettis) plus spouses and kids, Jens even brought his parents, making a total of 13 family members (see photo “Gilapples”).

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The happy couple	smiling for the camera	Niklas & Annie

Laura near Old Faithful	John near Old Faithful	And John again

The whole family	Laura & John	Laura & Annie

Photo op	Laura op	Zeno & Annie

Laura & John	John	Can you tell I love taking photos of John?
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Animals

We were hoping to see elk, bear, bison, and moose and were satisfied on all points except for the moose. John was alone when he had his encounter with the bear. Fortunately the bear knew better than to mess with John but John managed to shoot the bear with the camera and get some good photos.

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Bear	More bear

Bison passing the car	Car passing bison

Bison stares at car	Elk

Field of bison
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Yellowstone Scenery

Part of what makes Yellowstone famous is the thermal features. Thermal features are areas where you see steam rising from the ground, or puddles of mud that are steaming or bubbling, or pools of water that are amazingly clear and extremely hot. A short bastardized version of how this happens is that there is geologic activity close to the surface and water (from rain or from the rock under the earth’s crust) gets caught and is released to the surface as via one of the various types of thermal feature. The most spectacular type of thermal feature is the geyser, where the water and steam are released in a sudden burst that can go hundreds of feet in the air.

The most famous geyser is Old Faithful which erupts fairly regularly. The interesting thing is that although Old Faithful is fairly regular, the intervals between eruptions have changed over the years. So it’s not quite as faithful as the name might imply.

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Old Faithful Geyser 1	Old Faithful Geyser 2	Old Faithful Geyser 3

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone	Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone	Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Waterfalls	Waterfalls	Waterfalls

River view	Mountain meadow	Thermal area

Thermal area	Thermal area	Thermal area

Thermal area	Thermal area
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Last revised: July 2004