Return Of The Blogger

OK, let me explain...

I've been reliably informed that they held a U.S. Open while I was away, though I saw precious little of it.  Which, from the reports, is a bit of a shame.  The Sunday final round was an amusing comedy of errors, trapped as I was on an Alaska Airways flight from Portland to Bozeman, MT.  No live TV available, so I popped for the GoGo WiFi, to stream coverage.  It was comically bad, freezing for everything but the endless parade of ads.  

Having seen none of the action after Thursday, I decided to give myself the week off from LIV, Brooksie and the fetid miasma of the current news cycle.  There will be plenty of time to catch up with that, though we ironically got out of Portland just in time....

Portland was cold and raw, though it didn't matter a lick as we were surrounded by these beautiful girls...

Lucy seems to have taken to her meditation:

Whereas Stella will not capitulate to the laws of gravity:

Forget monoclonal antibodies, this is the cure for our Covid hangover. at least for Employee No. 2 and your humble blogger.

Then it was off to Bozeman, MT, to see what Big Sky Country is all about.  We ventured to the Big Sky Resort first, where it was.....well, snowing.  

As you might know from my winter blogging, it simply refused to snow until the mountains were all closing, and then it started dumping, including a huge storm just a couple of weeks ago.  That factored into the closure of Yellowstone (more on that below) and accounts for snow on the lower mountain so late.  This was our view as we rode that blue bubble chair:

We did a whitewater excursion on the Gallatin River on our second day, though I don't have any pictures for obvious reasons.  But it looked something like this:

They're experiencing record volume of water flowing down the river, though the numbers they cited went in the one ear and out the other... Good fun and I'm pleased to report that circulation has returned to my feet.  

But the big news is that we did actually get into Yellowstone, by virtue of great planning luck.  We were in Bozeman Monday through Wednesday, and I wanted to tour Yellowstone on Tuesday but, as luck would have it, they were fully committed that day and we opted for Wednesday instead.  Which was the day they re-opened, to our delight.

Not to get too granular, but they reopened three of the five entrances, specifically the West Gate (but not the North, where most of the damage occurred).  It was quite the rugby scrum getting in, but way worth it in the end.  

We opted to skip Old Faithful, so after making it through the gate we turned left, while the massive stream of traffic went right.  We headed to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, a 23-mile canyon with a feature not found in the Arizona version:

That feature being this dramatic waterfall:

To this observer, the rock outcroppings were even more spectacular:

I had a longish chat with a park ranger about how they formed, not from glaciers as I would have assumed.  Something resulting from the geothermal activity, but you'll have to go for yourself if you want more detail.

We found a lovely spot for a picnic lunch, watching the bison through the geothermal steam:

We saw a grizzly in the wild, though at some considerable distance.  But, because we were exfiltrating through the West Gate, we stopped at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, where our guide also worked.  This is Sam, their oldest grizzly:

We all agreed that the wolves could use a shampoo and trim:

A great trip, but glad to be home (and it seems that Napoleon and Tate missed us, or at least are pretending that they did).  Thanks for your patience and understanding about the U.S. Open blackout, but regular blogging will resume on Monday.  What do you think we'll be talking about?