Posts filed under Yellowstone

When we Hiked through Lamar Valley - Summertime in Yellowstone National Park

Adventure Tuesday

Adventures in Yellowstone

May 25-27th 2014

We had just managed to snag the last available campsite outside Gardiner and went to bed under a clear sky in the Rocky Mountains. The next morning I woke up by a strange noise, something was eating outside the tent, and it brought back memories from a different morning in Alaska when the same thing had happened. As I opened up the tent I was greeted by a bunch of elk. The following years I learned that this area, just up the hill from Gardiner is a prime spot for elk. Other than the noise from the elk it was very quiet around camp. People had been up partying into the wee hours last night, but we had major plans this morning and went to bed early. I was as excited I could possible be as I glanced over Yellowstone National Park while I had my coffee. I could not believe that I finally would get to hike in the mountains in Yellowstone. We were going to have a long day ahead of us, but first we had to get to the park and reserve a backcountry camping spot! These are first come first serve so we didn’t want to risk loosing our plan.

Up until this trip I’d only seen Yellowstone in a blanket of deep snow so I was stoked to finally get to see this beauty dressed in green. It was late May and even though spring is on the way in many places in the US at this point it can be slower here because of the high elevation.

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We’d been checking a couple of different short routes we could do, but after having to remove our top choice due to a late spring and too much water (that hike had a stream crossing without a bridge) we dialed in on a fairly decent hike into the Lamar Valley. If you’ve followed my blog for a while you have probably seen Lamar Valley, a huge valley blanketed in snow in the wintertime where you can spot wolf and bison. There are plenty of bison in this area in the summertime too, something we would soon find out.

I usually don’t take as many pictures during the actual hike, it would take forever to reach our main destination if I did. And especially when we are hiking in a new area you never quite know how long it will take. Sometimes I wish we had more time to stop and take more photos. This time i managed to take a couple of photos right before our bison incident…

W basically grew up with Yellowstone in his backyard and both of us had been living in Alaska for a few years when we embarked on this hike. In the deep forests of Montana and Alaska you are taught to make noise and spaek loudly, so that you do not accidentally surprise a bear. So we did what we have always done, talking loudly, clapping our hands until we rounded this tiny little hill and were greeted by a loud humpf. Before we knew it a huge bison that had been laying down, resting, turned his head towards us started to get up. We slowly walked away but somehow we were now inside a whole herd of bison. I don’t know how we managed to get into this situation. But, to clarify, we felt as if we were inside a herd of bison, but herds a very spread out. We were definitely too close to be comfortable. I closed my eyes and wished that I could stick my head in the ground. In the same manner as we somehow had gotten us into this situation we managed to get out of it. I always view bison as somewhat stupid creatures, that in combination with the fact that they are very large makes them extremely dangerous.

We continued our hike, walking through the valley and previously burned forest. We met a couple of other hikers and they had just been to the campspot we were going to. They told us, just like the previous group had told them, that a large grizzly walks by the camp up on the hill at about 5pm every night.

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We continued walking, through brush and over logs. We took a lunchbreak in the shadow of an old Lodgepole Pine. We checked the map again to see how much farther we had to walk. We checked the GPS and realized we had already passed the campsite and could not understand how that was even possible. We started walking back, probably for a good 30 minutes until both of us were doubting what we had seen on the GPS. It turned out that there was an older campsite on the map in the GPS. We realized that once we took up the paper map and crossed checked. So we started walking back, into the valley again, walking the same path for the third time this day. During this time we also started seeing some lone bisons along the trail. Some of them were hanging out in the forest. I had up until now only viewed bison as creatures that love hanging out in large open spaces, but apparently that is not true. So now we had to be on our toes about bison in the forest too. We crossed small creeks and stepped over large boulders and logs. In some areas the logs looked like pickup sticks, very large pickup sticks.

“A few minutes later W whispers
-There it is, there’s the bear “

We finally arrived and were sitting down at our home for the night. It was beautiful. The mountains in front of us and two hillsides on either side of us. We were also right next to the Lamar River which was raging at this time. i looked at my watch, it was approaching 5pm. I told W that it would have been nice to know on what hillside the other campers saw the bear, on the hillside by us or on the other side of Lamar River. Not more than a few minutes later W whispers - There it is, there’s the bear.

I immediately flew up with one hand on the bear spray and whispering in a frantic tone WHERE WHERE?? But then I realized that the bear actually was pretty far away from us. And she, or he, must have known about our presence. The bear continued along the hillside and you could see that it was on a mission. It payed zero interest to us, as it continued forward before it disappeared behind a hill.

After the bear viewing it was finally time for some food. W, as always, cooks the food and I took care of the fire, and water situation. If there is one good thing that I learned during my time studying in Alaska it is to find springs. Spring water you don’t need to filter, it is mostly clean and ice cold. And since we were on a hillside I quickly found some very active springs. We were watching the mountains and talking about this and that before we started to pack up the food and realized we’d forgotten the rope.When you are backcountry camping in Yellowstone (and many other National Parks in the US, especially in the Rocky Mountains) you have to hang your food up, to prevent bears from getting it. We decided to use one of the tent strings that was strong enough for the food. But we had wanted to hang our packs and clothes up too. Instead we placed them by the food storage area. We changed clothes and put the clothes we used for cooking into the backpacks and then we also put a plastic bag on top of the backapacks. We’d already got our tent set up far away from the food storage area.

Before we knew it we were watching the sunset in the mountains and soon after we went to bed. But what a night. We kept hearing noises all night, it was hard to tease apart if it was the river we heard, the trees or worse a bison or a bear walking around. At one point we herd a loud thump. I layed dead still and whispered did you hear that. W was also wide awake, and he had heard it too. W was convinced that a bear had gotten to our food, I kept thinking that a bison was walking around our campsite and was heading towards our tent. And that is how most of the night continued. At some point we must have fallen asleep completely though because in the morning we woke up by male elk calling for a couple of females. After some well needed coffee and breakfast we were finally ready to hit the trail again.

We packed up and started the hike back. Both of us were already feeling a bit stressed ove the first part of the hike which included all these large herds of bison. We met some new campers who were heading out to the campsite we just left. We told them about the bear and also asked them about the bison. They told us there were many bison covering the whole trail and made it hard to pass. Great. So once we approached that area we started to walk up up and up the hill. In this way we would be able to see where the bison were and maneuver in that way. We trecked through the sage brush that tore our legs up, cause we were of course wearing shorts. Once up the hill we didn’t see a single bison down below.

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Do you want to read more posts about Yellowstone National Park? Click the link below:

A Tale of Fires and Ghost Logs - Fieldwork in Yellowstone Pt. 3

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt
— John Muir

Adventure Tuesday

That summer of Dreams

A lot of different things happened during the summer of 2017. I went to Montana and Yellowstone not only once, but twice. I got to go to Puerto Rico for fieldwork and spent almost two weeks in the rain forest. I went on a roadtrip with dad through Badlands National Park, Beartooth Highway and then eventually through Yellowstone. We got married, well technically we were already, outside Butte on a fiery afternoon. After that we went camping with friends before we headed back towards Wisconsin. Once there we packed for yet another wedding and headed out to a summer camp. But what do we really do when I say fieldwork? If you have been reading my blog since it started way back when, you know I used to roam around in the interior of Alaska, studying fires, stream water chemistry, climate change and the list goes on. W also studies fires and we have helped each other doing field work through the years. So 2017 I spent part of my vacation by flying to Jackson, Wyoming to spend a couple of weeks with W and his advisors field crew.

The Start of the Large Fire Era

1988 one of the largest forest fires raged through Yellowstone National Park, and many people probably wondered if anything would be left after that large fire. 35% of Yellowstone National Park burned that summer, and that fire marked the beginning of a new era, the large fire era in the west. One of the many questions that fire overall poses in the north west, not only in the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone, but also in Alaska is: What will happen if and when fires become so frequent that there is not enough time for trees to regenerate. The normal fire return interval is every 100-300 years, and the area we worked at in 2017 was burned in the 1988 fire and then again in 2016.

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I have seen burned areas in Alaska before, but nothing quite like the the area I saw that summer. Everything was basically gone. Everything was black. Even though we still could see vegetation already growing in the black soil. We counted tree seedlings (Douglas fir and Lodge pole pine) , downed wood, logs and ghost logs. Ghost logs are basically a line in the ground that indicates that a log once laid there, but has completely been burned up. Those logs were most likely leftover from the 1988 fires.

The ghost logs can be seen as the light lines in the black soil above

The ghost logs can be seen as the light lines in the black soil above

Fires in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska are very different. The fires we see in Yellowstone are mostly crown fires, while the fires in Alaska are mostly surface fires. In Alaska the thick organic layer, which also serves as an insulator to permafrost, is a good indicator for how intense the fire has been. Often there is still a large portion of the organic layer left after a fire has gone through, and you will also see this patchiness of the thick moss on the ground. One thing the fires in Alaska and the Rockies have in common though is that when it burns it burns, and it can spread extremely fast if the conditions are perfect.

Smoke in the field and the after math of fires in Alaska:

The ground was completely bare when we arrived at the Maple Fire in Yellowstone National Park. The temperature was in the 90’s and the black soil didn’t make it cooler. We used measuring tape and compass directions to set up sampling plots. Large portions of this fieldwork was to count how many tree seedling we could see growing in the bare soil, and we did see quite a few. We also recorded signs of ghost logs, tree stumps and dead standing trees within all the plots. This work is sometimes hard on you, it’s hot, you’re on your knees and you are also high up in elevation. On top of that you have to hike, sometimes also carrying heavy equipment. You’ll get sunburned real easy and have to make sure you carry and drink enough water.

The Maple Fire in the Cougar Meadow:

Many tree species are evolutionary adapted to regenerate after fire, they produce cones that are serotinous, because the cones need heat to open up and release its seeds. But to regenerate the tree needs energy, and time to develop enough seeds, and on top of that they need to be lucky. Anyone who has planted a seed probably know that sometimes the seed germinate, and sometimes it doesn’t. This is the reason why this questions is so relevant, how successful are coniferous trees to regenerate throughout the Rockies and Alaska if the fire return interval gets shorter? The other problem is the local climate. Will it become drier or wetter, how warm will it get? These are factors that also play a role in the tree regeneration.

Through Active Ancient Land

Adventure Tuesday

Yellowstone National Park - Winter Edition

Mammoth Hot springs

Since we always enter from the northern entrance, by the small town of Gardiner, we get access to the most northern part of the park in the wintertime. Though you can’t get to Old Faithful with the car, you can get to Mammoth Hot Springs. If you can’t go to Yellowstone at all, you can always tune in to one of the many webcams that the national park service provide. There are several covering the northern part, and one of them can be found by the Mammoth Hot Springs. Precipitation (both rain and snow) that falls on the surrounding mountains slowly makes its way down through the soil and continues deep belowground. Eventually the water is heated up before it finally sees daylight again when it leaves the deeper soil and is forced upward and creates the Mammoth Hot Springs.

Colors, Art and Science

It’s pretty cool to see the art that constantly forms with the combination of hot steam and cold air. Snow and ice surrounding the hot springs makes for the perfect art formation. The hot springs at Mammoth are one of the most accessible hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. They are just a few miles from the entrance in Gardiner which makes for an easy excursion. The bedrock underlying Mammoth Hot Springs mainly consist of limestone. When the deep water slowly makes its way upwards it has formed carbonic acid (due to the carbon dioxide that the water has collected belowground) which dissolves the limestone and forms calcium carbonate. When the calcium carbonate finally reach the surface it is deposited and forms travertine which is the rock that forms all the terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Freezing Temperatures and Changing Colors

The hot springs constantly change and that is one of the greatest things about them. Either the flow of the water changes dues to freezing temperatures, or tectonic changes belowground triggers the water to change its route and sometimes even its temperature and other characteristics. Some of the hot springs even dry out for several decades, before they start to flow again. There have also been times when the hot springs flow has increased so much that the boardwalk gets under water. If you can time your excursion through the hot springs with some sunset or sunrise you should. The colors of the sky will reflect in the hot springs, and that is always amazing to see. It will be a completely different experience compared to the daytime excursion. The color of the hot springs themselves, blue, orange and green are caused by differences in temperatures and pH which allow for different bacteria to thrive and live there. Another good thing about freezing temperatures, other than all the art that is created, is that a lot fewer people will venture out at all. If its 10 or 20 below no one will be here.

The Terraces

Mammoth hot springs consist of two levels, the lower and upper terrace. Small parts of the area is wheelchair accessible, but to get to the upper terrace you either have to walk up some stairs, or access it from a different road, which I think is closed in the wintertime. Either way, if you are able to walk around you definitely should check out all the different springs at both the lower and upper terrace. You might see less of the different hot springs after a big dump of snow, so that might not be super fun. The photos below are all from the upper terrace level. All the photos above is sort of a mixture of all the different springs on both the upper and lower level.

Have you ever seen Mammoth Hot Springs in the wintertime?