Tag Archives: Yellowstone National Park

in the garden

July 27, 2008 James 2 Comments

I’ve been working on printing some of my Yellowstone photographs. While I wait for the scanner to scan and the printer to do its thing it’s a perfect opportunity to step outside and snap some random pictures of what’s going on in the garden.

The first Cherokee Purple tomato, grown from seed saved from farmer’s market tomatoes last year: I’ve been watching it turn color for a week now, and I thought it was finally time to pick it. It’s smaller than most of the other fruits on the plant, but I’m guessing it’ll be pretty tasty…

Peruvian daffodil (Hymenocallis festalis): John’s sister sent down a little package of presents the last time she visited over ten years ago. A bulb of this plant was in that package. That one bulb has multiplied all over the place, some in places where we put it, others in places where soil with the some bulb offsets was moved to. And some are even coming in places–like the lawn–where it probably have only arrived via seed.

This plant clearly has a life wish. No problem. We like it. It’s happy with little or heavy watering, dappled shade to full sun. And it smells great.

A moth that died in the arms of Drosera dichotoma ‘Giant,’ a carnivorous sundew in the bog garden: When I first put out some carnivores I was thinking, “Ooh cool! Bug-eating plants!” Now that I’m starting to see all the carnage–this moth, plenty of gnats, and a beautiful orange dragonfly–I’m starting to worry about my ethics. I’m a vegetarian, so why can’t the plants be too? Still, I guess it’s some sort of karmic payback: I eat veggies, so some of my veggies eat meat.

The flowering stem of another carnivore, Drosera x ‘Marston Dragon.’ Droseras have a reputation for reseeding like weeds. No weeds spotted so far, but it’s early yet in the season…

This sad little lupine is the descendant of a package of seeds that were given out at a wedding we went to on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. There was a bare spot in the yard, so the package got emptied into it. But there was a reason the spot was bare: The area got almost no water and even weeds had a hard time getting a hold. The lupines never have attained much size–this one is less than four inches tall–but enough keep coming back to remind us of that misty summer day.

And oh yeah, here are a couple of the images I’m printing up. The first one: Undine Falls, Yellowstone National Park. The second: Tower Falls Viewpoint, Yellowstone National park.

landscape, photography, places

virtual vacations: now

June 19, 2008 James Leave a comment

Don’t you love it when you talk about two separate things and then something happens that forces an unexpected convergence of the two? Earlier I was doing some Google Street View sightseeing of celebrity gardens. And I’ve posted a few notes (1 2) and photos from my recent Yellowstone trip.

Thanks go to Peter, who the other day pointed out that Google now has added ten parks and recreation areas to Street View, including Yellowstone! So you want to see what the view is along Yellowstone’s Firehole Lake Drive? Just drop into Street View to find out. Of course, like all things virtual, it lacks something of the actual. How will you smell the lodgepole pines or get a whiff of the sulfur fumes rising from the springs?
Google Street View along Firehold Drive Yellowstone

While Street View is a great tool and can let you get a low-res look at places you’d never visit, it’s really just a presentation tool for canned photography. The views are updated periodically, yes, but the periods span many months. What you’re looking at today is soooo yesterday, and in some ways it feels so Web 1.0.

Web cams offer a complement to Street View and can provide an immediacy the former tool lacks. In fact, if you’re interested in the Old Faithful Geyser and Upper Geyser Basin at Yellowstone, there’s a recently installed web cam at the attraction, with images updated at intervals of less than a minute.

Street View does a nice job of conquering space, giving you the freedom to move around a map and see what there is to see from different locations, and web cams can conquer time by giving you almost-immediate, up-to-date views of things as they’re happening.

What’s the next killer app? What will conquer both space and time?

Will all cars have cameras and GPS installed and then have the images beamed to some central location for real-time descriptions available to anyone on the web so that you can see what things look like right now? And if that happens, who will be the central location serving up the images? Google? The Department of Homeland Security?

landscape, places

yellowstone "wild" flowers

June 12, 2008 James Leave a comment

There were a number of spring flowers doing their thing at Yellowstone a couple weeks ago. I saw a patch of bright yellow and took this photo:

Yes, dandelions. They were all over. I talked to a ranger nearby who said that the park has a big problem with invasive species. He wasn’t a botanical expert, he said, but he thought there was a true wild dandelion, as well as the garden version. Unfortunately, this to me looks like the garden version. They were all over the park, as well as all over Idaho on the way there.

gardening, rambles

soil problems

June 11, 2008 James Leave a comment

So you think you have problems with uncooperative garden soil? Here’s a juniper trying to hold on to life at Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone:

landscape, photography, places

on the road–part 2

June 8, 2008 James 2 Comments

Late on the night of Day 2 I roll into Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument. Like Yellowstone it showcases some striking volcanic feature, in this case recent eruptions along the local rift zone in the Earth’s crust. Here are a couple shots from Day 3, images of an intense wildflower bloom and of residual ice in Indian Tunnel, a lava tube you can explore.
Blooms at Valley of the Moon N.M.

Snow in Indian Tunnel, Valley of the Moon N.M.

Then it was on to Yellowstone. Here are some of the pics from there, in no real order.

Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River: Upper Fall, Yellowstone River

Tourists at Artist’s Point overlooking the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. The artist in question is Thomas Moran, who used this vantage point for his famous image of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.
Tourists at the Lower Falls of the Yellowston River

Tourists at the Lower Falls, Yellowstone River

Spring thaw beginning on Yellowstone Lake:
Spring thaw, Yellowstone Lake

Clouds and ice, Yellowstone Lake:

Sunset Lake, Black Sand Basin, Yellowstone:

A couple shots from Midway Geyser Basin, from the brink or Excelsior Geyser: Midway Geyer Basin, Yellowstone

Midway Geyser Basin

The Jeep didn’t care for the cold, wet weather, and took its own vacation by the side of Yellowstone Lake.
Broken down next to Lake Yellowstone

Viewpoint at Ledge Geyser, Black Sand Basin, Yellowstone, with some of the only sunshine all trip:
Ledge Geyser overlook, Black Sand Basin, Yellowstone

The worst of the trip’s bison jams, this one when a herd of about five dozen was moving from their breakfast to lunch grazing locations:
Bison jam, Yellowstone

Algae in the geyser runoff at Norris Geyser Basin:
Algae at Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone

What? No pictures of Old Faithful? Sorry. There’s a couple hundred more of these tourist pictures but I’ll spare you. Once I start printing up some of my more “serious” photographic work and have something to show I’ll post a few more images.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]