Today is the day students start school. I never slept well the day before but now that I'm REALLY retired...I slept fine. I did still awaken at 6 AM. And we went off to "work".
At 7:35 I was at the gate:
8:06 saw us biking toward Lone Star Geyser
9:06 we saw this:
9:23-10:20 We are biking back to the car. The trail goes along the Firehole river. Up and down the bits of hill. Lets take this ride together. We leave the Lone Star Basin by walking a very short bit to the beginning of the bike trail.
After a straight stretch, a curve appears.
Then we bike downhill (keep the speed down) or you miss the very pretty meadow on your right.
This is where the Firehole River first appears. Its at the tree edge.
We continue along the path, sometimes with almost a cliff edge and other times the river runs right beside you. Its beautiful and yes, full of fish.
We cross the firehole and the final straight stretch to the trail end where the bikes get loaded and travel toward another path.
10:20-10:30 We meet old friends in the parking in front of the Lower Store (formerly the Hamiton store thus the name Ham's store). Some of the friends are "August" folk that I've never met face-to-face until today! Exciting.
10:30-11:30 Geysers call and its time to see them. We get on the bikes and travel down the path.
We are headed to Grotto geyser which we watched years ago when we volunteered for Rick Hutchison, the park geologist at the time. First we bike up toward Castle Geyser which we saw our first night back home.
Lew speeds ahead to see Grotto, but I putsy around taking photos for my teacher friends and thinking about dreams and how sometimes you can do what you dream. Now we are past Castle on the straight stretch that goes quite a while before we get to Daisy Geyser.
I'm going rather slow after taking a few more pictures when I see a few tourists go off trail to the trees. Now trees are not usually where tourists go off trial...Crap there is a bison and it is headed right toward me! Time to ditch the bike and go to a tree also!
It was that close..No trick camera and that is through the pine needles.
It passed by without hitting my bike on the path.
I noticed a small crowd up the hill near Daisy geyser. I decided to wait a few minutes and see what happened. Well Daisy is what happened!
I could see the steam from Grotto and biked on down to it.
I'm getting hungry. Time change is hard to manage sometimes. Lets head back to the Ham Store and get some lunch!
12:00-12:30 Lunch time in front of the store so we can watch geyser hill.
12:30-2:00 Lets go to geyser hill. We bike up to the Lodge. Then we start up geyser hill.
When the fire went through in 1988, I did not think the hill behind the geyser basin would ever look green in my lifetime. If you enlarge (click on it to enlarge it) the picture you can see the dead trees, new trees and old trees that are behind geyser hill. Next we cross the Firehole River.
At the "top" of geyser hill is Giantess. That's the gas station next to the ham store in the distance.
We hang out waiting for Lion or Beehive. Friends hang out around Beehive with us.
But eventually we have to call it quits. Katz has been alone quite a while and she gets cabin fever if we are gone too long...So
3:05 End of the day.
We get back to Baker's Hole and end "my first day of real retirement". Hope my teacher friends had a good first day, I did.
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