Firehole Canyon Drive
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Yesterday was just a preview, but
today was our first full day visiting world-famous Yellowstone.
The Yellowstone Caledra, located in the center of this first National Park, is actually
an active volcano.
The largest supervolcano on North America,
this caldera erupted several times in the last two million years.
Today it hosts half of the world's geysers and hydrothermal features.
After picking up Junior Ranger books for the children,
we started our visit with a drive through Firehole Canyon
taking many pictures along the way.
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Applying what I learned from
driving a trip on one charge,
I experimented online with all kinds of driving routes in Yellowstone
and quickly determined that there was no plausible way
I would run out of charge before we returned.
It turns out the tourists would slow us down so much
we ran out of time long before we could possibly run out of range.
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Lower Geyser Basin
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We arrived at Fountain Paint Pot trail to hike near the
Celestine Pool, Fountain Paint Pots, and the Fountain and Morning Geysers.
It was funny to see the children's reaction to the smells of sulfur, holding their noses.
For me the sulfur-infused warm steam surrounding me triggered memories of my youth
and made me smile.
Firehole Canyon Drive is one of many parts of Yellowstone meant to be toured from the car.
This Tesla gave us the perfect way to do that, driving in silence to cause as little disturbance as possible
to the environment, the wildlife, and other tourists.
We then drove through Lower Geyser Basin,
visiting Firehole Spring, the Great Fountain Geyser, and
White Dome Geyser (see top picture).
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Now that it was lunchtime, we continued to the Upper Geyser Basin
to have lunch and attend a Ranger talk.
We returned to Old Faithful to see the geyser erupt a second time.
Then we returned north to Midway Geyser Basin to
see the Excelsior Geyser Crater,
the Grand Prismatic Spring,
and Turquoise Pool.
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West Yellowstone
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Once we realized it was getting too late in the day to see much more of Yellowstone,
we returned to the west entrance.
The road there again was congested.
Along the way a storm moved in to start raining.
Time | Event | Range Remaining |
9:45 am | Depart West Yellowstone | 240 |
5:30 pm | Arrive West Yellowstone | 153 |
Range/Distance ratio: 1.14
Conditions: Traffic, construction, crowds, sightseeing
That was a great first full day in Yellowstone.
Because my son is the same age now as the
last time I visited Yellowstone over three decades earlier, I told him
he should remember this well
because the next time he is here could well be when
he brings along his children.
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Holiday Inn, West Yellowstone
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We took a swim at the pool at the Holiday Inn, then found a charming local pizzeria restaurant,
Wild West Pizzeria,
to have dinner. All the restaurants were surprisingly busy,
but then again the Park was extremely busy with tour buses of tourists from every country it seemed.
When we returned, I plugged in so the car would charge under the rain.
Cost to Charge: $0
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Dean E. Dauger holds a Ph. D. in physics from UCLA, where his group
created the first Mac cluster in 1998. Dr. Dauger is the award-winning
author in multiple American Institute of Physics' Software Contests and
co-authored the original, award-winning Kai's Power Tools
image-processing package for Adobe Photoshop.
After founding his company,
Dauger Research, Inc., its debut product,
Pooch, derived from Dr. Dauger's experience using clusters for his
physics research, was soon awarded as "most innovative" by IEEE Cluster
and continues to revolutionize parallel computing and clusters worldwide
with its patented technology.
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