There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip, day 9

If this takes me days to write, I am an utter failure, as this is a relatively long travel day and little else. 

Derek and I didn't necessarily wake up sunrise early, but we did wake up early enough that the sun hadn't quite risen. We had no intention of heading back into Grand Teton for sunrise photos is what I mean, but we did want to get the fuck out of this heinous hostel and back to a normal hotel. 

Our room neighbor to the left must have had a similar idea, as I ran into him in the hallway several times as we were both going in and out to load up the car. Derek asked me what he looked like and I told him if you looked up "rugged, handsome, travel hunter" he's the textbook photo. He was very polite to  me, though nowhere near as enthusiastic as our first night young boy neighbors had been. And I will say again (hopefully I said it before, it's been so long I do't remember) that the charm of the hostel stay was not from the hostel itself, but meeting the people who were sharing space with you. I DID enjoy that, seeing what other freaks were willing to save 100 bucks a night to share poop air with strangers. The rest of it I am happy to ferret away into my nightmare hole. 

Derek was in a great deal of pain from that heinous bed, so I packed up the car and got it ready for our swift departure. An hour after waking up, we were on the road. Happily,  happily, happily on the road. Grand Teton was AMAZING, but I was so happy to be leaving it behind. Maybe I'm pressing the issue too much, but Schwabacher Landing at sunrise had REALLY soured me on the entire park. It's silly, because literally every other interaction I had with people on that trip was lovely, why should one day ruin an otherwise good time? I don't know. It just did. I would go back to Grand Teton in a heartbeat if it was truly off season. Give me a time when it's pretty much just photographers who get it, and I will beeline back. Ansel Adams never had to deal with that shit. 

The drive to Estes was largely uneventful. The landscape was quite lovely, ranging from looking like The Black Hills to looking like Badlands to looking like...well...Colorado. I loved living in Hawai'i, it was easily the most beautiful place I've ever lived, but it's an untouchable, surreal kind of beauty. Colorado is beauty that's like...my kind. I miss Colorado in a way that's wholly different from Hawai'i. I miss Colorado in a way that's attainable, and I miss Hawai'i in a way that knows I will never step another foot on those islands again and I don't yearn for that, I just appreciate it. I yearn for Colorado. I told Derek that moving to Colorado was like experiencing an, "oh, so THIS is where I've been meant to be" kind of moment, and discovering who I've been supposed to be this whole time. Colorado is as much my home state as New York is. When Derek and I talk about retirement and forever homes, there is a not so small part of me that wants us to be in Colorado, even though the lifestyle I want is not possible there. 

Oh, Colorado. I love you. 

I am also very popular with the ladies in Colorado. Missouri where I live is not queer friendly, and I have not really gotten to experience a lot of the queer culture in STL so I have no idea how popular I'd be among femmes in my area. But Colorado I know. Not to brag or anything, but I did have 6 femmes flirt with me at the grocery store when I stopped to get food for myself for the next few days. Even though I did brag about it to Derek when I got back in the car. Well, I wasn't actually bragging, I was just kind of surprise delighted. 

We drove from the store we stopped at in FoCo to downtown Estes Park, a place Derek and I actually hadn't really explored much. The first time we went together we didn't stick around long, we grabbed a photo of ourselves in front of the Stanley and then headed off to RMNP (just to be thwarted by winter conditions), and the second time we were with my dad and Caryn and were running horrible late for a tour and then we had to drive the hour and a half back to Denver right after. Not much time for investigating. 

And nothing was going to change this time. Very little time to explore, RMNP was a last minute add on so I didn't build in a lot of leisure time.

Derek had found a rock shop and we were wondering if the rough there would be anything of interest to us. It was not, this was pretty much just a crystal shop, though they DID have some beautiful display pieces. 

I ALLLLLLLLLLMOST bought this. I bought Derek a knightia fossil block some time ago, he had been telling me how much he'd always wanted one, and since then we've collected quite a few gorgeous fossil blocks that we would like to display on the wall. I am gagging for one I saw in NM that looked like a shrimp somersault triptych, but when I called to see if I could buy it and have it shipped, the person on the phone told me no. Well. So much for that. I did love this one, and the price wasn't bad, but because Derek found us another place to go a little further out of town, I opted to not. Which in retrospect was a mistake. 

That is a truly magnificent Dugway geode, but that price tag. Woof. It never fails to boggle my min that this stuff is just free in the earth and we have to pay a premium for it. This is why I enjoy rock hounding, which...might I say that Derek and I did a lot more of than I mentioned and he has not let me forget that I've failed to detail our day in Weta where I found the most superior piece of petrified wood the world (read: Derek and I) have ever seen. 

We left the Estes rock shop and headed over to Dick's Rock Museum, a place I actually did not take any pictures at because I was too busy feeding duckies out of my hand and then looking through rocks. So I will offer you this link to check out instead, because I legit would have bought so much more rough from them if we weren't trying to not spend every dime of our travel money and to pay down some debt when we got home. As it was, we spent way more there than we wanted (but got some FANTASTIC agates and petrified wood). Anyway, if you want to see what it looks like, check it out here:

Dick's Rock Museum in Estes Park

With little left to do in our day but eat and get some sleep for a relatively early day (but not sunrise early) in what was a VERY comfortable room (FINALLY!!!!), we headed down to Denver to Seoul BBQ. 

This was one of the first places Derek and I went together. Our first big date was to the butterfly pavilion in Denver, and I think this is where we went afterwards. It's sentimental and also delicious. One of my favorite things to eat is kimchijeon. I haven't had one as good as the one I had in Chicago from Kimchi Pop 2, but the one at Seoul BBQ is really dece. So obviously I had a hankering for one. 

I am gonna eat fuck the shit out of you, she said to everything.

One of the sauces they brought with the banchan was so immaculate, Derek and I couldn't figure out what it was, it had to be a fermented soy  base with a little something else, maybe sambal? And so when we got home, we bought a bunch of different kinds of pastes and now I'm obsessed with this:

I am eating it on everything. Sodium levels be damned! I need it! I have POTS!

And after eating, we drove back to the hotel and crashed HARD. 

I did it! I am catching up! Ok, on to the next day, our latest morning in RMNP!

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip, day 8

After all of the time I spent convincing Derek that we needed to do sunrise on Jenny Lake, we did not do that. We slept through our alarms and got going for the day right as the sun was coming up. The first picture I took of the day was at 8:28am, so actually, we likely got going after the sun had already risen. Was I a little disappointed? Yeah. I think Jenny Lake would have been absolutely amazing, and absolutely private with nobody getting in my way and being inconsiderate. No time to lament what could have been, though, this was our last full day at Grand Teton. We decided to hike Taggert Lake, with a possible jump over to Bradley Lake. 

On our way to Taggert, we talked about the massive line down one of the mountains (I THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINK it was Mount Moran, but I cannot be sure) and wondered what it actually was. One of the things they teach you in almost any drawing/painting class is "nature doesn't make straight lines", but how like...when you pull away from the details, nature makes straight lines all the time. 

Case in point:

Suck on THAT straight line, artists!

We didn't know what it was, and sinceI had to go turn in my Grand Tetons Junior Ranger book (!!!!!!) at a ranger station, anyway, I figured I would look around at all of the information to find out, and if I couldn't, I would then ask a ranger. 

I didn't mention this before, but a ton of trails and trailheads at Grand Teton were under construction while we were there. I mentioned it when we went and looked at Moulton Barn, but that wasn't the only construction going on. Quite a few things were closed because they were working on them. We had actually been operating under the assumption that Taggert Lake Trail was closed, because there was a closure notice on our park map for Taggert Lake, so I had scrapped it off of our to-do list...but we kept seeing cars in the parking lot, so we popped in to find that it is quite open, it's just a section of it that's closed. 

Closed for blasting, eh? Dirty Grand Teton.

We got started on the trail at pretty much 9am sharp, and while the parking lot had quite a few cars in it, it was far from as packed as we had seen it get the two days before. I again opted to pack light...much lighter than any other day, in fact. I didn't bring my camera bag at all. Taggert Lake was about a 5 mile hike, and all I brought was a bottle of water, my phone, and an IQ Bar in case I needed a snack. I didn't ask Derek to bring my camera, I just didn't bring it. I wanted to just enjoy myself taking a hike in the morning with my spousal unit, in a beautiful location, without assessing light, or determining angles, or finding the best spot. They would all be the best spots. And I actually really enjoyed myself doing it this way. We DID decide at the car to not do Bradley lake. That would be a 7.5 mile hike, and while that would have been absolutely fine for our bodies despite the horrors of The Hatchet, we wanted to get to the other activities on our docket for the day, and we didn't know how long 7.5 miles would actually take us. 

We got going on to Taggert. It was a gorgeous day. 

We were really intent on looking at all of animal tracks and trails, so the trail through the forest took us a bit longer than expected. Which was totally ok, it was beautiful and the animal signs were plentiful. 

Not an animal sign.

I was a little surprised by this trail. I don't quite look at topography maps, and it was Derek who looked at ascent and descent of each trail, so when we had to go up up up up, I wasn't really surprised...

....it was the going back down down down that surprised me. 

On the way down to the lake, I thought I got yelled at by a park ranger. I had moved to the right for a pair of hikers coming up the trail, they stopped, so Derek and I went around them. The park ranger boomed down to us, "HIKERS GOING UPHILL ALWAYS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARK RANGER HERE!" I boomed back up, "I THOUGHT I MOVED TO THE SIDE ENOUGH, I'M SORRY!" Lucky for me, it was a misunderstanding. She was telling the hikers who stopped that they didn't need to stop. I know this because we actually stopped her to chat and she told me we had done everything right, but some people don't know they have the right of way when they're going uphill if they're not avid hikers. We talked to her for about fifteen minutes (not to brag, but she did say she loves talking to people like us), and I asked her what the big ol' line on Mt. Moran was. She told us it's a dike. She told us all about Skillet Glacier...which I've been calling panhandle glacier, and I don't know if that's what she called it, or if I'm just using synonyms for the hell of it. She gave us the history of the glacier, told us about the dike, and then talked to us about how this is the first year that out of country visitors are paying more for visits to national parks, and she's all for it. Which was disheartening, as I am distinctly NOT for that, and as she singled out Asian tourists for why this is such a great idea, I'm pretty sure her reasoning is xenophobic rather than equitable, as she claimed. I hadn't heard anything about this, which I stated, and said it didn't seem right, which Derek echoed, and then she told us that she had to get going, she was heading all the way out to Bradley Lake. Interesting conversation with a ranger that looked like Dr. Ruth, but older (which is dating me a lot). 

We were literally maybe an eighth of a mile from the lake when she left us, so we moved along and...as she had mentioned, the lake was absolutely stunning. It was still, it was quiet, it was beautiful. 

Derek set himself up to take actual camera photos, and I just wandered around, chatted a bit with some other hikers at the lake, and made a little squirrel friend. 

I wasn't fast enough on the draw to film her while she was getting her mushroom prize, but I did get several videos of her wandering around with it, and climbing up the tree to find somewhere to stash it. That was the best video I got, forever my favorite. 

Once Derek was done, we headed back to the car, laughed about a couple of young kids coming up the trail wearing VERY Osh Kosh Bagosh circa the 80s puffy jackets, and investigated the streams for more animal signs. We found a paw print and debated over whether it was a coyote print, or a wolf print. Derek told me that there weren't any wolves in Grand Teton, I told him he's an incorrect maniac, and 10 days later, we are still not settled on what the print is from. 

To fast forward JUST a bit to keep with the current paw mystery, our next stop was the visitor's center so I could get my Grand Teton Junior ranger badge, and they just so happened to have an area dedicated to animal prints, coats, scat, and preferred ecosystem. I took a picture of the coyote and the wolf, so we could compare and make an educated guess. 

coyote...

....or wolf?

The rest of the hike down was pretty uneventful, though we DID immerse ourselves in the strangeness of some of the lodgepole pines. We wondered if there was some sort of mass event that altered the shape of the younger growth and left the sturdier, older growth alone...

...or if there was some sort of pest that made the pines grow differently. Turns out it's neither of those things, lodgepole pines just grow like that. Their subsection is Pinus Contorta, it's legit in the name. Some of them are just interesting and crooked, and we learned a lot about pine trees when we got back to the car. 

(edit to add, I am having to chug 32 ounces of water right now so I can go get an ultrasound because I'm hoping to get my uterus removed...drinking water is disgusting when you're not actually thirsty. I hate this)

Circling back to our visit to the ranger station...and honestly, I should have just asked the ranger what the paw print was...I turned in my booklet and got my very first junior ranger badge. 

I had a little audience when I got sworn in by a park ranger, everybody clapped, and it took everything in me to not turn around and curtsy and bow. I was so excited to get my ranger badge, I was elated for the rest of the day. 

Next on our schedule was driving down to Jackson to go see the fish hatchery, which I actually enjoyed more than I thought I would. I initially just wanted to grab some photos for my dad, but learning about the conservation and the re-introduction of native fish whose populations are dwindling because colonizers are the worst was really interesting. 

I stuck my passport book into my purse just in case, and I was delighted to discover they had cancellation stamps at the hatchery. Derek had to go back up to grab his book, so I wandered around and waited for him, reading all of the info they had available on the walls, and hold on...

There's a junior ranger program here??? I looked around for someone to talk to...there was nobody available, but guess what was just out and about? Junior ranger badges. Just on the floor in an open bag. Right next to the junior ranger booklets. Did I want to steal one? Yup. 

Did I steal one? Nope. I looked through the booklet and it was all related to fishing, an activity I am very anti, so I decided that badge was not for me and I left the bag alone. I thought about yanking one for my dad, but also decided against that. 

Derek and I walked through the holding areas for the specific cutthroat troat they're working to preserve (I do have pictures of all of this, but I am eleven days home and so far behind in getting these up, so I'm just gonna be withholding), I took a few videos for my dad but they ended up being too long and wouldn't send (I need to get him and Caryn on Signal), all in all this was quite an enjoyable stop. 

The pond area outside was my favorite part:

Just brimming with cutthroats.

I am still surprised to have had such a solid time there, I really learned a lot about the fragility of the ecosystem and the rigid conservation efforts...enough that I felt internally hateful of the invasive variety of cutthroat troat we saw in RMNP and I was lowkey ready to cut a bitch. Bitch being all the fish that didn't belong there. Just to remind everyone, I am a vegetarian. More vegan than not, but I do go through phases where I want cheese or eggs, and I indulge those when they come around. 

We wanted pizza again, so we went back to Hand Fire, but we stopped first at the Museum of Wildlife Art. Derek and I were curious about if it would have a stamp for our book since it was the NATIONAL Museum, but no dice. No stamps. Just one funny sign in front of a statue:

We debated paying to walk through the gallery, but as much as I love art galleries, I was annoyed at this place for some reason I can't remember (I really need to get better about making time to do these day by day) and we left. I ordered our pizzas in the car, and I almost got a vegetarian pizza with goat cheese and arugula and pesto and cherries, but got almost the exact same vegan pizza from the day before, minus the butternut squash:

and Derek got the bison chili pizza which looked....underwhelming:

Underwhelming or otherwise, we both ate every morsel of our pizzas on the way back to the hatchet (no capital H for you!) to spend our last miserable night there before heading to Rocky Mountain National Park for the last leg of the trip. 

It is October 23rd. Home for 12 days. I am going to aim for finishing these up today, but I am clearly a very unreliable narrator, but in telling the truth to an audience and in reliably narrating on time. 

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip, day 7

Full disclosure, I'm going to complain again in a few paragraphs. Not about The Hatchet, I think we can safely leave those complaints in the previous day (I make no promises, though). But I am going to complain about people in general. My least favorite of the living things. 

We woke up at 5 to head out to Schwabacher Landing for sunrise photos. There is a glorious phenomenon called Alpenglow that happens riiiiiiiiiiiiiight before sunrise, it is stunning to see, and I think I can safely say that any photographer going to Grand Teton is going to try their hand at getting an alepnglow photo at Schwabacher Landing. 

Courtesy of...uh...Fine Art America?

It is very, very beautiful. I expected it to be busy adjacent, I figured there were a lot of people here like Derek and I. I guessed there would be maybe fifteen photographers hanging out with us. 

I was so fucking wrong. The wrongest I've ever been. 

When Derek and I got to the parking lot, it was pretty full. I was shocked. We grabbed our gear and hiked the quarter mile to the river's edge, and I was a bit relieved to see only one other photographer there. He said good morning to us, we chatted a bit about shooting on film while Derek and I figured out our locations and set up our tripods, and I relaxed a bit about the crowd. It was truly chilly out, I think it was about 30 degrees, maybe in the very high twenties? I guessed that the lot was full because people were going to watch the sunrise from the safe warmth of their cars while the silly photographers froze their collective nippies clean off of their chests getting the primo shots outside. Sunrise was at 7:26 that morning, we got set up by 6:40, it was still pitch black out, and I was a little frustrated that I couldn't see where I was setting up. I was worried I would walk too close to the river and plop myself into the very very icy drink, so I set up in a place I thought was decent enough. Derek bravely set up closer to the river, I worked on framing in the dark without being able to see what I was focusing on or what I was framing up, it would have been delightfully chaotic if I hadn't also been preoccupied by the slow trickle of people starting to work their way into the same space we were in. 

I want to be clear here that I am VERY pro people being out in nature. I think if more people experienced the outdoors, we'd have more people interested in its protection and preservation and care. I want people to see the aspenglow at Schwabacher Landing, I want them to want to experience the intense glory of nature in the real outdoors, not just in galleries or someone else's travel photos. I would have otherwise been delighted to see so fucking many people awake at such an early hour, huddled en masse by a river, just to see the sunrise on the Teton range...

except they were all so fucking rude about it. 

I do travel a lot. Derek and I have been to a ton of places over the last twelve years, and we are always taking photos. Always. People are generally very very kind to us and other photographers. If other travelers see us (and others) with our gear on trails, or set up in locations, they come up and chat with us, but usually are very respectful about if they're in our shot, they usually ask us if they can squeeze by or if they're interrupting an active shot, we have never been bothered by people walking in and out of our frames with reckless abandon. It has never happened in twelve years of travel photos, professional work in outdoor venues, I have only ever encountered polite, talkative people who respect what I do and the space it takes to do it. 

Does nature belong to me? No. No it does not, and I want to share it. I am HAPPY to share it. But what I am fucking pissed about is people not giving me a second thought and turning to look at me, and then standing right in fucking front of my camera. Right. In. Front. PLEASE understand that I am not actually implying that I deserve special dispensation because I have a camera, or that I am entitled to more space than other viewers because I have a camera. This is not what I think in the least. I am saying that it is good form to ask ANYBODY...camera or not...if you are in their way when you are in a group viewing something together. "Hey, am I ok to stand here? I don't want to get in your way!" This is something that is asked of me, it is something I have asked others, dozens and dozens of times, both before I had my cameras, and since. It is how to be a good citizen of the world, you just ask politely to make sure everyone can view the same thing you are there to look at. We all deserve equal opportunity to see a beautiful site/sight, and we should all be polite to our fellow viewers. It is what I expect of myself toward others, and what I expect of others toward me. Very reasonable, not at all entitled or insane, just consideration for others. 

Something to note about me that may be surprising is I am not nearly as confrontational as people think I am. I am actually pretty confrontation averse, for a few reasons, namely that I will either cry uncontrollably, or I will rage enough to beat the shit out of someone. I cannot regulate my emotions, it's a problem, and it is a game of emotional roulette determining which version of me you're going to get. I am also reluctant to advocate for myself because I'm afraid of looking unreasonable. So if you want to keep me quiet, harm me in a public space, I'll likely stay timid as a mouse about it. If you want to provoke me, harm someone else. I will rage at you as fuck if you bother another person, but if you bother me, eh. I'll just cry silently. 

Which is exactly what I did when the first person started running in and out of my frame without going around me, which there was plenty of room to do at this point and wouldn't have been at all an inconvenience. Derek was watching this as much as he could in the dark, and he later told me he could hear me sniffling as I cried quietly into my mittens, so Derek said for me, "hey man, it's rude to just walk in and out of someone's shot". Derek had another photographer behind him, set up not in Derek's way, and the guy had been walking in front of my frame to get back and forth to his friend that was set up behind Derek. The guy told Derek, "I know, I'm a photographer, too" and Derek was like, "then you know it's not ok to do what you're doing." And the guy didn't do it again. Derek wasn't rude, he was just straight forward. IT worked, I was relieved, and my relief would be very short lived, because this is when the non-photographer lookiloos started trickling in. I think, all things told, there were maybe 100 people watching this sunrise from the bank of the river. Of that 100, 5 of us had tripods and serious cameras on. Me, Derek, the guy behind Derek, the guy that was there before Derek and myself arrived, and one other guy a little further ahead of me, who set himself up in my shot, Derek's shot, and the photographer behind Derek's shot. 

Light had started cresting a little, and I was able to adjust my frame to get everybody out of it...kind of...but not really, and I was so fucking upset about this. I was crying the hottest tears on a very cold morning, which is a sensory nightmare, and that was further overwhelming me, I couldn't speak up for myself and I had about twenty people just directly in my fucking way, I was really upset and frustrated because I wanted this picture, and I couldn't bring myself to ask everybody to just move a little over for me so I could adjust my shit and then they could take their same seats. 

Derek and the guy behind him were vocally frustrated at the guy with the tripod in all of our way, and at about the same time, they started trying to gently get his attention to ask him to scooch a skosh. When he didn't pay attention, Derek got a little louder and more forceful and told him, "Hey man, you're in everyone's shot, can you  move?" As he was moving, the lady next to me scoffed and was like, "calm down, it's public land, brother" and something in me snapped a bit. This lady has no idea how many of us are actually working here. Some people DO  make a living selling landscape photography, there were so many art galleries in Jackson with photographers selling their prints to tourists (and making a killing, might I add...Derek and I talked not so jokingly about opening up a gallery in a national park tourist town), do I come up to her fucking place of employment and get in her fucking way? She doesn't know me, she doesn't know any of us, and public lands or not, there are still socially accepted etiquettes for sharing space with others. I turned to her and said, "ACTUALLY, it's pretty fucking rude to just get in a photographer's shot without asking if you're in their way or not." and she looked at me and said, "No, I know that, I know" and I shouted at her, "DO YOU???" She did not respond to  me, she just walked away, but I know I looked frenzied and ready to fucking sock any ol' bitch in the fucking face, because it was cold, and I had been crying, so my face was crazy fucking red, my eyes were crazy red, and I was being LOUD. Drea enthusiasts may be fully aware that I will not actually harm a fly, but random blonde cunts in national parks don't have any such safety knowledge. And if she HAD said something else, I think I would have thrown the fuck down. I was so fucking angry at what this experience had been and I needed a place...or a face...to loose that anger onto. Hers would have done just fine. 

Of the thirty people all up in my way, ONE woman was polite enough to ask if she could sit next to me and not be in my shot. I told Derek in the car a little later that she could have been all up in my shot, I would have moved heaven and earth for her because I was so happy that one person was polite. When her partner held up his cell phone to take a photo, she looked at me, saw his phone was in my shot, gently chastised him, and pulled his arm down to where she could tell it was no longer in my frame. Whoever you are, I love you, I adore you, and you may have my first born child, though they're 23 and a little world weary already. Not much of a bargain, but it's proper etiquette to extend the offer. 

All of this is not to downplay the experience of sunrise. It was glorious, I'm all around glad I was there for it even if I did spend the full frozen  hour on Schwabacher Landing crying and frustrated. 

These photos are going to suck.

After alpenglow and proper sunrise, Derek and I walked back to the car where I vented my frustrations....still crying...and I was very worried that the entire day was going to be ruined by the experience of thoughtless people at Schwabacher. After all, I told Derek, we got there first. It isn't like we showed up late to the party and expected everyone to move for us. It is not an obscene thing to think that everyone who shows up after you should consider the people they're joining. As I was lamenting what I considered a deeply rude social experience, I saw something that perked up my entire day, very literally.

An eloping couple getting their wedding photos taken. It was 7:30 in the morning, it was BARELY 30 degrees out, and that gorgeous bride and her gorgeous husband were trekking out to a gorgeous, freezing location to get their gorgeous (I assume) wedding portraits taken. I loved seeing this so much, I have about ten photos of them walking to wherever it is they stopped at. A girlfriend of mine eloped to the Teton range and I sent her a photo and told her I was thinking of her. It definitely set my head space back to the right mindset to go do Jenny Lake/Hidden Falls. And for those of you playing the home game, the teton range doesn't disappoint after the sun has come up...it's just as dramatic and beautiful. Derek lamented not staying longer until the crowd thinned out a bit, and I get it. 

It's public lands, brother.

Derek wanted to do a little bit of animal watching before heading off to Jenny Lake. We had chatted with a ranger the day before about where to go for moose and elk, he told us to go to a location that was...uh...closed. A bit delfated, we asked a different ranger, he gave us another location, and we headed there. We must have been on the right track, because we did spy a herd of elk on the way:

The other acceptable term is "gang". 

The tell of The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as I've mentioned, is cars parked on the road way and a gaggle of onlookers with scopes, phones, cameras, bare peepers, what have you, all pointed in the same general direction. On our way to our suggested location, we saw one such horde, complete with the flashing lights of ranger vehicles. We asked each other if it was critters or an accident and slowed down to rubberneck and find out. 

It was critters. A moose family of critters, in fact. Derek pulled up to a space to turnaround, but by the time we got back, the moose had moved on. Disappointed, Derek made his way to who knows where. He didn't know where he was going, I didn't know where he was going, but as our travel luck decided, it put us right back in front of the moose. In a pretty private viewing area. 

Get 'er, Ray. 

I grabbed that photo of Derek really quickly and decided to get out and take a few pictures of the meese meeself. Knowing full well I am not a great wildlife photographer, but what are my chances at having this opportunity again?

Oops! All moose!

I did manage one decent photo out of this excursion, but I got bored of it far faster than Derek did. What DID keep my interest were the two absolute lunatic photographers way closer than the dictated 50 yards from the moose. Myself and a small crowd of five others watched in sadistic fascination as they crept closer and closer to a fucking unit of a bull moose

surrounded by two mamas and two babies. Derek mentioned coming for the moose and staying for the goring. Nothing happened to them, which kind of upset me, because people do not need to be that close to nature, and if they get dangerously close, nature should sort out the problem accordingly. When it doesn't, these idiots get emboldened and invite other bold idiots to ruin it for everyone. I hate these people. 

Once Derek was done, it was time to head over to Jenny Lake. There is a waterfall at the "top" of Jenny Lake called Hidden Falls that you can take a ferry to. I had no interest in taking the ferry, I wanted to hike the lake. And I supposed it's just as well, because we arrived to find the ferry closed for the season. 

Water water everywhere and not a boat to...drink?

This was a really nice hike, pretty easy as hikes up a mountain go. But my pack had been giving me some trouble, so I didn't want to take my tripod. Derek said I could just use his. When we came to the first edge of the lake,I wanted to take a photo, Derek found that he hadn't brought his tripod, and while I said that was totally fine, he opted to go back and grab it (which did end up being the right call for later). I popped into a little hideaway spot on the lake and thought to myself, "this would be an excellent location for sunrise photos, and I doubt anybody would be here". 

That was exactly where I wanted to do sunrise shots the next day. When Derek came back, I excitedly told him what I was thinking, and he disagreed pretty soundly. I spent the duration of the hike talking him into it, and by the time we were heading back to the car, we had agreed (read: I forced my will upon him) to take sunrise photos on Jenny Lake. 

I did quite enjoy this WANTED sign at the beginning of the trail proper:

Dead or alive!

The hike itself was quite nice, until my knee locked up so bad that Derek and a stranger had to help me get off of the trail and into a sitting position. I had been outpacing everyone, taking the trail at a great clip, enjoying myself immensely, and then BAM. My osteoarthritis icked into high gear and literally locked my knee up. It took about fifteen minutes for me to work it out so I could flex it again. I am Jack's vexatious knee. 

Despite the hiccup, I really enjoyed the rest of the hike. I didn't really slow down my pace, which Derek told me was way too fast and I was missing the beauty, but...like...he was wrong. I've always been a quick-paced hiker, and I manage to take in the beauty just fine. Jenny Lake is truly lovely. It is so deep and so clear you can see all of the dead tree fall in it. I told my dad it reminded me of the dead marsh from LotR. I told Derek the same thing, but he didn't really care for the reference. 

It was a pretty uneventful hike to the falls. My knee mostly behaved, though it was a teensy bit problematic, and it was pretty swollen the rest of the day. Here is my knee at the top of the falls, where I rested while Derek took photos of the falls.

I peed right behind myself!

It is swollen and red, you can tell, but it felt mostly fine. I drank some water, had a tiny IQ bar as a snack, and waited for Derek to be done. I think he fiddled around with getting a photo for about thirty minutes before he determined he wouldn't get the shot he was after, and we should head back down. We had chatted with a couple who asked us if we had done the loop before, and we said no, we hadn't, but it was only 7.3 miles if you did the loop versus 5 if you did the out and back with the falls as the stopping point. I asked Derek if he wanted to do the loop, and we both figured with my knee being finicky, the out and back was the safest thing. A little disappointing, I just love hiking, and I love being outside in nature doing nature bitch stuff. But in retrospect, I WAS for sure ignoring the severity of my knee. It hurt worse than I allowed myself to recognize, and I am lucky I didn't hurt myself in a lengthy recovering time type of way. As it is, I started doing the three mile trail here when we got back, and my ankle is kinda fucked, so I'm giving myself this week to rest it before I get back to hiking every day, cycling every day, and lifting weights four days a week. 

The falls on the way down are just as pretty as the falls on the way up:

but I was strangely not interested in trying to get "pro" photos of all of this. I just enjoyed the beauty of it in the moment, took some less than great cell phone photos, and put it all in my admittedly shitty memory. I assessed everything in the moment and didn't like the light, it isn't like I didn't have valid reasons for not unpacking my gear and giving it a go. I just...I wasn't feeling it. Derek kept telling me I was going at too fast a pace to be really enjoying the scenery, but that is far from true. It was beautiful, and I was taking all of it in. At a decent clip. 

When we got back down to lake elevation, Derek wanted to try and get a photo of a sun bleached stump sticking up from Jenny Lake. 

He wasn't quite sure where he wanted to try and get the image, and I suggested a rock that jutted out into the lake. I had seen two people lunching on it on our way up, I figured photos from it might be kind of cool. He wasn't as keen, so I went over there and posted up in the rocks on the lake's edge and tried to get something. I haven't yet looked to see if it turned out. Stay tuned for future disappointment along with me!

I took a ton of pictures of the trail on the way up, it was just so pretty, but I feel like a geek trying to give a yard by run image rundown of the hikes we do, so I didn't. A couple won't hurt, though. 

It was about 12 in the afternoon at this point, we had been dawdling about for far longer than I wanted to. I no longer had to pee, but Derek did, so we had to find a secret pee spot for him where nobody on this busier than I had assumed (a trend throughout this whole trip!) trail. We found the perfect place:

and I pretended to take pictures there while Derek peed, and then he finished and in order to be extra inconspicuous to an audience of none, HE pretended to take pictures there:

Spot the difference!

Except I think we both took actual photos there. 

I really did not bury us in detailed plans for every day we had, I just had a thing or two to do and then the rest of the day was fair game. After Jenny Lake, we didn't have much going on, so Derek suggested we look for other sunrise spots, just in case. We drove out to Oxbow Bend and found the river must have migrated for the winter along with most of Jackson lake. 

No river! Denied!

It was low, if not empty in most places. We did get to a place where there was observable river, though, and Derek wanted to wildlife watch. So he got out his camera, I did not, and we parted ways to look at separate things. Except these shroomies, those we looked at together. 

I listened in while a couple talked about locking themselves out of their truck and waiting for help to arrive. I walked the river on the other side and looked for rocks. I watched people fly fishing. And then I got bored and went to look for Derek, and I found him chatting with a gentleman, as Derek often is chatting with a stranger and turning them into a friend. I joined the conversation and recognized the voice. In a big planet, small world moment, it was the same guy we had been talking to at Yellowstone a few days prior, out while we were photographing the eagles on their murderous dinner run. I interjected, "hey weren't we talking to you at Yellowstone?" and he said, "you sure were!" and then he stopped talking to Derek and mostly talked to me. We chatted about photography business stuff, he gave Derek and I some tax pointers for our next year's filing, his wife joined us and sat in front of her Swarovski viewing scope, and about fifteen minutes into us discussing how bad the pay is for transitioning from army to park ranger, his wife souts excitedly, "THEY'RE BACK, THEY'RE BACK!" and the two of them tell us very hurriedly, "it's otters" and off they went to photograph them. Derek and I ran to the river's edge so he could photograph them and I could watch them, and it was the absolute cutest thing I've ever seen. It was two baby otters and one grown up otter, swimming around, getting out onto the shore, digging for clams and bugs, and getting back in the water to swim to another beach. I didn't run for my camera, I just enjoyed the moment, like a superior being who is haughty and smug and only somewhat remorseful she didn't grab her camera. 

Derek likely got some cute images, though. 

I might need to add one of his to the final photo blog. 

My cellphone does pull away, and that's because our Yellowstone friend bonked me with his tripod and turned my whole body when he did it. He clearly did it on accident, no harm done, just wanted to explain why I am  uploading a video where only half the time is otter time. My other videos are over a minute, and I have trouble getting those to upload to Blogger. 

I was getting hungry, so was Derek, and I told him we neeed to head to Jackson to find a grocery store to grab some dinner, even if it was just cheese and fruit and something like low carb bagels. I couldn't eat snacks for one more fucking night, I was hungry. 

The overlook from Oxbow Bend. Your god, is it pretty.

So we found an Albertson's in Jackson, and right next to it was a liquor store. We wandered in to see if there were any local distillers we needed to get something to go with our Grand Pristmatic Rum. Turns out there was! We grabbed a gin and a local whiskey. 

We put our booze in the car and walked into Alberston's and not two minutes into looking for food, I said to Derek, "I really want a pizza" and Derek was like, "OH FUCK YEAH". So we stopped looking for food, found a local pizza place, and put in an order at Hand Fire Pizza. 

This summer's blockbuster: pizza!

Do you know how long it's been since I had pizza? I went vegan in 2017, I went keto in 2018. I haven't had a non-vegan pizza since 2017, I haven't had a pizza at all since 2018. And I was STARVING for a pizza now. 

Derek got the Proscuttio Brah, which is a version of the classic Hawai'ian but with proscuttio instead:

leave your bad pizza takes at the door, Hawai'ian is delicious.

I got a vegan pizza on gluten free crust with caramelized onions, impossible ground smeef, butternut squash, and light tomato sauce. 

My pizza, while a joyful experience, still manages to look depressing.

We stopped by the Bridger-Teton National Forest office to ask about free use permits for rock hounding in the national forest where we were met by a woman with the most extroverted, chaotic bisexual energy I've ever met. I came in and saw her giving flirt energy to Derek, and then she gave flirt energy to me. When I told Derek this, he said she just seemed like an exuberant person happy to share their knowledge with like minded people, and I was like, "nah, bro, she was bisexual and into both of us." I was so sure about that while speaking to her that I was super tempted to drop a hint about being bisexual  myself to see if she'd play along and confirm my theory. I didn't, her sexuality is none of my business, but like...girl was a bisexual gremlin if I've ever met one. I salute you, forest lady. You will live forever in my heart. 

Our pizzas did not make it to the hotel intact. I had three slices left, Derek and four, and both were completely totaled by the end of the our first hour back at our horrid little hotel. And that was pretty much our night. We DID bring in the gin we bought, we tried it, and found it to be so absolutely delicious that we returned to the liquor store the next day and bought three more bottles. No exaggeration.