Yellowstone

So, as part of my TA duties for field camp, I am in Yellowstone for the week. With highs supposed to be below 30 for the next 2 days, it is going to be a little bit cold, and I am guessing there won't be as many tourists as there have been when I have come in the past. I have all my winter clothes out, so hopefully I can stay warm through this adventure.

Since I am in Yellowstone, I thought I would post a bit about my last adventure to Yellowstone with my roommates. There are some parts I don't care to recount (such as getting sick the night after visiting the park...), rather, I would like to share some of the wisdom learned from the Yellowstone trip. The first, and possibly most important thing we learned was how to stop someone from tailgating you. The solution is quite simple... have your passenger roll down the window, tap your brakes, and have the passenger point out the window. Apparently, people are so obsessed with seeing wildlife in Yellowstone (including some of the mangiest foxes I have ever seen), they will stop the car at any hint of an animal. We used this to our advantage several times, and while it may be somewhat mean to prey on people's curiosity, in the long run it was probably better than slamming on the brakes and causing an accident. It also turns out that anytime you are stopped somewhere, people assume you are stopped to look at something. We found this out as we stopped to stretch our legs at a parking lot at a trail we had decided not to hike and had three cars stop in 10 minutes to ask what we were looking at. They were very disappointed when we said, "Nothing".

The other lesson we learned in Yellowstone is that if you sound like you know what you are talking about, and you have a few people stand around you and pretend to be interested, other people will stop to get the free version of the tour. Our plan on this one was to read the signs near sites, have one person recite what was on the sign, and see how many people we could get to stop and listen. This worked reasonably well for a while, however the experiment was aborted when one of our group decided to ad lib a bit and shared information that the onlookers recognized as false (for the record, the acid lake should not have a pH of 16...not only do you not find pH of 16 anywhere, a pH of 16 is, as the Asian onlooker put it, "Very, very basic")

So, there you go, a few things you can try to have a little fun while you are enjoying Yellowstone National Park. I know we had a good time with it.