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A quick note on this journal: This journal is primarily what I wrote while on the Yellowstone expedition itself. I’ve corrected some typos, made some additional notes in retrospect, and trimmed sections that seemed dull or distracting. By and large, however, it’s what I wrote out there. This expedition took place from June 10th to June 15th of this year.
Day 1 Toward Yellowstone: The Ride Up
A fairly good representation of the group dynamic.
We’re on our way north. We actually left about 8:30. Being in the mindset of abandonment—giving up my stresses and getting away—I feel more open to some of the beauty of home. The camera with me also makes me start to frame the surroundings for pictures. There’s plenty worth framing.
Shot of Utah Valley mountains before we left.
I find myself thinking of vulnerability, though I’m not sure what this has to do with Yellowstone, exactly. Still, it seems stirred somewhat by the escape into the wilderness. And the wilderness seems like its own metaphor for the interconnection, the vulnerability. The beauty, the risk.
The conversation on the way up is oddly across the board. We’re talking about marriage, about love, about work—about differing perspectives and experiences. Working through things, communication, marriage as a crap-shoot. C— is one of those sorts who seems uncomfortable with silence. There’s hardly a beat but she comes to another question. Probing, kind, interested—nothing obnoxious, just persistent. A hum, almost, like rhythmed white noise. I like people who converse like this so long as they don’t pressure me to be a participant—or shun me if I try to be. I suppose I’m bothered by either. It’s a sort of freedom of movement I crave. A respect for my voice, and my right to use it or not use it. I like the permission I feel I have to speak or not speak right now.
We’re less than an hour into the trip. I’m going to shut the laptop for now and get back to it later. But as a note, we’re past Salt Lake, to low mountains that roll on with sandy walls that blow off in billowing dust, all riveted in red, as the sky comfortably radiates its blue-ness behind it all.
Lava-influenced landscape on the way into Idaho.
The Second Half
We’re now at the halfway point to our first camp, more or less. Likely to have lunch in about an hour.
The beauty of Idaho’s mountains shouldn’t be underestimated, though a part of this is just the majesty of the rockies here in the western states. In Utah, you get numbed to it—the familiar mountains, never-changing. But here in the long sprawl, the long journey northward, the mountains become unfamiliar again—become new. Some roll in low hills, some form their own patterns against the backdrop of the sky—the stolid square formations, the little bumps, the jagged jaws. The dashes of snow providing contrast. The many shades of green, scrawls of brown, tan welts, and spasms of red.
The Idaho Mountains
I’m tired. Woke up to a coffee and a pill, both of which must be wearing off about now. It was 5:30am when I downed them. And running on maybe four hours of sleep; that feels like a generous estimate. Maybe as few as two. But napping seems wrong, is something I buckle against, just because I’m unlikely to see these mountains from this space for a good long while.
There, on the left, a dash of orange on top of a tall tan area. I’m thinking of the Irish hills, all green and patchworked for sheep, those town-made walls. And of Scotland, with its own patchwork, burst up by nature, the many shades of green I didn’t know before then. Here, it’s a sort of rusted green.
Idaho mountains at their deepest green.
The greenest of it is a powerful deep, but most is pale sage or russet or dirge-brown. And here are stones, clumped together in what almost looks like piles, but stacked so straight it must be nature pushing them like this. Pillars that run into cliffs. The gray-brown-green, the rust marks, then the road bends and these long cliffs turn into a mountain, then ebbs down again into the cliffs. So many look like they’re collapsing, hovering dangerously over railways or roads.
It’s not rust but a sort of orange algae. Life even on the rocks. These must be lava formations, part of the lava flows we’ll see later. Columnar bassalt. And a picture I missed, like so many, where the jagged earth jutted out like blades at an angle. At an angel. The steel-gray of it, like knives. A mini-arrete.
The freeway divides the colors. On the right it’s a dead landscape but topped with sage, speckled. On the left a deeper green, but spotted, dappled. And there ahead, like a gust of wind, a gray brush-stroke of stone across the mountain face. Green-gray, green that has forgotten to be really green, that has not withered but depleted, de-saturated. And topped there with dead trees, a forest of them. The green has been scorched, then.
The mountains change and change. Colors flash and spiral. New shapes and forms. This aching earth beneath us, internal friction as the world grinds against itself, and the repressed tension boils up in these beautiful rages.
Check out the next entry:
Lava flows and Earthquake Lake
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