Boiling River

Yet another adventure! Thursday we went to Boiling River in Yellowstone. To sum up, it’s a natural hot spring. But it’s way more awesome than that sounds.

It’s supposed to be “secret”; that is, it’s not marked from the road. However, at this point, tons of people know where it is, and the trailhead is so close to the road that you can see the cars parked. AND, the turnoff is at the 45 latitude sign, so it is marked if you know what to look for. However, even though it’s relatively well-known, it’s still not too crowded in the off season (winter), so it feels kind of secret. Kind of.

(yes, it was snowing)

The spring is about a half mile walk down a trail that follows both the Gardiner River and the road in Yellowstone. And you can see the steam almost as soon as you start walking.

Basically, there’s a “river” (really a stream) that comes out from underground and feeds into the Gardiner River. No one is exactly sure where it originates, but most people seem to think the water is heated by the same activity that forms Mammoth Hot Springs, which isn’t too far from Boiling River. The stream tends to average somewhere around 140 F, so that’s not the place you actually jump in the water.

This is the Boiling River, where it comes out from underground.

The place to soak is where the Boiling River and the Gardiner mix, and it’s well enough established that it’s a little bit engineered.

There are stairs built into the river bank to make it easy to get in and out (and probably to keep people from jumping in randomly and really hurting/burning themselves) and then there is a sort of rock barrier between where the Boiling River comes in and the Gardiner River, allowing the water to mix and pool, so you have nice warm spots to sit in.

I don’t have any pictures of us soaking, because we were in the water. It’s a little more primitive than Norris, and i didn’t want to break/lose my camera. But basically, it was great. And for anyone who comes out to visit me, we’ll totally go (if you want to).

Missoula

Monday Josh, Rachel and I drove to Missoula for the day. Partly to get out of Bozeman for a little bit for Spring Break, and partly because Josh and Rachel are both cyclists, and there were a couple places in Missoula they wanted to visit. It’s on the other side of the continental divide, which is a neat piece of trivia. There’s a green highway sign that lets you know when you’re crossing the divide, but i didn’t get a picture of it — i was too busy looking at mountains on the way there, and it was dark on the way back.

Anyway, we got into Missoula around lunchtime. It’s bigger than Bozeman and has more a downtown/historic district. It’s also home to the University of Montana, supposedly our arch-rivals. Someone explained to me that Missoula is more for granola-hippie types, while Bozeman is more for straight outdoor enthusiasts. Missoula is in a sort of bowl-valley (and is farther west), and i guess because of that the weather is more mild.

Missoula from the “top” of a mountain … that we climbed …

the University is at the base of this mountain.  We climbed the Missoula M trail, and this photo is actually from the mountain with the M on it, but higher up.  Apparently, most Montana towns that have both a Montana college/university and a mountain have an M trail, which means that at some point people made a giant M on the side of a mountain, and other people regularly hike up to it. There’s one in Bozeman, although i haven’t climbed it yet, but having climbed the Missoula one … I’m pretty sure the Bozeman one is better. I’ll let you know once the weather gets a little warmer and I actually check it out.

Anyway, so we had lunch and then the first stop (before the M) was the bike kitchen. It’s basically a community/coop shop that provides free materials to people who want to fix or build bikes. Bike parts and whole bikes are donated, and then people can come to the shop to use the parts to fix their bike or put together a new one. The trade-off is that people who use the shop donate time or money to keep the shop running. Rachel was so, so excited to check it out, and it was a cool place even for me, who knows very little about bikes. But i think the best part was at the end of our visit there. We “found” an awesome two-person bike tractor thing.

and they let us ride it!

It was pretty awesome.

After the bike kitchen, we climbed the M, where Jennifer texted me about the W&M game on ESPN (we lost, but being on TV is still cool).

The white in the background is part of the giant, white concrete M.

When we got back down the mountain — which was really, really steep at points and still partly snow covered, making it all the more impressive that i didn’t actually fall — we then went to REI! which was the other reason we went to Missoula. It’s (as far as i know) the only REI in the state. Rachel needed a bunch of stuff, since most of her outdoor gear was stolen out of her car last year and she’s planning a cross-country bike trip at some point. And i needed a sleeping bag, since i don’t have one and it’s a hard thing to borrow, especially if the people you would normally borrow from happen to be going camping with you. So i now have a good sleeping bag, which is exciting.

Then we got dinner and drove back to Bozeman. Missoula is about a 3 hour drive each way, so it was a long day, but it was a lot of fun and nice to feel like i went on a trip, since i’ve been in Bozeman for most of Spring Break. And it was cool just to see more of the state, including going through the Rocky Mountains.

Up from the Abyss …

I disappeared for a while. Over a month, apparently, now that i’m looking at the blog. Sorry! I front-loaded my semester in terms of when certain assignments were due, and got sucked into a black hole of lots of work and little sleep for a few weeks. But now i’m on Spring Break, and can play catch-up on everything.

February was a good month — started out cold, but it’s been much warmer lately. We’ve even had a few days in the 50s in the past couple weeks. There’s talk that the winter here is coming to a close, although it’s not unusual to get snow through April, so i’m not jumping to conclusions any time soon.

As for some Montana-themed fun, we went to Norris Hot Springs again Saturday night. This is the fourth time I’ve been, but the first time i went on a live music night. It was funny — because it’s so cold outside, the musicians are housed in this plastic dome bubble thing so they can stay warm, but it has a sort of quarantine/Boy in the Plastic Bubble feel to it.

You can see the bubble behind the pool. And you can see the steam from the hot water. Usually it’s more lit up, but i took this photo as we were leaving and the hot springs were closing for the evening.

Here we are enjoying the springs …

It’s hard to take a good photo, because it’s dark outside but the flash reflects off the steam and whites everything out. While i don’t know how it works exactly, they basically direct the hot spring water into the pool by having it stream up from the floor boards.  They drain the pool every night when they close, so the water’s always pretty clean, even though it’s not chlorinated or anything like that.

We’re hoping to go to Boiling River this week as well, and if we do i’ll definitely take some photos and put some up.