Hello, Lana and Nellie

(And Mother Svetlana, Grandmother Larisa and my critic, Marilyn)

I have been remiss by not writing more often, but I hope to make it up to you by including dramatic photos of my trip to Yellowstone. Some of these you have already seen, and others will be new for you. These are my favorite shots.

I also went to Coeur d'Alene Lake, but after Yellowstone I just didn't find much interest in shooting more photos.

This blog is going to consist of photos and commentary, where appropriate. Enjoy!

This is the Hangman's Building in Virginia City, Montana. Inside, there was a beam as wide of the  building, from which highwaymen (robbers) were hanged by vigilantes. Vigilantes are men who take the law into their own hands. Inside the building is a diorama depicting the hanging of several individuals while the vigilantes stand guard with rifles.

Hangman's Building, Virginia City, MT

Later, this building became the city water works office, which was run by Sarah G. Bickford, a former slave who came west in a covered wagon. The only black in an all-white community, she took over the business when her husband died. In the doorway on the right is a shop that sells rocks, and I purchased two rocks that are a variation of fool's gold. Instead of being iron pyrite (iron and sulfur), they are a fcombination of iron, copper and sulfur. I look forward to presenting them to my two young scholars when we meet next.

YELLOWSTONE! The "Porcelain Basin," bright white from mineral deposits

Below: A fountain you don't want to run through. It is scalding hot.

Below: A "hot tub" you don't want to soak in, unless you plan to be a cannibal's dinner!

Below: Probably small geysers that stopped spouting. They are actually covered by smooth, clear, and very hot water.

Does the photo below suggest a fried egg? The dark spot is a steaming spout. The colors are created by bacteria that laugh at scalding water.

Below: A mat composed of heat tolerant bacteria.

Water that boils up from the ground carries minerals that form a new land cover. The edges of this pool at Mammoth Hot Springs are created by minerals that solidified as streams of water poured out of the earth.

This is another photo of boiling mud which can become the source of clay. The bubble burst just as the photo was taken.

The weather was wonderful this time of year: cool, but sunny. This is the beginning of the descent to Mammoth Hot Springs. 

Although it looks like the chipmunk below is trying to smother a giggle, he's just gathering pine nuts for the winter.

This is the only good photo I took of a grizzly bear. This bear became accustomed to people. Normally that's a death sentence, but it's actually living a zoo life and earns its living partly by trying to break into food containers. If a container keeps the bear out for an hour, it is given a certificate of durability.

MONUMENT: I had seen this rock pictured below eight years ago and came back for a second look. Does it look like it belongs there? It shouldn't. But how in the world did it get there?

ANSWER: In the 1959 Yellowstone earthquake, there was a enormous landslide that created hurricane winds that ripped clothing off of campers and -- in some cases -- blew them away, never to be found again. The landslide descended one side of a valley and came halfway up the other. This boulder rode the slide like a skateboard. It didn't tip over! A similar boulder did the same, carrying a smaller boulder the size of your piano all the way without dropping it. 

This bounder sits atop the slide, which entombed 28 campers who were asleep in the valley. Their names are on a plaque on one side of the rock.

How big is this boulder? If you look really closely, you will see a small sign at its base with a light green top. That sign is between 3 and 4 feet tall.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog.

Love,

Robert

 

A Yellowstone mud pot bubbles rock into future clay.

Dear Milana and Nellie,

Today's blog is a bit of a geology lesson, and we're going to start with two elements and a compound. I guess I should define an element:

An element is "each of more than one hundred substances that cannot be . . . broken down into simpler substances." For example, pure silica and pure aluminum are all made of the atoms that bear their name; they are elements. 

Water, on he other hand, is not an element, because it is a combination of the elements hydrogen and oxygen. Water is the compound I was talking about.

These two elements and a compound are the primary components of the clay we use for ceramics. And Yellowstone is creating tons of clay. It's taking a while, but the photo at the top of this blog is an example of the creation of clay. The action is probably getting a lot of help from sulfur, which comes from volcanos. (Another word for sulfur is "brimstone," because it's the stone-like substance you find at the brim of a volcano.

Now here is something else you may find interesting. For most of your life you have been walking on aluminum and silica. -- For example, all that sand on the beach? Silica. 

Silica and aluminum are very abundant and also very light. They differ from each other by only one proton and one electron. And that little difference means that silica can be transparent, but aluminum is opaque. Silica is an insulator and aluminum conveys electricity. Silica is brittle and aluminum is malleable. (Look up the word, malleable.)

These elements are the pond scum of the earth; they float to the top of the world, and they make continents, which are sometimes referred to as "sial," for silica (si) and alluminum (al). It's because of the abundance that mankind was able to create the first medium to write on (clay tablets) and vessels to hold food and water (pottery). In a way, clay was the foundation for civilization.

The igneous (look up igneous) rocks that are part of continents take a long time to break down into clay, but Yellowstone does it much faster with all the sulfur that's available from this super volcano; sulfur and heat make for a nice acidic brew that turns rock into clay much faster than the weather does.

Enough of a lecture. The rest of this blog is going to be mostly photos of what I saw yesterday. The photos should speak for themselves, but I've added captions anyway. Feel free to ask me questions, if you like. 

Also, start looking for errors in my writing. Marilyn found 12 in yesterday's blog. If you had found them, you could have made a bundle. (Well, OK, some spare change.) Maybe you can write to Marilyn and ask her what the errors were. She wouldn't mind hearing from you, and you have her e-mail address.

Love,

Robert

Photos follow.

The ground at Yellowstone smokes with boiling cauldrons of hot rocks and chemicals.

Yellowstone is the land of stinky air and sometimes you're not far from a cloud of steam and gas.

I'm not sure what they are photographing, but they sure are enthusiastic.

A geyser periodically shoots water into the air.

The water bubbling up from this cauldron seems to be crystal clear, but it's loaded with chemicals.

Another Yellowstone casualty.

Shallow pools of water sometimes look like an abstract painting.

These colors are created by mats of bacteria that tolerate the 160+ degree water.

I visited a "mud volcano" that bubbled and sputtered out the rock it had dissolved.

This pool looks placid, but the water is scalding hot.

More colorful bacterial mats.

This photo showed me what happens when the bubbles collapse. My eye didn't catch it, but the camera did.

For a while I couldn't figure out why the cars weren't moving, and then the reasons plodded by.

A grizzly bear saunters off after digging up a meal.

Hello, Ladies!

I would have said "Scholars," but there are more possible readers for this blog than originally intended. First of all, I'm writing to Milana and Nellie, the twin scholars. But I'm also including in the notification email the mother (Svetlana) the grandmother (Larisa) and mycritic, Marilyn. Four of you have never met Marilyn, but I have known her I think since I was a high school sophomore. She was a year ahead of me in school, and has never let me forget that, so she has gleefully decided to correct my writing.

Note: The twins didn't point out any errors in my first blog. I was aware of two, and Marilyn claims to have found others, although there is some disagreement over this. At any rate, the twins missed out on a chance to earn $2 by discovering my errors. They were: 

1. a missing "s" that should have followed the apostrophy on Mary's name. The mistake appeared thus:  "Mary'". 

2. This sentence:  I will be staying with Mary Fraser the cousin of my deceased wife, Betty." is missing a comma. Can you tell where it should have been placed?

A bison slowly ambles across a valley. No need to hurry.

I am writing this after my first day at Yellowstone National Park, America's first national park, which was created in 1872, when Ulysses Grant was president. The park has stunning geology, small herds of wild bison who will gladly gore you with their horns if you get too close, and the grizzly bear, which is the second largest terrestrial flesh-eating mammal. (Can you name the largest?) Check out this photo of a bison -- it looks like God grew tired and didn't finish making him a decent outfit. The last half of him is naked. Do you think he gets cold in the winter?

The weather started out foggy today, but then it cleared up and the sky was a beautiful blue. I wish Grandmother Larisa could have come along -- she wants to travel in good weather, and this weather is quite comfortable. And since summer is gone, the roads aren't crowded, which can make it difficult to stop and take in the views. 

Today I decided to go to Mammoth Hot Springs in the northern portion of the park. The road there takes me past some lovely vistas, such as this waterfall. . . 

. . . and past this vista as the road descends to Mammath Hot Springs: 

The view at the beginning of the descent to Mammoth Hot Springs

I say "descends," but the elevation here is quite high. My visit to the hot springs involved some hiking uphill, and the elevation is 6,500 feet above sea level and higher. I could feel the effect as I climbed up a wooden staircase.

Yellowstone is a volcanic area, and the ground water turns to steam is changes the surface of the ground as it emerges. It's dangerous to walk near steam vents such as this one, because the ground can collapse under your feet with deadly consequences. For example:

Hot stem and gasses escape from a fumarole along the highway.

You don't want to walk close to this steam vent, because the ground beside it has likely been hollowed out from under-surface flows, and you can fall into a very hot death.

The outflow at Mammoth Hot Springs builds new ground and structures.

Over thousands of years, percolating water built this terrace.

Some of the formations are quite beautiful.

However, the poisonous water is drawn up into trees, killing them. They look like skeletons.

The volcanism at Yellowstone creates all sorts of opportunities for discovery. For example, there is an "Obsidian Mountain" -- obsidian being a type of volcanic glass, usually black, and frequently with other minerals incorporated. The rock below was taken from that mountain and placed at an information marker along the highway. It's small enough to fit in the trunk of my Honda Fit, but just barely. But you're not supposed to take them home, and it would likely ruin my gas mileage.

I hope you enjoyed this posting. And look for errors! You're bound to find them, because I didn't proofread this posting very closely. It takes a while to create it, and I want to get back into Yellowstone!

Love,

Robert

To: Nellie Kislyak and Lana Kislyak

Hello, ladies! Or should I say, "Hello, Students?"

I understand you two are thriving at your new school and that you are embracing with zest your new status as scholars. I miss our sessions -- probably more than you do -- but I'm pleased to hear reports from your grandmother that you are enthusiastically becoming scholars. The hardest and most important work you will ever do will be thinking, and I wish you well. Have you won your $10 bet we made at our last session?

On Saturday I leave for my next great adventure -- a road trip to Yellowstone, America's first national park, followed by a few days at beautiful Coeur d'Alene Lake. While I'm traveling, I'll be posting photos and short reports on this blog. ("Blog" = Web log, a log being a diary of actions.) I have produced several blogs over the years about my travels and shared them with about 100 people I know. This time it's different. The blog is being written exclusively for my two favorite scholars, and I hope you will find the articles interesting.

My first stop will be in Richland, Washington. I will be staying with Mary Fraser the cousin of my deceased wife, Betty. Mary is a widow. Her husband died a few years ago of a nervous system disease  made famous by a baseball player who had that disease. His name was Lou Gehrig, and he was known as the "Iron Horse." 

Mary and I at the Columbia River with a riverboat
in the background.

The disease is called "Lou Gehrig's Disease" in remembrance of him, but its scientific name is Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Scientists do not know what causes this disease. If you Google "ALS and famous people", you may learn that another very famous person also had this disease.  I mention this because I hope you will become curious about some of the topics I cover and will Google those subjects to learn more about them.

One subject you may be interested in is the "Manhattan Project." This was America's program to build atomic weapons. Mary' home in Richland is very close to Hanford, the community which collected the plutonium that was used in the world's first atomic bomb. That bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, 10 days before I was born. The Hanford facility that developed this was top secret. Ironically, my father-in-law, Lee Goodell, knew some of the individuals involved. He was a pacifist during the war and was required to do community service for national forests. During that time his classmates visited him, so he knew they were involved in something, but they couldn't tell him they were making the biggest bomb in all creation. Hanford also developed the plutonium which went into the bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II. You can read more about this with a little help from Google.

Left: Hanford plutonium building.   Right: Trinity -- the first atomic bomb explosion.

This is as much as I'm going to say for now. I hope you enjoy the blog which was created just for you two, and I hope you will be curious and want to know more.

Until later,

Robert

P.S.  I have written and rewritten this post several times. I have tried to make sure I capitalized the right words, used good punctuation and had no misspellings. Read my blogs carefully to make sure there are no mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. I will pay you $1 for each mistake you find. If there's a mistake and you don't find it before the next posting, you miss your chance.