Leroy's Art Blog

It is a rainy Saturday morning, so I have been trying to see just what the problem is with loading photos to my blog. As usual with such things, there really wasn't a problem other than my not knowing which tab to activate. So here come some belated pictures taken last month with my clan from China, during our trip to Glacier (would you have guessed, from the sign?) and Yellowstone. Those are my grandkids, Alice and Roy.

You can enlarge any of these pictures by clicking on them, by the way.

As they had told us, the parks really are much more interesting and rewarding when you get away from the drive-by tourist centers. We went to beautiful Bowen Lake, and from there backpacked in to Quartz Lake where we pitched our tents for the night. A Bald Eagle flew low over us, its wings making whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sounds as it flew along, and we watched it dive for a fish.

The Longpole Pine is by far the major tree in this area. Majestic, but they apparently burn rather easily. Most of the park seemed to have been burned over sometime in the last 50 years, leaving lots of blackened tree trunks. This would have felt tragic if the Ranger programs were not so diligent in explaining the necessity of periodic natural fires for the forest life cycle, re-growth, and animal diversity. This has been another dry year, and smoke from forest fires was a nearly constant presence, on some days obscuring the views like a fog.

When we were camping at the Many Glaciers site, this view greeted us right outside our tents every morning. Very red in the morning, its color changed throughout the day. We are on the western side of the park here, and the topography and feeling is quite different than it is on the eastern side.

The rest of the clan took off for a two-day backpack, while I stayed at Many Glaciers, and drove the car to pick them up at the far end of their jaunt. That's Paola, Roy, Alice and Matt in the photo. Left to myself, I joined a Ranger guided hike to Iceberg Lake, one of the sites that is featured for its beauty. It was the first day the trail was open, as it had been closed for ten days because there were too many bears in the area.

Still, we had to off the path at one point for a bear and her cub to stroll by. The Ranger was disturbed because the bears weren't spooked by us. That makes them more dangerous, and often bears who have become too habituated to being around humans have to be killed.

Iceberg Lake is in this deep bowl, with gigantic sheer rock faces on three sides. As a true glacier lake, it is this miraculously luminous green color from the minerals that the glaciers have ground out of the underlying rocks. Those white patches really are residual glaciers - they used to be much larger and many more not long ago. Global warming is very apparent here, where all the glaciers will be gone in a few more decades, or less.

Now, I'd set up this page so that the script nicely matches the photos. But I suspect that the dimensions of page are going to change when it gets posted and it will all become discombubulated. If so, sorry about that.