Sunday, July 27, 2008

Yellowstone - July 26-27








We’re mountain-lovers and Yellowtone has some mountains, but mostly it has wildlife and steaming natural features like geysers, boiling mud pools and steaming holes and boiling springs. We wandered the park from dawn to dark the last several days including two visits to ‘Old Faithful,’ ’hiking the length of the ‘Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, circumnavigating Yellowstone Lake, reading the constant spin from the park service on how good the 1988 fires were, but mostly seeing wildlife: bear, moose, elk, deer, coyotes, wolves and buffalo and several kinds of rare birds. Yellowstone is not a zoo, but it almost seems like one of those drive-through safari parks…wild animals were everywhere!

The highlight of Yellowstone for me though was not the wildlife but the church life. We attended 8AM Sunday morning service at the Old Faithful Inn where Jarod Osborne is serving as the summer chaplain. We had a wonderful service and Jarod preached a great sermon to the gathered group. We got to visit with Jarod and his wife Esther after the service. Jarod was one of my students at IWU several years ago and he is now in Princeton seminary and this summer national parks chaplaincy is one of his two required internships.

Since we have finished the overnight backpacking stage of our vacation we did not do all of the 1,000 miles of trails in Yellowstone but we did exhaust every road in Yellowstone before biding it farewell and heading north to wherever this road takes us…

1 comment:

::athada:: said...

Thanks for the tomatoes ... I will try to get to watering soon so it's not all shriveled up when you get back. AND if you see that the tomato wire has fallen, I promise I found it that way.