Fossil Forest Yellowstone: whole trees preserved by time, remoteness, bear country, and national park regulations. Why was this field trip optional?
June 28, 2011
This was a field trip to Fossil Forest in the NW corner of Yellowstone National Park. This was the only optional field trip. What was supposed to be a three mile hike was actually a six mile hike in the beautiful back-country of Yellowstone over ever fun tree fall!
The Tetons in the Morning
Along this pretty river in the woods you can find Andesite. About 50 million years ago this area was a subduction zone with stratovolcanoes, much like the Pacific coast and the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The Farallon Plate was subducting underneath the North American Plate. There is debate on how shallow or deep the subduction was.
A bear was here!
Bristlecone pine pine-cones, they only open with fire!
This is where we left the trail and started following GPS coordinates.
It's a rock chuck!
FLOWERS!
Look what we found!
Elk antler sheds!
A geode!
T
Yellowstone!
Is awesome!
Tree fall! It doesn't look that bad in the picture but it a lot of up and downs.
It was bordering on not-as-fun-adventure!
The first petrified tree I saw!
Beautiful piece of wood!
Lunch time!
This one nearly brought me to tears! Not only is it gorgeous but
I almost didn't stop falling down the endlessly steep hill!
I was never a mountain in a previous life.
Another nice tree, there were a lot of tree to see!
I found a leaf!
Petrified wood was everywhere! All the light colored rocks are pieces of petrified wood.
My favorite piece that we found.
Here is another example of tree fall. :)
Another geode!
A lot of people fish in this river.
Map
We're in Bear Country! We didn't see any but we found their poop and scratch marks!
We did pack bear spray! And yes, that is a real thing. It is not a repellent, it's like a pepper spray for bears.
The Tetons in the afternoon!
This was quite an adventure and I got to see some beautiful petrified wood! I would only recommend this hike to people who really like hiking and love petrified wood. The best part was the standing trees. Supposedly some of the trees are standing because there was a volcanic eruption, the trees fell in a lake, eventually sunk to the bottom, and some still stood. I think the idea came from Spirit Lake, which is next to Mt. St. Helens.
I recently got to go to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona and that also has some very beautiful wood (which is also a different color from the petrified wood inYellowstone). Petrified Forest NP has ridiculous amount of petrified wood (hence the name) that is a hop, skip, and a jump away from parking lot rather than a strenuous day hike.
No comments:
Post a Comment