Pilgrimage to The Fire and Ice

Yellowstone is a package of excitement: geothermal features with half of the world’s geysers and Old Faithful where Mother Nature hosts a water dance show (almost) every 1.5 hour; wildlife so abundant that when I took my friend, painter Gao Hang there he went into an uncontrollable laugher seeing a bison doing a sand bath, 5 minutes into our visit. The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is no Grand Canyon, but its upper and lower falls flanked by the yellow stones, the park’s trademark from the rusting iron-rich rocks, has its own grandeur.

I’ve visited this favorite Nation Park of mine 3 times, but I’ve never been there in the winter. Yellowstone, unlike other NPs that are either open year-round, or closed for winter, closes its door by November and reopens in December to present an entirely different season of wintery wonder. With feet of snows on its caldera, 5 miles above the molten magma, and the hot and cold’s clashes at the pools, mud pots and geysers, Yellowstone in the winter is a duel of ice and fire, and a must for my Pilgrimage of Light.

The Plans

The geothermal features are not just stunning, their periods in hours presents an unique opportunity. Instead of thousands, millions or billions of light-year-away galaxies, I get to project objects of our solar system, at distances the light can travel to us in hours. Do we have a match? Yes! Saturn’s 1.5 light hours away in average, that’s also the average interval of Old Faithful’s eruptions.

While I got busy collecting NASA’s Saturn images, my wife/travel companion/assistant Olive, has made her plans as well. Winter visit to Yellowstone presents a logistic challenge, as most park roads are closed to private automobile traffic. All movements in the park are either on foot, on snowshoes, cross-country skis, snowmobiles, or, on snow coaches.

All I cared was that Old Faithful will be only a 10-minute walk for Old Faithful Snow Lodge. I want that unlimited access in case we need multiple night visits to the geyser for any success. Olive, on the other hand, wants to see something during the day. Oh, right, most people do want to see something during the day in a national park. I’m the weird one that forgets about normal sightseeings.

The Arrival

Olive’s itinerary was designed with relaxation in mind. We would arrive at Bozeman, MT on plane, stay a night, then we would take a shuttle bus to enter the park and stay another night at Mammoth Hot Spring’s historic hotel. The latter couldn’t happen because of the damage caused by the great flood at Yellowstone in June. Instead, we would have Gardiner, the gateway to Yellowstone, as the stop for another night before we enter the park.

And finally, we were on the snow coach, inching towards Old Faithful in single digit temperature in Fahrenheit in an otherwordly landscape.

Old Faithful

The routine of surveying during the day and projecting during the night brought us to the predicted 4pm eruption. And Old Faithful delivered.

For those who knows Mandarin, you can eavesdrop the discussion for projection between Olive and I. The eruptions in winter were rather different to the ones in warm days. The mix of hot water and cold air produced much more and higher flying, “solid” steams. For those who wanted the water dance, it might be a bit disappointing that the fountain of nature is veiled. For me, however, Mother Nature’s oversized steamy projection screen provided excellent opportunities.

Here is another great reason to visit Yellowstone in the winter. At this boardwalk surrounding Old Faithful, there were just a few dozens spectators. In the summer time? Thousands. If you are shorter than 5’6”, you would have to crawl through spaces in a forest of legs to get yourself a front row view, unless you can settle for just the sound effects.

The Frigid

Forgive us, vegan friends. but we did try bison short ribs before braving single digit temperature. The tasty meat cooked in red wine provided energies and kept us going, like what they did for the natives.

We made our first attempt at the 7:30 eruption. The stiff fingers and the short duration of event proved to be too challenging for my method, so far designed for formations that remains unchanged for a few million years. The steam dissipates in a matter of seconds. I had to adapt.

“I’m going to have you fully in charge of the composition of the projection,” I said. “We can’t respond to the shaping of the steam fast enough if I give you instructions.”

Olive remained silent, which translated to she did not object but she was thinking whether she would agree or not, but at the moment she couldn’t voice her objection effectively and she might do it later.

Back in the hotel room for a break from the cold, I asked her to practice a bit of quick actions on the Manfrotto geared tripod head. This is a great piece of equipment for nuanced composition. But to make it respond quickly, one needs to make it an extension of one’s fingers.

Surely, a musician can agree with the importance of practice.

In the meantime, I swapped the slide with a color image of the Saturn which not just shows its signature orange hue, but also a rare, blue Saturnian aurora.

Once again we put on layers and layers or clothes, adding the scarves, the caps, the gloves, attaching the crampons to the shoes, carrying the gears, and finally, we made it to Old Faithful before the eruption window. We set up, then we waited.

And thank you, Old Faithful, for another punctual delivery. Olive and I took our stations and executed the plan. She aimed, I clicked. And it worked.

Not only we got Old Faithful and Saturn nicely juxtaposed, we also had Big Dipper’s cameo appearance, to the right of the steam.

High 5, Olive!

The Hike to Morning Glory

The success of the very first night gave me a shot in the arm. Strategically, this would be the time to do something harder and veering off the main path, technically, aesthetically and/or content wise. I’ve been drooling over Yellowstone’s many colorful thermo pools, not literally, as I don’t want them to be contaminated by my personal organism. This is Grand Prismatic Pool, taken by me in summer 2017.

My current projection capacity has way exceeded this geothermo feature’s diameter at 300 feet. What will keep me from attempting this site will be the inaccessibility during winter time. We will need to do cross country skiing or to ride snowmobile, and like always, the return trip will be in total darkness. There’s also the uncertainty of how projection would work on a body of water.

Making Grand Prismatic a reason for another pilgrimage, I chose a less ambitious site at Morning Glory Pool.

This is a time-lapse video on the hike from Old Faithful Snow Lodge to Morning Glory. This was on the day prior to the actual projection.

When we went for the shot, it wasn’t such a pleasant hike at all. The sky was overcast, the wind blew and the snow fell. The last thing one would do was to take out a cellphone to do such a video.

Morning Glory might be much smaller than Grand Prismatic, but’s full of intricacies. The fading cloudy daylight could barely bring out any discernible colors from it, but I brought my own light to reveal the hidden beauty.

Liller 1 star cluster’s image by Hubble wasn’t so colorful. The colors we see in this photo are reflected by the the pool’s living organisms. Yes! Projection into the thermo pool is not only possible, it presents a rare opportunity for the terrestrial feature to provide the colors.

Grand Prismatic, you will be the next.