Somebody got his Master’s degree. Yay!

And we’ve been doing some day trips, including one to yellowstone last Friday. It is baby bison season, and they are all SO cute. They are the little orange furballs looking exhausted in the above photo.  I took some better/closer pics with Paul’s camera but he hasn’t uploaded them yet.

We also did a little tour of the Old Faithful Inn, which was pretty interesting. The Inn opened in 1904 and was one of the first of it’s kind–rustic–since before that, national park hotels were made to appeal to wealthy people from the east coast who felt comfortable in more familiar surroundings. Montana was still scary wilderness at that point. The builders  were actually allowed to use materials from the park to build the hotel (including 500 tons of volcanic rock and all of the trees you see–which originally had the bark ON, although they removed it later). The bent branches you see making up the levels form when something happens like: lots of snow builds up and the branch grows around it, or a tree falls and rests on the branch, and the branch grows around it. So the crew (of fifty men, who built the hotel in a year) went out and found those injured trees for their curves. The inn’s roof also extends to 76.5 feet at the peak, which is the average height of a lodgepole pine, the most common tree in the park. And in case you were wondering, the altitude is too high for termites, and due to climate and lack of bugs, it actually takes a fallen tree, out in the elements, one hundred years to weather away in Yellowstone. Crazy! You can watch a little video about the inn here.

We also stopped by the Grand Prismatic Spring again– like everything in the park, it looks different every time. The colors you see in the ground are bacterial mats– different bacteria grow in the different temperatures of the water, hence the color range. So cool. As you can see in the photo, there was still a good deal of snow in the park. It is finally getting nice and warm though (as indicated by my first accidental sunburn of the season), and it is SO nice to go outside.

Paul and I spent this morning building a little hat tree for my upcoming craft fair. It came out pretty well for me not really knowing exactly what I wanted or how it would work. I’ll have to snap a picture of it in action this weekend.

I’m still catching up and haven’t even downloaded my photos from the week, so for now enjoy these two from Paul’s flickr. We took Alexa to Yellowstone on Friday despite the icy roads and freezing cold (and we survived!). It’s a totally different park in the winter– only one road is open, leaving you more time to observe, and you see tons of animals and few people, instead of the other way around. Below, I was watching a coyote along the frozen Yellowstone river. He was watching me too.

And here was the lovely sunset view on the way home, through Paradise Valley. The sunsets here are simply gorgeous, and this one was accompanied by the moon, which seems to appear earlier with each passing day.