Yellowstone (Fairyland Basin)

SLC / Yellowstone (late June 2009)

THis post is quite late. We did this trip 3 weeks ago!

I made a visit to SLC where we celebrated Seth's bday, attended the wedding of one of one of Seth's best buds from high school and college days (Ben Passey), then headed to Yellowstone with my dad and a buddy of mine from here at UW (named Christian, who is actually back in Denmark now). Selected Yellowstone pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/200906YellowstoneSelected#.

It was fun to get together with all of Seth's old SLC crew for his birthday celebration and for Passey's wedding. The wedding was fun. I got into some interesting conversations. Talked to a Swedish Jewish woman who told me a bunch of history of holidays (like Hannukah and Christmas). Also talked to an older couple about global warming (which often comes up when i tell people that i do research in fusion science), and about the justification for our government support of NASA. We also got together with a few of my old buddies (Mano and Poore). Seth and I hung out a lot with eachother's friends...

My sister Tess just did a great post about the family trip on her blog,
http://tessothy.blogspot.com/2009/07/family-visit.html (pictures courtesy my mom).

We arrived in Ystone Monday morning. The crowd was horrendous. I almost lost the handle while driving the big Ram pickup and simply drove over some of the tourists' cars. But Christian's danish etiquette restrained me.

We had a lot of interesting conversations, many of which did not end up in wrestling matches. As i've mentioned, Chris is danish. But he seems to have had a bad reaction to the heavy dose of liberal social policies in Demnark. He largely agrees with Libertarian ideas. We had a heated discussion about whether it would be better to let the free market handle Yellowstone or not. Chris thinks that private conservation efforts would be sufficient to protect the Park and all of our other protected wild areas in the US. My dad and I are fairly convinced that capitalists would gobble the place up and spit it out. Another interesting discussion was about gun control. In demnark, handguns aren't allowed. A shopkeeper who'd been robbed several times eventually got ahold of a gun and shot a robber. The shopkeeper was thrown in jail. We talked about when somebody like the shopkeeper is gonna just snap and how everybody has a breaking point beyond which any morals or compulsion to follow laws goes out the window. Christian pointed out that there's a fundamental question about how much power governments should have, arguing that they will be inefficient because they aren't part of the free market. I pointed out that governments were established essentially through free market forces anyway. So it IS the free market keeping Yellowstone alive!

Lots of beautiful scenes in Yellowstone. We finally made it to the seldom-visited Fairyland Basin. It was quite a slog through a fog of mosquitos and mile upon mile of lodgepole pine downfall. But the fantastic thermal features along the way, plus the Basin itself made the slog worthwhile.