On July 4th, we started the morning off by going to the town parade. The parade included pretty much every local business and politician. It went on for a while and it was hot! It started around 10:30 AM and we didn't get back until almost noon, if I remember correctly. The people in the parade threw out lots of candy and a lot of the kids had bags to collect it. The parade was very western, as you can see from the pictures below. Pretty funny!
After the parade, we wondered what to do... Most people we knew were working... Not much of a surprise there! As I've mentioned, almost everyone works in hospitality/tourism, meaning most people work any given day of the week. It is pretty easy to plan things with people at night, but the day is a different story. Anyways, with no other plans, William and I decided to rent a canoe and go to Jackson Lake. We have driven by the lake before, but never been directly on it. It is up in GTNP and probably about 15-20 miles away. We accidentally took the long way there and actually saw a pretty scary sight on the way there... a wild fire! It had just started the afternoon before (the 3rd) and went from 300 acres to 4700 acres in a couple of days... I'm not sure how big it is now because it seems that reporters here take the weekend off! Anyway, we didn't take a picture of the clouds from the fire on the way there... it really was an alarming sight, especially to someone who did not grow up around wild fires. I hope that it has calmed during the weekend, especially since we've gotten some rain. There is also a very large fire burning to the southeast of us that I believe is now around 90 square miles. I know the rain has slowed some of its progress, so I hope it will continue to slow!
Luckily, the Bear Cub Fire has not stopped any activities in the Parks. We had a great time boating across the lake. Most of the fun was just looking around. Let me tell you, I thought Lake Lure was cool with it's mountainous surroundings. Wow... I don't even know if I can go to Lake Lure anymore! I am spoiled by this:
Snowcapped mountains surrounding a huge glacial lake that you can do any type of water activity on. I've said it before, but pictures really do not do justice to the scenery here!
Amazingly clear water.
The less interesting side of the lake. There was an awesome paddle boarder, though! This might be one of our future activites.
Picture overload!
A sailboat making its way across...
This may be hard to see, but this is a "pyrocumulus" cloud. It doesn't look much different from the other cumulus clouds in this picture (probably because of the camera) but you could definitely tell in person. This was formed from the Bear Cub Fire. I'm telling you, it's not the most settling sight! It definitely produces some weird colors and looks much different than a normal cumulus cloud. (Google it!)
The tallest mountain in this photo with the big glacier in it is Mount Moran. This is an iconic mountain here and definitely has a story to go along with it. In 1950, a plane holding 21 passengers crashed onto Mount Moran during a storm. Well... they are still there. It is in such an "extreme location" that it's too difficult to recover the bodies or the plane. Climbing to the location is (obviously) discouraged. A little disturbing, to say the least!
Now, another pretty picture to forget about the plane crash! It's funny to see Jackson Lake now, because it is completely freezes over in the winter- you can ski across it! I'll report back on this in January.
I hope to post again soon with some more fun pictures. It has been in the high 80s lately. That, combined with the extreme sun, makes it hard to do too much hiking during the day. The other day in the newspaper the UV factor, on a scale from 1-10, was a 12! Yep, the arrow was off the chart! There may be very low humidity here, which is definitely nice, but the high altitude combined with little cloud cover makes for some strong sun. We were going to go to Salt Lake City (temps in the high 90s-low 100s there!) this weekend, but some other plans got in the way. I hope we can plan to go soon and share that experience.
