Timpanogos Storytelling Festival

 We are at the 34th Timpanogos Storytelling Festival with some wonderful other performers.  Some of them (but not all) are Bil Lepp, Carmen Deedy, Antonio Rocha, Brigid and Johnny Reedy, and Mara Menzies.

People start arriving early to see the flowers at the Ashton Gardens location.

This Festival has always had a family audience flavor with every age in attendance.  There are lots of activities for children in addition to storytelling.  We meet parents now with their children who themselves grew up being brought in their own childhood.

In addition to the tents, there is a huge waterfall Amphitheatre that holds thousands of people. This is one setting for evening performances. Here are people gathering, some areas for blankets only and others for chairs.

It is nice to be first in the Amphitheatre, since before dark falls you can see all of the audience!

I got to finish yesterday afternoon with Brigid and Johnny Reedy. Here they are playing the same guitar together!

What fun!

Thanksgiving Point

 Trish and I are now in LEHI, Utah, for the thirty-fourth Timpanogos Storytelling Festival.  I perform here every year and we love this Festival.

The Festival is held in the stunning Ashton Gardens at Thanksgiving Point located in LEHI, just about a half-hour south of Salt Lake City.

Before the Festival starts, we got a chance to visit the Gardens and check out all of the performance sites and tent stages…and…the astounding flowers!

Trish and I were here last for a workshop week at the beginning of May when 750,000 tulips were in full bloom.  Now it is dahlias and a host of mixed summer flowers filling this fifty-five acre wonderland.

The tents are spaced out among all of the beauty. Even before the stories are told, you are soothed by the magic of simply being here.  There is even a waterfall on one side of the Garden.

After a preview show called “Look Who’s Talking,” last night, today all eleven of us who are featured tellers get to work in earnest.  If you have never been here, it is a place to think about coming for sure.

Through the Tetons

 Trish and I love the Grand Tetons! We try to come here every year.

This year our visit was cool and wet and somewhat subdued…it was restful anyway.

We got one pretty good day when the mountains were visible, then the clouds took over. Even then the sky was beautiful!

This is the land of the elk.  Now it is rutting season. We could see a large female across the meadow on the lookout for mating.  None of them  are close up right now.

Evidence of the elk population is everywhere. In downtown Jackson the city park has these huge elk antler gateways on each of its four corners.

Just down the road, in the small town of Afton, elk antlers bridge their entire Main Street.

We will come back here next year and be looking for more animals and better weather!

Yellowstone Thermal Spots

 Staying at Old Faithful Inn, as the name suggests, means that we have had front row seating for all Old Faithful eruptions.  About every hour and a half we can go from our room directly out on the viewing porch and watch.

It is a perfect viewpoint.  From the same porch we can look all the way across the Old Faithful Geyser Basin and see what else is happening.  On one occasion, just as Old Faithful was erupting, we could also see Bee Hive Geyser in full eruption from the same spot.

In the afternoon we took a Yellow Bus tour to avoid driving and parking issues.  Visiting the Lower Geyser Basin was our favorite stop.

The beautiful colors of the Silex Pool, changing when the water cools as it overflows, is something to stare at for a long time.

On around the trail we watched the Clepsydra Geyser (meaning “water clock” in Greek) erupt non-stop.  It goes constantly twenty-three hours each day!

The Leather Pool is so named as it in 1916 supplied water to a then-existing hotel through a long leather-insulated pipe!  The water is in the edge of boiling.

On our way back to the Inn, we took the Firehole River drive and made our last stop of the day at Firehole Falls.  There is something here to see everywhere you look!

Old Faithful Inn

 Many years, as Trish and I travel to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, we come by way of Yellowstone National Park. Since we have been before and will surely come again, we have learned to focus on a single area of the Park instead of trying to do everything.

This year we decided to stay at the Old Faithful Inn, a destination in itself, at the Old Faithful Geyser Basin.

The Old Faithful Inn was built during the winter of 1902-03 and opened in June of 1903.  It is built of local materials, mainly Lodge Pole Pine and lava flow rocks.  The woodwork is amazing.  

When we arrived there was a whole bus load of Amish tourists at the Inn.  The men, experienced barn raisers themselves, were almost hypnotized as they stared and stared and even seemed to measure the internal structure of the Inn.

We stayed in one of the historic rooms right in the Inn.  The room was small and had no bathroom.  There was a sink, but the bath and shower room was shared and down the hallway.  This was quite a luxury in 1903: a steam heated room with indoor plumbing!  We loved it!  Back in the days when the Inn was new, the only way to get here was to take the train to Gardner, Wyoming, then take a stagecoach fifty miles down through the park.

The gigantic fireplace in the “living room” of the inn goes up more than five stories and weighs five tons.  It, and the entire foundation of the inn, is made of lava-flow rock sourced about a mile from the Inn.

In the Yellowstone fires of 1988, fire almost destroyed the Inn. 300 firefighters volunteered to stay behind and fight to save this building.  At the last minute, rain and a shift in wind rescued the Inn.  

One of our favorite places here is the observation porch. Located on the front of the Inn, the porch overlooks the Geyser Basin and faces Old Faithful as it erupts every ninety-one (plus or minus thirteen!) minutes!

Canadian Rocky Flowers

 Even though the growing season is short up here, the days of sunshine ore quite long, the nights are cool, and, there is plenty of water.  It is a perfect environment for bright colors and vibrant flowers.

Everywhere we turned from Waterton to Banff to Lake Louise the flowers were abundant and glorious. 

From city parks to hotel terraces no opportunity was missed to add blooms to the environment.  I got lots of ideas and hopes that some of these things might work back at home.  I’ll surely give it a try.

This whole bed was filled with gigantic artichokes.  Who knew they would thrive here?  And the poppies were brilliant!

Canadian Lakes

 We could not be in Banff very long before taking a day trip up to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake.  

Since this is the very high end of the tourist season, we noticed that parking is very difficult at favorite places with cars circling round and round waiting for someone to leave so they can get a place.

To avoid this, we took a bus for the day. Our driver, Anik, has been driving busses here for seventeen years and not only had automatic parking places but told us so much that we would have otherwise missed.

On the edge of a rainy day, the light and colors were marvelous.

The color of the water comes from “rock flour.” The glaciers that feed the lakes grind the rocks beneath them until all that is left is as fine as flour.  This rock flour is partially suspended in the water as it flows into the lakes.  It reflects the sunlight colors ranging from gray to blue to green.  The color is lovely.

After Lake Louise, we visited Moraine Lake, a side trip we would not have known about on our own.  The entire day was one of unbelievable beauty.