What I Did on my Summer Vacation
July 23, 2008

I suppose I should blog more often, but I've been busy...

We (my family) drove to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons this summer.  We drove through California and Nevada, and parts of Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  All those states have interesting terrain and beautiful countryside, except Nevada.  Sorry Nevada, but driving across your northern areas was boring... and endless sea of sage and flatlands.   

As we drove in, we hit our first Yellowstone traffic jam - a few dozen cars & RV's parked byside a narrow 2-lane road.  The attraction: a bald eagle nest with chicks.  We were in Alaska just a few years ago and saw bald eagles galore, but they are rather rarer in the lower 48.  Not to far in we spotted bison off in the distance so we stopped (with lots of others) and took pictures.  Turns out this simple act marks us as Yellowstone "newbies" - before the day was out we found bison within feet of the road, and this was a many-times-a-day occurrence.  Only newbies take photos of bison from a 100 yards away.  Anybody whose been there a little time at all knows they'll have to back up and go around the bison to maintain the 25 yard recommended stay-away distance.

That evening we went to the ranger show and while crossing a large field we had to walk around 4 grazing elk, watched a dying bison (some kind of sickness) and saw a coyote (no doubt eyeballing that sick bison).  During the walk back to the tent the kids were full of questions; "could we save the bison?  why not?  will the coyote get him?  what's wrong with him?"  ... it's all nice to watch those nature shows on TV, but quite another thing to see it actually happening.

We camped a whole week.  We kinda figured the kids would be trouble ("No computer games!?!?  For a whole week?????") but actually they had a blast.  Besides all the seeing and driving and hiking, they were all just forced outside into wide open spaces (no tiny backyard fences ala suburbia) and were soon playing tag, hide-n-seek, "the ground is lava, hop from rock to rock" and any number of games. 

We saw all the geysers of course, plus loads of hot springs and plopping mud pits (definitely a hit), plus various caves that roared and churned muddy water from escaping steam.  We hiked alot; quite a stronger challenge at 7000+ ft than at sea level where we live.  We saw a momma brown bear and her 2 cubs - this while a good 3 miles from any kind of civilization or car.  We did see her a long ways off, so we made plenty of noise and she sorta huffed and lazed her way up the hill and away from the trail.

One evening we noticed four bison in the campground.  They were sorta getting closer and just moseying along, nibbling grass and ignoring campers.  We kept seeing campers suddenly come aware that a bison was quite close (sitting around a campfire in a chair, reading or eating or whatever - then the sudden jump, wide eyes, rapid backpedaling).  The bison kept coming closer to our camp.  My wife wondered aloud "what happens if a bison walks through our campsite?".  A few minutes later we found out!  The bison walked between our tent, car & fire (they are utterly unafraid of campfires).  The ladies retreated into the ladies room, we men (and boys) orbited the restrooms around the other side.  The bison was within 5 feet of my car, when he decided to scratch his back on a tree (instead of my car, phew!) - in front of the ladies room.  They have pictures from only a few feet away; we have a movie of the whole affair.

We had an up-close-and-personal run in with the bison one more time.  During the ranger show one night a whole lotta bison decided to wander right by, including lots of mommas' with frisky calves jumping about and playfully butt'in heads.  One stumbled into the rear bench seats and momma was *right there*, but she didn't want to stumble over the seats either - they looked like tripping hazards to her too.  Baby decided to go around the amphitheater, momma followed baby and we all breathed a sign of relief.  Nothing like a dozen 1-ton animals with playful babies sporting less than 10 feet away from you.  (we also saw some of the ranger movies where some in-your-face camera flashes trigger a bison to toss a the camera person about like a toy). 

On the way out of Yellowstone and down through the Grand Tetons (some *amazingly* spikey pointed mountains) we hit our biggest traffic jam yet.  A good hundred cars, SUV's and RV's parked on the side of a narrow 2-lane road.  Coming on straight at us: one of those mondo greyhound bus sized RV's filling all remaining space.  Hundreds of people milling about, crossing the road willy-nilly (running just in front of that RV with no chance for the driver to dodge; he basically had to move forward at a slower-than-walking pace till he cleared the area).  The attraction?  A momma grizzly bear and her 2 cubs.  If she wanted to eat people for breakfast, there they were: a few hundred of them squashed like sardines along the side of the road a short jog away.  We shook our heads, took pictures from the car as we cleared the area and moved on.  Grizzly bear pics were on our "must see" list; the only animals we didn't get pics' of were moose & wolves.


I suppose I could throw in some technical content here, but why bother?  :-)

Just so you know, I'm furiously porting HotSpot to our next-gen hardware.  Most of the work is very straightforward coding but somehow very satisfying to do.  I'm "eating my own dogfood" and using my build.java approach - it's working out marvelously.  I got around to adding some bells and whistles from that last blog report: parallel build, auto-tracking of include files (YES!  I removed the horrendous HotSpot "includeDB" structure - it's all auto-tracked by the build system; you simply #include files like you would in any other large C project, and build.java figures it all out), build-recently-failed-files first (means if you have to hack a popular header file to correct some other file, you don't have to wait while make builds the 100's of uncaring files first before getting around to building the file that's going to crap out anyways), etc, etc.

 


Cliff

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Comments

sounds like fun - gosh, i need to get out of the house ;-)

i'll be a downer: http://www.harpers.org/subjects/AmericanBison

Posted by: Raoul Duke | Jul 23, 2008 11:36:35 AM

 

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