CJ's Yellowstone Pictures

Here is the deal with the pictures. I have about 600 pictures in my physical photo albums that I took during my three years of living in Yellowstone. I also have been back to the park twice since then. Many of these were taken during the summers of '96 and '97 when I was working as an assistant housekeeping manager at Lake. I didn't have a car. It had been wrecked while I was working at Old Faithful during the winter and while the car was in the care of my infamous longtime companion James. A mutual friend of ours had borrowed the car to retrieve his tools from his broken down truck and was rear ended at a stop light by a teenage crackhead driving a stolen car. Such is life in South Florida. No car in Yellowstone is bad. It's a big place, makes it hard to get around. Between working way too many hours and having no wheels I didn't get out to other parts of the park as much as I would have liked to. So lots of the pictures were taken at Lake.

A lot of these are of flowers. I like flowers. Some are of people. I don't usually take many people pictures, I tend not to like then as much as flowers, but as a group Yellowstone people are way nicer than most. Some people might like the flower pictures, but the people pictures would bore most visitors to the page, so that cuts the 600 down.

I was using York Photo Labs while I was out there. They are fairly cheap, mail order, and the prints usually look good. On the other hand several negatives had scratches or what looks like splash marks on them. Not many, but of course the damaged ones were always really good shots, so I don't especially recommend them unless: 1) you need mail order, 2) you are on a tight budget, and 3) you won't freak out too badly about the occasional wrecked picture. They started offering scanning onto floppy disk with processing for around $5/roll with the processing (mid '90's prices). So I started ordering the scans. I wasn't able to look at them till I got back to civilization and my computer. For $5 you don't quite get a Kodak Photo CD. You get 600 x 400 scans that need quite a bit of cleaning up.

At first I used these scans, and started making this web page on an old 386 computer with a 256 color monitor. The results were less than desirable. After I got a better computer and monitor I saw the pictures in the first few galleries looked pretty scary, all dark and garish colors and blurry. It took me years to get around to redoing them. I rescanned the original prints, which is kind of time consuming.

I started out that first summer with an instamatic camera. My good camera got smashed right before I went out there. By the second summer I replaced the instamatic with a used cannon SLR, and started getting bigger prints. After I quit working there I quit using York Photo Labs and started getting Kodak Photo CDs. That helped. In December 2002 I started using a digital camera, a Casio QV-2900UX which finally made it to Yellowstone in 2003. That helped even more. No more tedious scanning. No more pictures I thought would be good, but turn out not very good once developed.

My sister has scanned some pictures for me. Thank you Jennifer.

Then I bought a scanner and am slowly scanning all my photos, then burning them onto a CD. It takes a while. As I get them done I will put the more or less good ones up here. So check back every now and then.

There used to be free services like one called mindit that would alert you when a web page changed, but mindit went out of business. There are others, but I don't know what they are. If you know of one, and it is free, with no spyware, please tell me. If you write and ask nicely I may start a mailing list to let people know when I add more pictures. Maybe someday find a script to let people sign themselves up to such a list, or even set up a mailing list for this web page if I can figure out how to keep it from getting spammed to death with no effort on my part. But for now we will keep it primitive.

You might notice that some of the subject matter in some of these is a bit unusual. I am a weird person. I take pictures of mud, bark, bugs, algae, carcasses, diseased plants, things like that sometimes. Don't worry, I have been known to take pictures of Old Faithful or the Lower Falls.

By the way, the little pictures in these galleries are thumbnail pictures. Click on them for the bigger ones , the ones you can actually see wht it is a picture of. Skip over the ones that you think might be boring.

Here is a search engine for the site, just in case you want to look for something in particular.

Enough whining, on to the pictures.

Today you can check out:

Gallery 1 - General random Yellowstone pictures. There are a few of the Grand Tetons in there too.

Yellowstone Flowers - I said I liked flowers didn't I?

Yellowstone in Winter

Jennifer's Gallery - Pictures my sister contributed.

People in Yellowstone - Friends and relatives, crazy savages, probably not anyone you know.

Gallery 6 - Random Yellowstone pictures

Gallery 7 - More somewhat random Yellowstone pictures, although we do have the beginnings of a theme - spring in Yellowstone.

Gallery 8 - Mostly pictures taken with an old Instamatic camera my first summer in Yellowstone ('95). Several geysers, some mud pots and hot springs, a few scenic views.

Gallery 9 - Pictures from my first winter in Yellowstone, most of them taken in the Mammoth Hot Springs area while I was waiting to go to Snow Lodge. I had gotten a better camera at this point (a pawnshop special).

Gallery 10 - More shots from my first winter, a couple of the canyon and the rest in the Upper Basin. Geysers galore.

Gallery 11 - Shots from the first winter into the second summer.

Gallery 12 - (finally) All from the summer of '96, hot springs, wildlife, pretty lake, the Seven Mile Hole Trail, a waterfall.

Gallery 13 - Shots from my summer of 2001 trip. The first day including a hike along the canyon rim, a wildfire, and the Mud Volcano Area.

Gallery 14 - More pictures from the 2001 trip, the first part of the second day. Lots of geysers in the Lower Basin, a few flowers, a few bones.

Gallery 15 - Some stuff from the second part of the second day of the 2001 trip. Lots of Great Fountain geyser in the Lower Basin, and a few in the Biscuit Basin.

Gallery 16 - The third day of the trip. Some Grand Teton National Park photos, but mostly West Thumb geyser basin.

Gallery 17 - The fourth day, morning portion. The drive to Mammoth including the Overhanging Cliff and Wraith Falls, and the Beaver Pond Trail.

Gallery 18 - Exploring Mammoth Hot Springs on the afternoon of the fourth day.

Gallery 19 - The final part of the fourth day of the 2001 trip. Artist Paint Pots and Norris, so plenty of thermal action here.

Gallery 20 - A long one. Spent the day in the Upper Geyser Basin. Typical geyser stuff, plus a Grotto Start, and a Giant hot period.

Gallery 21 - The last day of the August 2001 trip. Finally getting around to posting it in May 2003. Mostly geysers of course.

Gallery 22 - Some miscellaneous stuff from the 2001 trip.

Gallery 23 - Pictures from the early summer 2003 trip. We started off this trip in Glacier National Park. I guess it is close enough to Yellowstone.

Gallery 24 - Is the second day of the Glacier/Yellowstone trip. We are still in Glacier.

Gallery 25 - The last day in Glacier. Many waterfalls here.

Gallery 26 - The day we traveled from Glacier to Yellowstone. It includes Philipsburg, Mammoth Hot Springs and fighting bunnies.

Gallery 27 - We move from Mammoth to Old Faithful.

Gallery 28 - We spend a day in the Upper Geyser Basin.

Gallery 29 - We hike to Fairy Falls.

Gallery 30 - The last day. We go to West Thumb and one more romp in the Upper Geyser Basin.

copyright Chris Johnson