Love at Mammoth Hot Springs

This is where Tomcat decided I was his cup of tea. After being best friends for nearly a decade, we hadn’t actually lived near each other in a couple of years. For a stint we both found ourselves living in a very unlikely place: Utah. He was studying film and I was living in the burbs with Sister, anxiously awaiting an au pair assignment in Paris. I’d been driving all over the country for the past year, trying to hit all 50 states and found myself extremely restless. So one day I called Tomcat and said, “Hey, I’ve got the bug. Do you want to come with me? You can pick: North, South, East or West.” He said, “Sure, I’ll come. I haven’t been East.” So we left that night for Mt. Rushmore, returning via Yellowstone.

Well, the heater in my car was broken and we were bundled in blankets. Heading to Yellowstone only brought disappointment – it was closed for the winter! I’ll never forget shivering to the radio, which was playing the entire Bat out of Hell album.

A year later, he was still in school and I still wasn’t abroad. It was late September and Mammoth had a cabin available so we were off to try Yellowstone again. There was nothing up there to speak of back then, maybe an old church nearby. We ate a nice dinner somewhere and I introduced him to Baileys. This will forever be the beginning. “How come you never dated me?” “Well, you always had a girlfriend.” “Well, you always had a boyfriend!” (Actually, I don’t quite remember who started that 3-sentence conversation.) Looking at each other, we realized that we were both liberated; he’d just dumped his girl, and I’d just dumped my guy. We were married less than 4 months later!

Now, here I am up in Mammoth Village with my kids and no Tomcat. It just doesn’t feel right. The area has developed into something far greater, but the cabins seem lost and the area is no longer teeming with elk, or maybe we were there at the wrong time of day. We did spot a couple of females trying to nap under a shady tree and that thrilled the kids. The actual terraces maintain their magic though – stinky as hell, bubbling up their boiling waters into phosphorescent pools of copper and blue.

We could spend all day talking Geyser Basins. Walking along and suddenly seeing steam shoot up 20 or so feet high out of the ground only a few feet in front of you is quite a memorable experience. Their steam whistling and spitting out of the tiniest holes or roaring out of immense ones. There’re these milky bubbling hot tubs called Paint Pots, which had us all giggling for some reason. They were so unlikely and gross and yet appealing! At one point Peanut was dodging the steam from an active geyser, shouting, “Thank you SO much for bringing me here! I love this place!” Smelling rotten eggs while watching these displays makes the definition of Sulfur sink in pretty well. And when the sign says “Danger Thin Crust” we can talk about pizza and what treasures lie just below the Earth’s surface in the same sentence and have it all make perfect sense.