Summer Vacation: Day 2

	This morning we made our way toward Devils Postpile National Monument. Wow. The entrance to the place was VERY high in altitude and very chilly for summer. I believe it was somewhere around 9,000 ft. At this point there is a Minaret viewpoint where I shot these two pictures. I never feel natural posing for the camera. I suppose that is why I like being behind the lens.
	Devils Postpile is seriously one cool place to visit. I was not sure if it was going to be worth the extra driving to get there but in retrospect it was worth it all. I mentioned that at the overlook it was chilly and windy. To get to the postpile from there you have to descend about 2000 feet down mostly a narrow one-way road with steep drop-offs. The weather was nice. It was not windy and warm. What a different a little elevation makes. I need to tell you a little about this formation. It is one of the finest examples of columnar basalt formations because of how many columns have 6-sides (hexigons). We took many more pictures but these will suffice to tell the story. Notice the cool arrowhead like formation where the columns are lateral on the left and vertical on the right. That's cool to see. Then we took a close up of the column debris at the foot of the formation. Tracy loves this stuff because she took geology in school and can recognize volcanic things like this. The other pictures don't really give you scale of the formation so I took a panoramic picture that lets you see the whole thing. We'll talk about the top of the formation in just a second but first let's talk people. On our way up to the top of the formation (they let you walk on it) Ryan posed for me through this decaying tree. What a cute kid. Tracy and Ryan showed their cuteness in this pose. If you look closely you can see the formation in the background. The walk up to the top is short but very interesting. You walk through an area that has a lot of fire damage and it's a bit like a forest graveyard of sorts. Ryan just loved all of the dirt and dirty things; the more the better. When we got to the top of the formation I'm not sure what I expected to say but I did not expect to see a tile looking floor. The picture I selected doesn't show that feature off very well. Looking down, the ground looks like a bunch of hexagonal tiles. They were smoothed by ancient glaciers and as as you can tell from the included picture it is curved. The curve is not all that noticeable from on top but the camera sure picks it up. All in all we enjoyed this part of the national monument. We were not sure what else there was to do but we did know we needed lunch.
	I had to fight every temptation to keep the table out of this picture. The scenary around this lake near the Postpile was enticing. However, I realized I wanted to capture what our view was as we munched on lunch. There were ducks, fly-fisherman, etc. Ahhhh. Relaxing!
	I guess I had really no idea that this national monument had a big waterfall attraction. It does and it's called Rainbow Falls. It is about a 1 mile hike from the trailhead to the the falls. Just a few steps in, Ryan conked out. He did that a lot in his child carrier. Like the postpile trail, this one was marred by fire. This fire in the 1990s was apparently a very big deal for the area. Huh? The waterfall only looks about 3 feet high in this picture with Tracy. However it is really about 100 feet hight; darn optical illusions. This was a fun place to shoot. On this one photo of the trees and roots winding through the rocks you can see me camouflaged. Tracy likes to shoot me taking photos. (grin) We hung out at the falls for about an hour as Ryan continued to sleep and I found new angles to take photographs from. We liked this waterfall. It was definitely the most impressive one we saw on the trip. Actually it was just about the only one that had water so I guess that is not hard to award a winner (smile). We closed out the day by going back toward the postpile and try to find the soda springs which was proof of volcanic activity. They were okay, but I liked the bridge we had to cross better.
	When we go back to the hotel, Ryan cooked us up some dinner and made sure we had good plumbing. Every pipe checked out and no leaks.