We are feeling very divided today, crossing the Continental Divide three times in less than an hour — getting to sample western and eastern life-styles while on top of the world.

The road from Chico, Wyoming (see earlier post) south through Yellowstone Park is not as throttled with bear and moose watchers as we’d been led to fear. At least three regular travelers of the road told us to add several hours to our expectations and and extra dose of temper dampener. We avoid the big thronging points at the Northwest entrance and mid-way at Old Faithful and stop where there is no one, along meadows, lakes, waterfalls, hillsides with 19 year old lodgepole pine growth, repopulating the burned out wastes of the great 1988 firestorms. The extent of the furnace is stunning to see. Sky reaching bare gray trunks are everywhere but now the floor from which they rise is green with new growth, not sere and blackened ash.

We watch a downy woodpecker make his meal from delectables found in a couple of the old trees. Wild robins are everywhere, oranger than their manicured-lawn cousins, an artifact of diet perhaps. Cliff swallows do their roller coaster feeding loops along the Gibbon and Yellowstone rivers. Enormous ravens struggle awkwardly to flight, then land to preen and glisten in the mild warmth at 7,000 feet above the sea.

Walking in Lewis lake up to our shins we see white crowned sparrows feeding at the pebbled shore. The afternoon breeze is stirring the surface and breaking the mirror of the far hills. We hope for an osprey or a bald eagle but are not rewarded by such smaller glories and are content with the day entire.

The road exits Yellowstone Park and immediately enters Grand Teton Park and soon enough the greatest wonder of the world, the jagged teeth of the Tetons appear, taking a bite of the sky. Jackson Lake spreads blue and wonderous along the base, the liquid form of the great glaciers that once cloaked the peaks. From 100,000 years to 10,000 years ago the spires lifted above a sea of white, gouging, pulverizing ice carving the stone beneath, creating the great ribbed forms we see today.

Many years ago these peaks were the first experience of nature that lifted the heart of a 12 year old boy out the everyday world of bicycles, homework and baseball into the mysteries of the universe. Like staring into the black night of stars and trying to imagine beyond, and beyond, and beyond and…. The thrill is not gone.