This was shot on a warm afternoon on a lovely ranch in Montana, just inside the border of Yellowstone.

I was in a remote ranch in Montana for a week last year. Almost every day we would head out to ride horses, find a distant fishing hole, or just randomly explore. Everything was great until I decided to test the bear spray into the wind.

A shot from history here in the fertile crescent.

This was shot at my friend’s ranch near Yellowstone in the middle of the afternoon after a long day of fly fishing…

After a long hike through the mountains of Yellowstone, I came across over 40 horses sprinting from one meadow to the next. I stepped behind a tree to get out of the way and shot this one.

We were lucky enough to spend a week with Dr. David Sands, a microbiologist and geneticist (if those categories are even appropriate for someone so diverse).  Almost every day we went out on nature hikes and never made it more than a few hundred yards from the main lodge.  He would stop at just about any plant, pull it up, and rattle off a million interesting facts about it.  He constantly had Ethan running to and fro to collect different samples and then enter a Socratic mode, helping him to figure out what everything he found meant.

Dr. Sands also brought several suitcases full of petri dishes and a variety of interesting bacteria that have been the subject of some tests in his lab back in Bozeman.  Ethan and Dr. Sands did a number of experiments when they weren’t out in the field exploring and discovering.

The first time someone photographs a new phenomenon they get to name it, right? I call this a “Steamtrey”. [edit: on Flickr, someone recommended “Treynado”.] Well this shot took forever to get just right… The weather was perfect for the steam to come off the geothermal area and the wind patterns were even more perfect to whip up the steam into a 30-foot high tornado.

All that red in the foreground is a special bacteria that has formed in the super-heated water.

This is Yellowstone at sunset. It got rather chilly about this time but the warm steam from the geothermals kept us warm.

I didn’t change the colors here!!!! Let’s get that right out of the way.

I came to visit a friend in Yellowstone National Park over the weekend and for a few days next week. He has a beautiful ranch on the edge of the park in Montana and is inviting up a fairly eclectic group of intellectuals, mostly associated around various Libertarian think-tanks with which I am involved. I know it all sounds a bit heady, but it’s one of my fun academic cerebral diversions.

There are daily and nightly TED-like talks from plant biologists, entrepreneurs, geneticists, paleontologists, artists, and yours truly (who is giving a possibly-in-comparison presentation on humans evolving into a super-organism via online games and social networks).

The picture here was taken on the summer solstice in thin-crusted geothermal hotbed of the Norris Geysirs. This particular place was not too far from something called the “whirlygig” (or somesuch).

The various colors are made from two merging rivers, each one with a dramatically different temperature. Different color bacteria live in each temperature of water - the red bacteria was over 160 degrees and the green was below 160. If anyone else was there during this same time, they can confirm the quirky nature of these dual rivers running in the same channel!

I took this about 9 PM on a clear Fall evening in Bangkok. I’m pleased with the way it turned out… I recommend the Large on Black version.

Here is a dark church I found somewhere in Milan.

We got colded-in in Bozeman. The weather was so cold that a lot of the service vehicles at the airport froze over and could not service the planes. When I woke up in the morning, the temperature was 23 below zero with no wind chill. It was not much fun going outside to start up the car!

Up in Big Sky, my friend text messaged me and said it was 34 below. When I landed in Dallas, it was 32, which is 66 degrees warmer than Big Sky… crazy…

The Blue Moon Bakery is in the middle of Big Sky in the Westfork Meadow Village. This place has amazingly good food and amazingly bad art.

The best thing about this place, besides the homemande pizzas are these “wonder bars” seen below. These are sort of like 7-layer bars, but they have a very robust inside layer of chocolate. When these things are heated for 20 seconds in the microwave, they hover in new state of matter somewhere between plasma and liquid. I think the state is technically considered LCD.

I decided to start featuring more of the world’s best desserts on here along with my rating scale. I give the Blue Moon wonder bar a rating of 8.8. This is a very high rating. Here is my scale:

Rating 0: A dessert that I will tolerate and perhaps eat if it is in front of me on a plane and I am starving. Example: sickly-looking lemon flan wrapped in plastic

Rating 5: A dessert that I decide to eat because there is nothing better on the menu and I feel like I deserve dessert. Example: homemade vanilla ice cream

Rating 10: A dessert that is so good that it causes instantaneous death and nirvana simultaneously. Example: unknown, unfortunately.

Throughout the Blue Moon there is some really bad art. I strongly suspect it was made by some angry, man-hating vagabond that skulks around Big Sky with a nihilist attitude and comfortable shoes. Here is one of them:

I found some more Rams in Big Sky and snapped this pic of them eating together.

We ate at Buck’s T-4 in Big Sky for dinner. The restaurant is inside a Best Western, so I was rather suspicious of the “fine dining” claims, but I was wrong to be suspicious… this place is great. It is basically a steak place that specializes in wild game.

The placemat had all the brands of the local Montana ranches. I even espied Martha Johnson’s brand, and I thought about the time she took us to By Word of Mouth for dinner and a bar fight broke out right in front of Gustaf, knocking over his chair. Martha had just finished telling us how everyone in Montana is so nice and tranquil.

I ordered the New Zealand Red Deer because it sounded exotic and because it sounded like deer. It was kind of chewy, but it reminded me of Lord of the Rings so I ate it anyway.

And then Ethan borrowed my camera because he wanted me to perform a Jedi force move on him.

We went back to Yellowstone and went to a little habitat where they keep bears and wolves in captivity, and do fun captivity-things like put a slab of meat in ice and watch the bears wrestle over it for hours until they break through. That is good times for everyone.

The wolves were actually pretty cool to watch because they all started howling at the same time on one side of the wolf pen. Over on the other side, about 100 feet away, a lone wolf started howling also. I think they were doing their best to simulate calling one another in the wild, but it was weird since they were only 100 feet away.

Oh, and here is a bear skeleton. I thin it looks very strange, and it reminds me of the posture of some of my old friends from the fraternity.