Today is Gr8fulJ and I's one month anniversary, and we couldn't be happier here on Hawaii! After days of uploading, and after figuring out how to connect our super new digital camera to our super old computer, we finally got some photos to spit out. I did my best to narrow them down to our favorites, so I hope you all enjoy!
 
We started our trip in the Badlands of South Dakota, where it was windy, a bit cold and kept raining on us. We didn't do any major exploring, but we did get out and look around 
Here is a photo of my very favorite new husband as he makes little children jealous by scrambling out past the path.
Due to the rainy weather, we didn't stop to see Rushmore because it was too cloudy to see anything anyway. Insted, we did some touristy caving, and had a wonderful time out of the rain! This is the texture of the inside of Wind Cave, which doesn't have your typical cave formations at all!
Here is the inside of Jewel Cave, which is completely covered in crystals!
This is a nice cross-section of some of the crystals that cover all of the walls of the cave. This layer of crystal is about 10 inches thick.
Also in Jewel Cave, here is cave bacon! I'm not kidding, that's really the scientific term for it! This piece is about 20 feet long and a foot or so wide.
Here is our awesome cadillac, Icculus, parked at one of the scenic pullouts that we stopped at. We scrambled up the rock pile that you see in the background...
... and here is the view from the very top of that rock pile! You can see our white car loyaly parked at the bottom, so happy to take us on one last road trip before we left the mainland.
Bison! This is the first thing that we saw as we entered Yellowstone National Park. I've always wanted to go to Yellowstone, so this was a real treat to me!
I couldn't believe how many there were!
Here's a good photo of some of the crazy mineral deposits that are all throughout Yellowstone. There are hot springs which continually flow upwards, and spill their super hot mineral water all over the surface, killing all the plants, bleaching the rocks, and then covering the land in a layer of mineral deposits. Different colors of bacteria live in the different temperatures of the mineral water, and that is what you see making the crazy colors in the next few photos.
This is Mammoth Spring, one of the largest hot mineral springs! It covers quite a bit of land!
These are some dry terraces that were formed by Mammoth Springs, again, covering a lot of land.
This is a large geyser basin that was very close to where we camped in the middle of the park. You can see little geysers going off all over and steam from hot mineral springs all over this desolate basin!
Here are some very large and clear hot springs. You can see how small the road is compared to them! You can also see how the forest is recovering after it burned 15 years ago. There are still tall, burned trunks sillouted against the new, short, growing trees.
This is a beautiful hot spring, and you can see just how hot it is, because there is plenty of steam even though it was a warm day of about 78 or 80 degrees.
This is another large geyeser basin, and you can see little spurts of steam all over the landscape. I just try to think about what the first people to see this crazy land must have thought!
This is the grand canyon of Yellowstone, as seen early in the morning from Uncle Tom's trail.
There are the Upper Falls of the grand canyon.
Road block! Silly tourists and their cameras, harassing the native wildlife as they stumble across the pavement that shouldn't be there. We got stuck in traffic like this two times.
One really big bull, that was a little too close to our car!
This colorful river is flowing from the geyser that is erupting in the backgroung. The different colors are caused by the different bacterias in differnt temperatures, and you can see the steam coming off of the river!
Boiling mud! This is one of the mud pots that are scattered throughout part of the park. Gr8fulJ captured this one just before it burst.
Opal Spring, steaming away in the heat of the day.
This is a little geyser that went off as we were hiking back to our campsite for the night.
This is the runoff of the Grand Prismatic Spring, which I didn't realize was in Yellowstone, but have always wanted to see. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip, and one of the most beautiful things in Yellowstone!
This is the whole basin on the Grand Prismatic Spring, as viewed from above after we took a 10 minute hike up a hill following a nice grandma's advice  What a great view! If the trees hadn't burned 15 years ago we wouldn't have been able to have this awesome view because the trees would have been in the way. Notice how tiny the boardwalk and road are compared to this thing!
A close-up of the mineral buil-up around the edge of the Grand Prismatic Spring. The colors are almost too bright for nature!
And of course, Old Faithful. We took this photo from Observation Point, which was an easy half hour hike up a little hill. We watched it go off with about 6 other people instead of standing with the hundreds of people that you see clustered around the base of the geyser.
These are the Grand Tetons, as we were were standing on top of a smaller mountain above Jackson hole. This is where we started our hike down the Granite Canyon trail. We got rained on on and off, and the mosquitoes were killer, but it was possibly the most scenic and beautiful hike of my life! It took us 11 hours to hike the 12 miles down the mountain and back to our car.
I didn't realize that mountains were covered in flowers?! So every time you see a green mountain scene, those aren't grasses and shrubs, they are flowers! These were the flowers at the top of the mountain, they got taller and taller as we hiked down until they were as tall as we were!
This was a little hidden waterfall that we spotted after scrambling up a spill of granite alongside of the trail.
Here is one of the beautiful spills of sparkling granite boulders that we scrabled up. I'm in the lower left corner for some scale.
This is a photo looking back up the valley.
And this is a photo looking down the valley, to the little babbling brook that carved this beautiful canyon.
All of you should go visit the national parks. You can even purchase a National Parks Pass which will get you in to all of the National Parks for a full year for only $50 (ours paid for itself on our first trip to Utah!). I encourage all of you to go out and see the beautiful world that is around us, for there is so much to see! There is a good reason why each piece of land was set aside by our government for your viewing pleasure, and they all deserve to be seen and enjoyed. Go out and explore!
And on that note, I'd just like to say that Gr8fulJ is the most wonderful person and most perfect husband that a girl could ever dream of. He opened my eyes to all the wonderful things around me that I was missing, and he sparked my interest in nature and all the beautiful parks around us. I'm the happiest wife and luckiest girl that there ever was!
Peace to all of you! 
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Life's a journey. Take the scenic route.
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I had the pleasure of meeting GratefulJ420 at the Ohio Gathering and you indeed got yourself a fine catch! I wish you guys the best of luck. 
you have no idea what wildflowers are until you've been there. drop me a line sometime so we can catch up! peace sister
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