This should be a nice picture. Instead, it's full of smoke, thick enough that we can now smell it in the air. It turns out the wildfire situation is much worse than we were aware of (we're a little out of touch with the news lately).

These too should be nice photos. In the background there is the mighty Teton Mountain Range, and this is our destination for the next couple days - Grand Teton National Park. This park, with the backdrop of those mountains, is an absolute stunner, and one I've long looked forward to visiting. Instead I'm pretty pissed off at the moment, and this smoke is unlikely to move on anytime soon while the nearby fires range on out of control.

Anyway, for the time being I guess I'll be primarily focusing on stuff that is right in front of me rather than at a distance, and hope my photos (and Photoshop skills) can do this place some justice. Grand Teton National Park is named after the highest peak in the 40-mile-long (64km) Teton Range - Grand Teton, and covers an area of around 300,000 acres. The park is regarded as an almost pristine ecosystem, with the same species of flora and fauna that have existed since prehistoric times still here. There are over 200 miles (320km) of hiking trails scattered around, and today we caught a boat across Jenny Lake here to check out a couple of those miles.

The trail we followed crossed Cascade Creek (which discharges into Jenny Lake) and meandered up to Hidden Falls, where the creek plummets 100 feet (30m). This is apparently one of the busiest tourist attractions in the park, and several of them felt the need to hop the fence for a closer look. I managed to time this shot just right with nobody in it; plan B was to start yelling (which I often do - people see a big camera atop a big tripod and seem to obey hehe).

Rather than catch the boat back across the lake we walked the two miles back instead. Various wildlife are often seen throughout the park, and there are warning signs everywhere regarding bears and how to react (and how not to react) if you happen upon one.

So that was pretty much our day today. Tomorrow I have a few things in mind that I really want to photograph, but I dare say I'm going to be sorely disappointed.

This is our accommodation for the next couple nights - the offspring of a tent and a cabin, complete with wood stove which we've got cranking right now as I write this. It's only a few degrees above freezing outside (given we're high in the mountains), but it's toasty in here!

Today started out with a good old fashioned bear hunt hehe. A bear was seen rummaging around our campground this morning, which prompted to cavalry to aggressively chase it away. Once a bear determines humans to be a means to finding food, they can become aggressive which is bad news all round, so discouraging it from returning was the aim of this hunt. The gun that guy is holding fires non-lethal bean bags, just in case.

Anyway, it was another smoky day here in Grand Teton National Park, though it had lifted just enough for me to at least capture something half-decent of the Tetons. They really are an incredible backdrop to the whole park! Plus they're climbable, if you're keen.

We spent the day driving through the park to check out some of its more popular areas, along with a couple more off the beaten track. This is Oxbow Bend on the Snake River, ten minutes down the road from our campground at the northern end of the park.

Snake River flows through the park and eventually meets up with the Columbia River, which we'll be spending some time around later in the trip. This was shot from Snake River Overlook, one of the park's more famous views and one I had been really excited to capture after first seeing a sunset image shot from here about 15 years ago that has stuck with me ever since. Bummer about the smoke - I'll come back some other day and have another crack at it.

Off the main road a ways are what's left of some of the early settlements in the park. Not a bad view out the kitchen window. The barn on the right is another iconic Grand Teton shot that I first happened upon several years ago as well, and today I walked up and touched it, and snuck a peek inside :)

After lunch we followed our noses along a few more miles of the park's 200 miles of hiking trails.

This here is String Lake - a little guy connecting two larger lakes that is popular with kayakers, and swimmers who are hardy enough to brave the cold (which we were not).

Not a bad way to spend a day.

Nor is following this! Smoke or not, this is one bloody nice park!

String Lake eventually leads to Leigh Lake here, apparently named after a mountain guide who went by the name of Richard "Beaver Dick" Leigh. I'm not sure how he earned that nickname, but good for him. Anyway, we turned back at this point and called it a day. Tomorrow we head just an hour up the road to the geothermal wonderland that is Yellowstone National Park!

Yellowstone National Park - established in 1872 and widely held to be the first national park in the world (certainly the first in the US). This was our second attempt to come here after the first was thwarted by a lack of available accommodation. Given some 20,000 people descend on the park every day during the summer, it's no wonder accommodation options are in short supply.

Immediately after we entered the park we hit a traffic jam caused by these two bison. Recall I made friends with one of these back in Custer State Park, after it decided it didn't want its photo taken and charged at me. Rather odd looking creatures, with the wooly front end and the big bald arse.

Yellowstone covers a whopping 3,468 square miles (8,983km) or 2.2 million acres comprising lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges, and we've got four days here to cover it all :)

Yellowstone is best known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features. In fact, half of the world's geothermal features and two-thirds of the world's geysers are concentrated right here in Yellowstone, fuelled by ongoing volcano activity just a few miles beneath our feet.

We spent today in the Upper Geyser Basin and Midway Geyser Basin areas of the park, containing a plethora of thermal springs and geysers.

Some of them look nice enough to jump right in, and despite the at- or near-boiling temperatures, some clowns just cannot resist the urge to touch the damn water. At least two or three people a day apparently end up in the park's clinics with burn injuries. Idiots! Go boil a pot of water and then stick your hand in it - that's basically what these morons do.

The most famous of Yellowstone's geysers is Old Faithful, so-called because it is one of the most predictable geographical features on the planet. Old Faithful generally erupts every 90'ish minutes, with each eruption shooting 3,700 to 8,400 gallons (14,000 to 32,000 litres) of boiling water up to 185 feet (56m) high over the course of one to five minutes. Video here - groovy! Incidentally, this water isn't last week's rain or whatever - it's actually 500-year-old snowmelt from a nearby mountain range.

After watching Old Faithful blow its load a couple times we went to check out some more hot water. Seriously, the colour is very enticing hehe.

This bloody awesome looking thing here is Grand Prismatic Spring (as seen from above, which I stole) - the largest hot spring in the United States and the third largest in the world (New Zealand has the largest). Grand Prismatic is 370 feet (110m) in diameter and 121 feet (40m) deep.

Unfortunately we can only see it from ground level which is hardly as impressive (or at best from the hill in the background there, which we didn't have time to hike up). So I improvised somewhat, and got this shot by attaching the camera to my tripod and then holding the tripod high above my head by its feet. After I was done, I noticed half a dozen other people around me now doing the same thing hehe.

The vivid colours of the spring are actually pigmented bacteria in these microbial mats that grow around mineral-rich water. The centre of the pool is sterile however, due to the extreme heat. Its deep blue colour is simply the scattering of blue light from the sun by particles suspended in the water (same reason the sky is blue).

All of the water spewing out of the springs and geysers flows down to the Firehole River, which you can safely swim in downstream.

That was our first day in Yellowstone, and so far we've managed to resist the urge to touch the boiling water.

Day two in Yellowstone National Park, and we started it by driving around Yellowstone Lake, one of the world's largest alpine lakes with 110 miles (180km) of shoreline.

Further up the road our noses got punished as we drove through this smelly stuff - rotten-eggs smelly hehe.

The Mud Volcano area sits atop Yellowstone's magma chamber. Heat, gas and water rise to the surface which over time has created what you see here. Yellowstone's abundance of earthquakes (in the order of thousands per year, most too small to be felt) causes the temperatures below to rise and fall, which in turn alters what we see above ground.

This is Sulphur Cauldron, one of the most acidic springs in the park and only slightly less acidic than battery acid. Sulphur-rich gas rises furiously here which microorganisms that thrive in this shit use as a source of energy, and turn the gas into sulfuric acid.

Tough place to be a tree.

This is the Mud Volcano of the Mud Volcano area, one of several such muddy pools which are the result of the sulfuric acid breaking down soil and rock into this wet clay mud.

And this is the aptly-named Dragon's Mouth Spring, due to the steam and the rumblings within as the steam and other gases explode through the water. The Earth is quite an amazing piece of work!

After we'd had enough of rotten eggs, we drove through Hayden Valley - a favourite hangout for some of the park's myriad of wildlife and one of the best locations to view them. Here we have some more bison, sitting around and doing nothing, except for that one outcast who just stood there instead.

Bison seem to take no notice of the road. When they want to they simply wander across it, in their own time, and hold up traffic.

This might look like a classic pile up of lady drivers, but in fact this chaos was caused by everybody stopping to get a look at...

...this bear, which was milling about a ways off the road. Yes, everyone had their phones and point-and-shoots working overtime hehe, but it took a long lens to get even a half-decent shot. Unfortunately we're yet to see one up close so far on this trip, much to Kristina's disappointment.

All day we had been following Yellowstone River here which meanders its way through the park, and at about this point it gets particularly interesting.

First up we have the Upper Falls here, coming in at 109 feet (33m).

The river then enters the absolutely spectacular Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It's a short but very steep hike from the canyon rim to get these views, but it really is a jaw-dropper! The canyon is approximately 24 miles (39km) long, between 800 and 1,200 feet (240 and 370m) deep, and from 0.25 to 0.75 miles (0.4 to 1.2km) wide.

Ever wondered what's at the end of the rainbow kids? Well in this case it's the Lower Falls, at the mouth of the canyon.

The Lower Falls is 308 feet (94m) in height, and is a rather impressive sight (and sound) itself.

The canyon has several overlooks and hiking trails. This is the view looking back along the canyon towards the Lower Falls. Some dork apparently fell from this viewpoint recently, but landed on a ledge and survived.

Just one of the many amazing things we've seen during this trip, and believe it or not we're only just now approaching the half way point! Good times :)

Bit of a gloomy day today with a big thunderstorm to boot, which we expected based on the weather forecast and didn't have much planned other than checking out a few sights near our campsite. What you're looking at here is basically the rim of a huge crater - the result of an enormous volcanic eruption 600,000 years ago. That eruption was so powerful that remnants of the crap it spat out carried as far as Texas and California, and subsurface activity has been ongoing ever since.

This is Tower Fall on Tower Creek, a short distance upstream from where it meets the Yellowstone River. The fall is 132 feet (40m) high and named for the tower-like rock formations at the top of it there.

Tower Creek on the left after Tower Fall, and nearby Lamar River on the right - a tributary of the Yellowstone River. Pretty damn nice as far as rivers go!

Now this thing blew me away. It might look like a random tree trunk, but this trunk is 50 million years old! A chain of volcanoes erupted here at that time, triggering landslides of ash, water, and sand which buried entire forests. Before the trees could rot, abundant silica in the volcanic flow plugged living cells, leaving behind this petrified trunk which is just one of many around here. The surrounding fence is to prevent people from chipping off bits of the trunk for a souvenir.

We then went on a wildlife hunt along the Lamar Valley. Bears, moose, and wolves are often seen along here, but unfortunately all we spotted were more bison loitering around doing nothing, and holding up traffic again. I had bison for dinner tonight - they taste good.

Our final day in Yellowstone National Park today, and I gotta say this is a bloody nice little pocket of the country (rotten egg smells aside :)

We started out in the Norris Geyser Basin, one of Yellowstone's most colourful and dramatic geothermal areas, and the park's oldest, hottest, and most changeable.

Kristina bought herself a pair of binoculars yesterday, and hasn't put them down since.

Much like the other geyser basins we've visited, Norris is full of weird and wonderful sights, sounds and (not-so-wonderful) smells.

The most famous of Norris' geysers is Steamboat Geyser - the tallest active geyser in the world. When this guy erupts, it can rocket a column of scalding water up to 400 feet (120 metres) in the air - about three times the average height of Old Faithful. However, major eruptions only occur four days to fifty years apart, the last of which was in September 2014. We don't really have time to wait around that long - things to do you know.

From Norris we headed to the spectacular (if not ugly) Mammoth Hot Springs, a large complex of hot springs resembling what I imagine the surface of Venus might look like.

This area is best known for these terraced hot springs composed of travertine (calcium carbonate). As the spring water rises it percolates through buried limestone, dissolving calcium carbonate. Above ground, the hot water deposits the calcium carbonate which collects and solidifies over time around the spring, creating ever-changing scenes such as these.

The hot water that feeds Mammoth comes from Norris Geyser Basin after traveling underground via a fault line that runs through limestone. I said it yesterday but I'll say it again: the Earth is quite an amazing piece of work!

Some of the springs now lay dormant such as this one, but could pop back to life at any time as the conditions below our feet change.

In the town of Mammoth Hot Springs itself, dozens of elk have taken up residence, feeding on the grass the Park Service spends a lot of time watering and taking care of hehe.

Nerd. And that's that for our time in Yellowstone, and this also marks the (approximate) halfway point of the whole road trip! Given all the things we've seen and done so far, it's hard to imagine we're only halfway through, but neither of us are ready for this to be over yet :)