Last year I had intended to do a post about the trees in Yellowstone, and the wildfires, but I didn’t have enough good pictures. As we drove out of the park on only our second morning there, on our way to the hospital in Cody, I snapped photos of burnt stretches from the RV window, but of course they didn’t work out. That’s when black and white helps. Well, I felt it did, anyway.
(Heartless of me to still want to take pictures of Yellowstone when we were on the way to the hospital because my son may have appendicitis? No, just single-minded. Get me with my face behind a camera and it’s hard to stop. Heartless would have been me making T stop the RV so I could get actual decent photos. Taking crappy photos from a driving RV was perfectly appropriate motherly sacrifice.)
Anyway, most of the pine trees in Yellowstone are Lodge Pine, so called because the Native Americans used the trunks for their tipis.
They would indeed have been perfect for that purpose, because they don’t even have to be cut down; they’re just lying all over the place, for the picking up.
Lodge pines need fire. The cones only open at high temperatures. So every now and then a whole stretch of park will burn down, and despite how it looks, that’s a good thing. Space and light for new growth.
This time I got my burnt pine forest fix. We climbed up a hillside, over charred, fallen logs, and I clicked away. From a distance it looked like a complete dead zone, but looking more closely, I found that life was indeed beginning anew here.
Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 
Nature is beautiful even in the burned out trees.
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That’s what I thought! Whenever anyone is stopped by the side of the road and people are taking pictures in Yellowstone, people driving by will stop, too, to see what there is to see. So twice people drew up when they saw me taking pictures on the burnt out hill, but they didn’t see anything and drove on again. Oh well.
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