Day 10 – Yellowstone

Miles traveled: 220
Hours on Road: 13.5
States covered: 1 –Wyoming

Today was the kind of day you remember for the rest of your life, except you remember it as being two or three days. So much splendor and diversity is seen and experienced your mind can’t believe that it was all done in one day. One conversation at the end of the day went something like this: “That’s where we saw that bear.” “Oh yah. Yesterday?” “No, this morning.”

When we started out at 9:30 a.m., it had been decided that since we’d seen so much wildlife, we now needed to witness a bull moose fighting a grizzly bear. We then added that a bison should be refereeing the match. So that’s what we set out to find.

Yellowstone is 18 miles from where we are staying in Colter Bay. Once inside Yellowstone, there is one road to follow for about another 20 miles, then you can choose to go to the left or the right. The way the park is laid out you can make one giant circle of it, or you can do several circles within that circle. We chose to go to the left and make that one giant circle.

It was before we’d entered Yellowstone that we had the bear sighting. About 100 yards off the road a large black bear was wandering among the tall grasses foraging for whatever it is bears forage for. That was our first bear sighting, so we were off to a good start.

The road leading to West Thumb, where we would take the road off to the left (or west, if you’re in to navigational terms) had high canyons with steep drop-offs. Once again, I had an adrenaline overload. Jeff was sympathetic to my plight in the beginning, but he got annoyed when I yelled at him every time he took his eyes off the road to check out the scenery. I felt that I had to watch straight ahead since he was sightseeing so if we started to veer off the road I could scream out in panic and he could correct his direction. It’s not that I want to be annoying, but I get this physical feeling, I guess maybe vertigo, whenever I’m near a steep drop-off. I feel like I’m going to tip over at any moment. The first glance into steepness sends a wave of dizziness over me, then immediate panic, then I feel I’m going to fall. Most times, if I’m not secured in a building or an automobile, I have an underlying feeling that I may jump. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it feels like. My body’s reaction is to send my adrenals into overdrive, and before you know it, my heart is beating a mile a minute and I feel like I might pass out or do something crazy. It isn’t a fun way to live, but when there’s so much to see in high places, I accept the dizzy rush and hope for the best.

I did try to relax and take deep breaths. I even forced myself to look around at all the scenery knowing logically, if not emotionally, that Jeff was being very careful. Lewis River had carved a deep gorge into the rock creating a spectacular canyon that was covered with greenery.

We arrived at Grant village and took a drive around. The book John had with him vehemently criticized this village as too touristy and something to be avoided. It just looked like a souvenir shop, store, and gas station to us. We didn’t bother getting out of the van.

At West Thumb we went west. It wasn’t long before we came across a herd of elk. We saw only females and youngsters – no one with impressive antlers.

We saw several signs for the Continental Divide. We finally stopped for a photo op at Isa Lake. According to the sign, “From this snow-fed hollow, Isa Lake drains in two different directions – from directly astride the Divide. Isa’s west arm feeds the Firehole River on its way to the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and Gulf of Mexico. The lake’s east outlet leads to the Snake and Columbia Rivers and the Pacific Ocean via Yellowstone’s Shoshone Lake and Lewis River.” Jeff put it simply: rivers to the east of the divide drain into the Atlantic Ocean; rivers to the west drain into the Pacific Ocean. We met three motorcyclists from New York, one of whom took a photo of all of us.

Next on the agenda was Old Faithful. We arrived 20 minutes before the next expected eruption, so we found a good place to sit, and we waited. Viewers had to stay off the “thermal areas” for their own safety, so we were probably 100 to 200 yards from the hole of Old Faithful. There were several false-alarm eruptions before the big one came along. It started slow, with water reaching five feet, then 10 feet. Then, it went full force, maybe 50 to 100 feet in the air. Since the wind was blowing so hard, the plume appeared very wide, with spray spewing quite a ways. We were not downwind from it so we didn’t get any water on us. In fact, when we walked around afterward we noticed that the area that is downwind from the eruption is a little farther back from the hole than we had been.

There’s a wooden walkway built throughout the area so that people stay on the path and off the thermal areas. We came across a pool of iridescent, blue water in what appeared to be a very deep pit. Steam was coming off the water, so it was obviously warmed from below. Trey wanted to throw a rock in it, but signs specifically prohibited throwing anything into the water holes. The signs said that anything could plug up a vent, and once plugged, vents do not become unplugged.

We ate lunch at Old Faithful Lodge. Talk about grandeur. The main room is open all the way to the top with balconies on every side. It’s made entirely of logs and has the feel of a giant tree house. It looked like it was five or six stories high, and at the very top was a room made to look like a little log cabin. The fireplace was stone and reached all the way to the ceiling and had a giant clock going down its side. We got sandwiches at the deli and ate up on the deck that overlooks Old Faithful, but it was too soon for the next eruption.

After we left the lodge, we headed north toward Mammoth Hot Springs. On the way we saw several cars pulled over to the side of the road. That almost always means there’s an animal insight. I looked out my window and over the crest of the hill to the side of the road, and I could barely make out what looked like the tips of antlers. Naturally, we stopped and got out. The animal in sight was a giant bull elk with a huge rack of antlers. He was lying down enjoying the sun and the grass that was within reach of his mouth.

The map we got when we entered the park indicated that there would be traffic between two spots that we intended to hit. We hit that traffic. In Yellowstone, they don’t just do repair work; they entirely replace roads. We had to travel on dirt where the asphalt had been removed so it could be replaced. Though it was a 10-minute wait, it was in such a beautiful spot, no one minded.

By the time we’d passed the traffic jam we were all dying of thirst. It’s amazing how much we’ve been drinking out here. Between the dryness and the elevation, we’re always thirsty. We pulled over at the next pull-off we could find and pulled the coolers out so we could get to the water to refill our water bottles. The second we pulled out the water, the skies opened up.

At some point along the drive we saw a female elk that Trey insisted was a mule deer. He said that if it were an elk, it didn’t look like the picture in the brochure. I thought it was hilarious that a nine year old was talking about what he’d seen in the brochure. He later said he’d like to see a pronghorn and was told by his brothers that there is no such animal. He immediately responded that there is so a pronghorn; it’s in the brochure. He even found a picture of it and showed them.

Mammoth Hot Springs was as far north as we were going in the park. Montana was only five more miles down the road, but we still had so much to do in the park, we decided to skip going to the border. The hot springs are remarkable. The color of the stone in the area changes drastically from one spot to another. One minute it’s a rusty orange, the next it’s whitish, somewhere between cement and marble. There’s a long wooden walkway to the top, so we went up. Because the walkway winds back and forth and around all the hot springs, it’s a very long walk. At the top, it’s like you’ve entered a whole different world. The floor of the hot springs at the top looks like coral. Jeff says it’s thermophilic bacteria. It’s beautiful. Right next to the coral-looking area is an area that looks like it snowed. There are dead trees in amongst the springs that add to the mystique of the area.

It turns out, there’s a parking lot at the top of the springs, and since the kids were pooped, Jeff and I offered to walk to the bottom and get the van. On the way down we saw two women, probably in their twenties, on their way up. One of the two was in a wheelchair and was probably ecstatic that the walkway was a ramp. Unfortunately, it was a ramp only at the start. I told them that soon they would reach the first of many staircases but that they could reach the top by driving. It was not made clear at the bottom that there was a parking lot at the top, so I wanted to make sure they could still get there.

After getting the gang at the top, we drove back to the bottom to use the restroom. While walking to the building it was in, we passed a private residence. I knew we were still in Yellowstone, so I thought that was odd. I asked the first ranger I saw how those people got to live there. She said that you have to be a park employee to live there.

After Mammoth Hot Springs, we turned back south(east). Along the drive we passed a bison that was right at the side of the road grazing. I could have touched it from the passenger seat. After that was Dunraven Pass, which is at 8,200 feet. It winds through a forested area where many people were pulled over to the side. Evidently there was a sleeping grizzly way down in the woods. We took a pass on that one. A sleeping grizzly may as well be a log. After the grizzly spot, there was a several-acre area of dead trees. They were still standing, but they were all gray. It was a pretty cool sight.

At the next junction we reached, called Canyon, we went into the education center that had information on the supervolcano that exists under Yellowstone. They had a giant relief map of the area, so we got a photo of Parker’s Peak.

The final big thing we wanted to see was the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. I’d never even heard of that. People always talk about Old Faithful, but I think the Grand Canyon was the most impressive part of the park. We walked down to the brink of the lower falls. It was a long, steep walk down, but it was amazing. You can walk right up to the edge of the brink and look over to where the river has carved the giant gorge. It reminded me of Bridal Veil Falls on the American side of Niagara Falls. I guess the lower falls are even taller than Bridal Veil. The walk back up was exhausting, but well worth the view we’d seen below. On the walk down and then back up we could see the Upper Falls, but it was getting late and we thought if we walked to the brink of those falls, we wouldn’t get back until after dark. After we’d gotten back in the van and had driven a while, we got to the Grand View pull-off. We were almost too tired to move, but Jeff, Trey and I got out to check out the view. It wasn’t quite as amazing as the view from the falls, but it was impressive.

Since it was already passed 8 p.m., we decided to backtrack a little to the last junction and find a restaurant to eat in. We found a cafeteria where you paid one price for a certain plate size -- $6.95, $9.95, or $12.95 – then you fill that plate with as much food as you want (or can possibly pile on). Parker was worried they were going to say something to him about how loaded his plate was. We all got the $9.95 plate, and he managed to pile on chicken fried steak, 10 popcorn chicken, a couple cups of corn, a couple cups of mashed potatoes, a deep-fried chicken wing, garlic bread, and three corndogs. In addition, he had three glasses of rootbeer and a piece of German chocolate cake. Yes – he ate it all. Cal was pretty impressive, too, with noodles, two meatballs, sausage, six chicken nuggets, three corndogs, two rootbeers, and pudding. Somehow he finished off his plate without a scrap left on it. Trey didn’t eat much at all, though he had good intentions. He served himself some salad, but all he ate was the cheese cake he took.

By the time we left the cafeteria, we were so tired we were loopy. All the tree trunks and rocks started to look like animals. At one point I yelled out, “Moose, rock, bison.” It turned out to be a bison lying down. The only real evidence was the moving tail.

On the southern part of the drive we passed Yellowstone Lake, the largest high-elevation lake in North America. At 7,000 feet in elevation, it has 110 miles of shoreline and has a maximum depth of 390 feet.

Just as we were about to leave the park we saw a giant herd of bison. They were grazing up on a hill as the sun set. We got out to take pictures only to discover that we’d pulled up alongside people from Danbury, CT. What a small world.

We didn’t get back to camp until a little after 11 p.m. What a day. After spending 13 and a half hours touring Yellowstone, no wonder it seemed like two days worth of sightseeing.

For photos, use the following link:
http://www5.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=1829372027/a=2740108027_2740108027/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/
I've added links for photos to all the previous days, as well.