The Caravan Arrives!

At last, after 23 days and 2700 miles, The Great Rolling Yellowstone Caravan has arrived at the West Entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Our drive out of Grand Teton over Teton Pass was a little hairy. Going up the mountains is not so bad but going down the other side without burning out your brakes can be a challenge. Our diesel rig has an exhaust brake and automatic downshifting that helps a lot, but our companions have a gas rig so they had to manually downshift and do a lot more brake riding coming down than we did. Fortunately, it is a relatively short up and down on either side so it was a small portion of the overall trip. After coming down, we were in Idaho, with gently rolling fields of potatoes and whatever else they grow there. We stopped for lunch with a view of the Teton mountains from the reverse side.

After arriving and getting set up in the campground in West Yellowstone, we headed into the park, and headed toward Old Faithful. This is a great part of the park because of all of the tectonic activity. We stopped off at geysers all along the way and Geoff took lots of photos and video. At Yellowstone Lodge, we had a quick dinner in the lodge cafeteria and then set out to watch the next eruption of Old Faithful geyser. The schedule they post in the lodge is indicated as being plus or minus the eruption time. As it turned out, the eruption was almost exactly –10 minutes and Geoff was on his way to set up for photos when it went off. Everyone got to see it and it was not a disappointment for us. As we were leaving the area and going back to our car, a tour bus pulled in, just a bit too late. As it was, that may have been the last daylight eruption of the day.

As we headed back home, we came upon a couple of places where there were elk near the roadway. Being close to dusk, this is usually the best time to see wildlife since they are usually in the woods during the heat of the day. You can always tell when there are animals nearby because the traffic suddenly comes to a stop.

Day 2 came and it is now officially summer. Ellyn and I have been on the road now for nearly two months and it has felt like summer for most of it. Our first times of wearing long pants consistently has been since we reached Yellowstone. Most of our trip in the Midwest was in shorts and 90+ weather. Now we have 40 degree nights and 70 degree days for the most part. But that’s OK, we are enjoying every minute of it.

So this was a long site seeing day. We tackled the Inner loop of the Grand Loop of Yellowstone. The first part was past things we had seen the day before as far as the exit for Old Faithful. Then we stopped at the Kepler Cascades for some pictures and then up to the Continental Divide and Isa Lake, which flows East to the Pacific and West to the Atlantic (No, it is not a typo…look it up).

Then we went past the West Thumb area (although this was probably a mistake. We should have taken a look. The geyser area there was probably interesting) and headed to Yellowstone Lake. When Ellyn and I had been here ages ago with our sons, we had rented a boat and gone out fishing. It was an adventure but we had forgotten how large this lake is. At Lake Village we stopped for lunch at the Lake Lodge. The meals at the lodge cafeterias are not spectacular but they are likely reminiscent of what the travelers of the early 1900s got when they came here to see the wonders. Most people do not come here for the food.

On the way we came across some of the first wildlife of this trip segment; two Elk resting in the remains of a burned out forest. The National Park Service allows all fires to do their natural duty and burn themselves out unless they threaten structures or people. This fire may have been lots of years ago and new trees were just starting to rise up again out of the destruction. These Elk had nice big antler racks unlike the ones we had seen the first day out.

After lunch we headed north to the Mud Volcano and Sulfur Caldron areas. At the mud volcano Geoff yelled at a lady who left the path for a picture. Not a smart thing to do since a man died here earlier this month when he fell into one of the caldron areas. His body was not recovered. We also saw a rare occurrence of a Fire Rainbow overhead. This only lasted a few minutes but was even more spectacular than what was going on inside the earth at the moment.

Another unusual thing we came across in this area was a Bison. That is not so unusual but his behavior was; he was rolling on the ground. We did not get any pictures of this but we turned around and watched him for a while as he walked around and then attacked a small tree, scratching his head vigorously against it and eventually ripping it out of the ground. It was quite a laugh. Then he proceeded to walk down the road the way we had come, holding up traffic for some, but allowing us to continue on our way.

We encountered more Bison along the Yellowstone River as we headed for the Canyon of the Yellowstone and the Yellowstone Falls. The falls were really roaring. Apparently it was not a dry spring around here.

After a long day and about 128 miles covered within this huge park, we headed for home. One last wildlife encounter at the end of the trip was a lone coyote in a field. Day three was a relaxing one with us mostly investigating the town of West Yellowstone and its many gift shops.

Our adventure continues with the next post.

The Grand Tetons

We looked at routes into West Yellowstone and realized that going through the park from the east was not an option because of the mountain passes and narrow roads. We had planned on going north through Montana but we had also tried to figure out how to include Grand Teton National Park south of Yellowstone in our itinerary. It would have been out of the way to go there after Yellowstone but it looked like we could go that way before Yellowstone. We had the time to spend a full day in Grand Teton and still get to West Yellowstone on time so we did it.

From Keyhole State Park we drove southwest to Casper where we visited the National Trails Interpretive Center. This building has information on the wagon trails that went through Casper on the way to Oregon and California. The multimedia presentations are great and it made us appreciate all the more our relatively easy trip across 3/4ths of the U.S. to get to this point. Eight hours of sitting in a diesel powered motorhome is about the equivalent of two weeks of walking for the pioneers.

We then drove on for about two more hours to Riverton, WY and an overnight stay in a funky little RV park. Some grocery shopping and a stop to fuel up both of the rigs in the morning and we were on for a three hour drive to Grand Teton National Park and some boondocking (no hook ups at all). Coming into the Tetons from the west on US-26 as we did is the way to do it. We saw the mountains for about an hour before we entered the park itself and some of the views were spectacular.

Friends from the Jewish RVing Chapter, Shalom Roamers, Sandy and Carl Greenbaum, are volunteers in the park to direct traffic and keep visitors away from wildlife. However, as it was our luck, they had the day off when we were visiting so they volunteered to show us around the area. The great thing is that they have been doing this for many years so they know everything about the park and were able to tell us lots of things as they were taking us around. It was fun.

The first day we arrived, they came to see us after work and we took a short trip to Mormon Row, where there used to be a pair of Mormon farms back before the park was formed and the buildings are still there looking onto the mountains. They are kind of iconic sites for photos of the mountains. We were there late in the day so the sun was behind the buildings but I took some multiple exposures and processed them into HDRs and they came out great.

Then we had a wonderful Shabbat dinner at Myra and Dave’s RV. The next day, Geoff got up early and headed out to take some sunrise pictures of the mountain, a once in a lifetime chance as this was the first time he was in the park overnight. He was not disappointed except that the sky could have used a few clouds to pickup the morning rays.

When everyone else got up, we headed out early and spent the day driving up to Moran Junction, which was where we came into the park, and then around in front of the range past Jackson and Jenny Lakes on Teton Park Road. We stopped at Jackson Lake Lodge for lunch.

We also saw a lot of wildlife, especially on the river. There were some beaver dams and lodges but we did not see any beavers. We did see lots of ducks including a Mother duck with about 23 youngsters. Wow! The views were magnificent and we had a great day. Finally, we make it to West Yellowstone after another 3 hour drive over Teton Pass. Should be fun.