Yellowstone National Park

Hey Everyone! Laura here. We made it through Yellowstone! We have finally thawed out, cleaned up, and even washed our clothes here in Idaho, and we're feeling pretty good. Since Yellowstone was one of our biggest stops on the trip and covered almost a week's time, buckle down for a pretty long blog post today. We figured the best way to cover everything is to break it down day by day, so here we go..

Day 1
On Tuesday morning we spoke to the friendly couple that owned the motel that we stayed at in Greybull. They had a lot of good advice and suggestions, and sent us on our way with maps and books of information. As I ran out to the car to get something while Elijah talked to them, I knocked over a waist high plant holder with a huge plant in it that was directly outside the door. Not only did the plant fall over, but it completely flipped upside down. I freaked out, picked up the stand and plant holder, scooped up as much dirt and plant remains as I could, plopped it back in the holder, and ran off. It was a bad start to the morning, especially since Elijah had haggled this poor couple down to $55 for the room the night before. Anyways, we head off to Yellowstone, and as we start climbing up the Rocky Mountains the temperature plummets, the winds pick up, and it starts pouring rain. The snow capped peaks that seemed so harmless in the far distance grew closer and closer, until we found ourselves with five foot snow drifts on each side. As if this wasn't bad enough, we then see a sign that says "Avalanche Zone next two miles." Great. We get through the avalanche zone without getting buried, and we are trying to buck up our spirits. We were in Yellowstone for goodness sake, we would deal with whatever came, and it would be awesome no matter what. As if to encourage our determination, a little ways down the road we see a bunch of cars parked on the side of the road and a dozen people staring at something on the side of the road. We pull over, and about 50 yards away is a mother grizzly bear and her cub. It was AWESOME. We had heard that we may see a bear, but we didn't think we would within an hour of entering the park. We get to our campground, set up, and get out our winter clothes. It was the strangest feeling to come from the 90 degree Badlands, and then having to cover up our sunburns with pants and winter gear. As dinnertime approaches, it's still pouring rain and there was no way we could make a fire or even fire up Elijah's camp stove. So we headed to one of Yellowstone's general stores that had a little restaurant as well as a gift shop, and we spent hours happily in the warm building deciding between a dozen coffee mugs, patches, and postcards.


Day 2
After a long night in the low 30s with nonstop rain, we drove up to another area of the park that had a great canyon and waterfalls that is called the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. It was still very cold, but other than the occasional shower, the weather was very nice. For three out of the four days we were in the park, I wore three long sleeve shirts, (one of which was an under armor type base layer) a fleece, a lightweight winter jacket, and a hat and gloves. Apparently, my body produces as little body heat as a living person possibly can because with all that, I was still freezing. But with the sun out, it was tolerable. The falls were beautiful, as was the drive back to our campsite. Since the park is so big, we had to do a lot of driving to be able to see a good amount of the park. There were pull-offs about every quarter mile, so we would drive and look for wildlife on the side of the road that we could stop and look at.

After a day of almost no rain, it started pouring again right before dinner time. Therefore, we decided to find a restaurant in a different area of the park for dinner. Lucky that we did, because on the way there we saw a male elk RIGHT on the side of the road. We thought that was so cool, until we drove fifty feet further and found the female nursing a baby elk a little further off the road. It was SO cool. On the way back from dinner, we must have stopped a dozen times to look at different birds* and animals. Yellowstone is like a zoo, but cooler because it's all in the wild.

* Elijah here, real quick. We saw both common and barrow's goldeneye ducks today, as well as a bunch of grey jays and black-billed magpies. On the way back from dinner, we also saw a bald eagle perched on the shore of Yellowstone Lake.

Day 3
After another cold night, we woke up to find that our tent zipper had frozen shut. Yikes. All we could think to do was sprint to the car and blast the heat until we were warm. We quickly packed up, and headed out to a new campsite for the second two nights. Luckily, our new campsite was almost a thousand feet lower in elevation, which translates to at least five degrees warmer. On the way to the campground, we stopped at Old Faithful* to watch it go off, which is every 90 minutes. While we waited, it started snowing. It was a pretty cool sight.

*When we pulled up to Old Faithful, there was a pack of bison roaming through the parking lot. Whatever, they do what they want.

Day 4
This was our last day, and a beautiful one at that. We drove up to the northwestern corner of the park to the Mammoth Hot Springs, which is at one of the lowest elevations in the park. It figures that in the one place that we least expected to get a sunburn, I still managed to torch my face on this last day when the temperature soared to a scorching 57 degrees, allowing me to whittle my layers down to two long sleeved shirts. I felt naked. With the weather so nice, and in the only area of the park that was completely thawed out from winter, we were able to take an awesome six mile hike. We saw tons of animals, that I will let Elijah embellish on because most of them were birds*. It was a great day, and a good end to our time in Yellowstone. Even though the weather was challenging, it was definitely a unique time to see the park, and we took advantage of everything we could.

*I could write pages and pages of how excited I was to see each species, but instead I'll simply list them all. On that one hike we saw elk, bison, barrow's goldeneye, common goldeneye, mountain bluebird, chipping sparrow, american three-toed woodpecker, american flicker, williamson's sapsucker, yellow-headed blackbird, american coot, lesser scaup, and mountain chickadee. Last, and certainly not least, we saw TONS of western hemlock, cousin to my favorite tree, eastern hemlock.

*This morning we were able to get up and out of our site in less than in hour. We would have made great time on the road had it not been for the pack of bison that decided to take an early morning stroll down the main park road. Once we passed them, we made our way south. Leaving the south entrance of Yellowstone, we drove through Grand Tetons National Park. It was so cool. There was a huge snow-capped mountain range with the Snake River in the foreground.


We're now in Blackfoot, Idaho for two nights, and are planning to visit the Idaho Potato Museum on Monday morning before we head out to Boise. We had our first ever laundromat experience today, was about as mundane as it sounds. Our goal is to eat potatoes with every meal while in the state of Idaho, and our dinner was a good start. We'll let you know how that goes.

Until next time,
Laura & *Elijah