I woke up at 5:22am and had to pee. I thought it was the
middle of the night. Clay was sound asleep. When I came out of the bathroom, I
realized that there was light streaming in around all the curtains. I went
through to the living room and opened the curtains and was awestruck. The sun
was just rising and throwing color and the skies were blue and the water was
reflecting the Grand Teton range. It was all just breathtakingly beautiful.
I went
back in the bedroom and woke Clay up. He acted like why was I waking him up in
the middle of the night and I pointed out the window and told him he was
missing an incredible sunrise. I watched it from the windows and door as the
light changed color and lit up the Grand Teton range and Jackson Lake. It stayed beautiful well past
our breakfast and checkout.
We were on the road north to Yellowstone National Park early
hoping to see some of the many grizzlies everyone was reporting and showing
photos of to the north of Signal Mountain Lodge. We stopped on the dam and took some more
photos. We saw a small herd of elk. I spotted a lone Sandhill Crane in a meadow and
finally got a photo of one! We stopped at Colter Bay and finally found some
souvenirs we wanted to buy from Grand Teton National Park before we left it.
In almost no time we were entering Yellowstone, I think it
was only 22 miles. Neither of us had done any homework on this subject. I had
several pieces of tourist information on Yellowstone that I had been carrying
since Denver but I hadn’t had a chance to study them. Anyway, we decided we had
7 hours and we should do the Northern Loop. Yellowstone has 2 loop drives like
a figure eight. We are staying tonight below the bottom of the lower loop in Grant Village and we have dinner reservations for 6pm. We headed north and only
stopped for things that really caught our eye on the part of the lower loop
that we’ll plan to do tomorrow.
The first remarkable thing was the amount of snow on the
ground. We had only come 22 miles, but it was what you might expect as a change
after a 300 mile drive. The lakes we passed, Lewis Lake and Yellowstone, were
really big and almost completely frozen over. We did not expect that! No wonder
all the people on our float trip that had come to Grand Teton NP from Yellowstone NP
were thrilled with all the animals and bears they were seeing. All the animals
here must still be wintering! And how would they get around anyway in snow over
an adult's head?
We saw a lot of waterfalls today. We saw a lot of bison today. The
first was Lewis Falls at 29 feet. We saw an elk in the road that went to Grant
Village where we’ll be dining and sleeping tonight. We stopped at LeHardys
Rapids and to see a steam vent sinkhole in a parking lot at Sulphur Cauldron.
It smelled bad and was a little scary. We drove over Dunraven Pass which was a
terrifying and twisty climbing road. According to the NPS Yellowstone website this
is the Beartooth Highway and it wasn’t opened for the season until May 23.
There were a lot of side roads still closed and stores still closed but it
seemed crazy busy and crowded to us anyway. It also got really hot today. I can’t
imagine it here in summer with real heat and real crowds and without the
cooling effect of all the massive mounds of snow.
We stopped at Tower Falls at 132
feet. It was right near a big stone tower standing over the road.
Specimen Ridge across the Yellowstone River is the world’s largest petrified
forest. We actually thought they were lava tubes until I read about the
petrified forest. We ate our picnic lunch at the picnic tables outside the
closed store here.
We walked a mile round trip to
see Wraith Falls and then went down and across the road and saw the same Lava
Creek fall even farther at Undine Falls. According to the map they were both right
by the road. Not! Only Undine was within 20 feet of the road. Wraith Falls was
a long hard steep hike for us! Near here we came upon a lot of stopped traffic and one way, as there was a minivan that had run off our side of the road and was resting on its roof. That's unfortunate, but at least it happened here and not on the part where crossing that line on the pavement would have meant falling 100s of feet.
We came to Mammoth Hot Springs about 3pm. We
were at the half way point of the loop and only had 3 hours left before our
dinner reservation. It was really hot, we were tired and cranky and it looked
like the State Fair was going on here. We didn’t know what to look for here,
but we could tell by the parking lots and hundreds of people we could see
climbing the 300 foot elevation of boardwalks of the Lower Terrace Area that we
didn’t want to go there.
We drove on to the Upper Terrace that I had
information was a one-way driving loop. That was true, but there were still lots
of parking lots and boardwalks. We did some of them and I am sure we missed a
lot here, but we weren’t enjoying ourselves now anyway so it was just time to
move on. I don’t really remember anything of note after this.
We just fought
crazy drivers for about 60 miles to get back to Grant Village and checked in and
arrived within minutes of our dinner reservation time. I had pork and mashed
potatoes and Clay had his best beer yet (I have no idea what it was) and trout
amandine. Either he was really hungry or it was really good. He announced half
way through that he was going to eat all his meal tonight. I told him I was
going to have 2 slices of pork and potatoes left over and he took my plate and
finished mine. He really liked both. He ate all the asparagus from both our plates. He
ordered dessert. They had huckleberry ice cream and he really liked mine the
other day in Jackson from Moo’s. He
ordered that and I had some. We got back to the room and finished bringing up
the luggage.
Photos
