Another long one, 3 days in a row!
Sunday, September 6
So 6 years after our first attempt, we finally drove the Beartooth!
The sun was shining as we set off down the main street of Red Lodge, or at least, as we detoured around the main street as it’s being dug up for resurfacing at the moment. Today is the Sunday of Labor day weekend and most people seemed keen for a lie in, the car park was still pretty full when we left. So we had a head start on the others keen to drive the road today.
It wasn’t long before we started to climb…and climb…and climb up a series of hairpin bends that took us way up into the Absaroka Mountains. The views were spectacular so we stopped at the first major viewpoint to grab a few photos, but we nearly expired from the cold! The wind was blowing and at that stage it was only -2 degrees Celsius outside, according to the car thermometer.
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| Neil, feeling the chill! |
Before the next photo stop we layered up with everything we could find and dug our gloves out of the suitcase – it’s hard to take photos with frozen fingers! It really is a spectacular drive across high tundra, scattered with a series of alpine lakes but the cold stopped us from lingering long at any stop. At its coldest the temp bottomed out at -4 degrees but the wind chill made it feel MUCH colder.
As we headed back down the other side we switched onto the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, a road that we’d driven before in 2009. This time we were heading the opposite way and it took us all the way down to the foothills to the little Wyoming town of Cody. You may guess from the name that Cody owes much of its fame, and present income, to Buffalo Bill Cody, the famous buffalo hunter and Wild West showman of the 1800’s. We stopped in at the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum of the West, not really expecting much, but we were both absolutely blown away! It was a fabulous museum, or really 5 different museums each on a different theme, Buffalo Bill himself, The Natural History of the region, Firearms ( we though Liam would like that one!), the American Indian of the Plains, and the Museum of Western Art.
I was particularly impressed by the Natural History Museum, as you progressed through the displays you wound down several levels each representing a different range above sea level in the surrounding mountains. The displays of geology and wildlife on each level were fantastic, full-size Bison and wolves etc.
Our final scenic byway for the day was the Buffalo Bill Cody scenic byway that takes you from the dry scrubby area around Cody back up into forested mountains to the West entrance of Yellowstone Park. You pass the Buffalo Bill Dam and the Buffalo Bill State Park (start to see a pattern here?) which were really both very lovely. The lake behind the dam looked like a lovely sport for recreational boaters and the campsites on its shores were well occupied by RVs and caravans.
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| Buffalo Bill Scenic Byway |
Finally back in Yellowstone Park we wound around the enormous lake heading across to the Old Faithful section and our home for the next 2 days – the fabulous Old Faithful Inn. This one is the granddaddy of all National Park Inns. It was the first one and its massive log beams and walls and stone fireplace have been copied in so many later lodges. I’d booked us into one of the rooms that are in the later wings added to the lodge. The original rooms in the main lodge building had dubious reviews and most have shared bathrooms. We don’t do shared bathrooms!!
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| Old Faithful Inn |
The pace was buzzing! Neil struggled to get a parking spot in the lodge carpark but eventually we were settled into our “Premium Geyser View” room….. Which has a geyser view if you squint through the trees and use your imagination! Hmmmmm! We’re booked into the Old Faithful Inn Dining room tomorrow night but tonight we had to find an alternative. Looking at the crowds buzzing around the main lodge we made a beeline across to the much quieter Snow lodge building a few hundred yards away. That’s where we stayed on our previous visit and we remembered the excellent Obsidian Dining Room there as serving a nice meal. We made a good choice and enjoyed our dinner in a much quieter room. The local sausage sampler of bison, boar and pheasant sausages was particularly good!
Monday September 7
A Day in Yellowstone
I’ve started to think that my aim to stay in all the vintage, original national park lodges has a flaw. The flaw being that vintage, original national park lodges have vintage, original quirks! In Glacier it was the appalling bed, here the bed is fine but the pipes for the central heating are very quirky… particularly at 5.30am in the morning when they start to play a tattoo fit to wake the dead, or at least fit to wake the deeply sleeping!
We breakfasted on muffins, fruit and coffee in our room before setting forth on a grand loop tour of the park. There were several areas that we missed on our last trip and some old favourites that we were keen to see again. First stop was new to us, the Artists’ Paint Pots. A lively thermal area scattered with a series of boardwalks through a bubbling cauldron of geysers and mud pots and vents. In the cold air the steam was going crazy and at times I couldn’t see Neil through the fragrant (?) sulphurous mist.
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| Enjoying a steam bath at Artists Paint Pots |
Yesterday and early this morning, Neil and I had both been surprised at the lack of wildlife in the park. On our previous visit we’d seen herds of bison and elk within a few minutes of entering the park, and back in 2009 we’d had to dodge the bison getting around the open areas near Old Faithful. This morning the best we saw was one or two lonely bison waaaaaay across a meadow, so small they really looked like a speck of mud. However, we needn’t have worried… we’d just passed through a canyon called the Golden Gate, turned a corner and Neil hit the brakes hard. There was a bison in the very middle of the road 20 feet in front of us and he was coming our way. We just looked at him and he looked at us and kept coming….Neil was mentally formulating his explanation to the rental car company for the dint in the front of the car, because the Bison was coming straight down the road and not deviating at all! You’d swear he was playing chicken with us
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| Playing chicken with a bison |
However, at the last moment he turned aside and strolled past the car…ready to terrorise the next carful of people to come around the bend. I may sound a bit dramatic, bu bison are HUGE! Think of a really large bull and add about a half as much again… and you have an average Bison. We’re driving a Jeep Cherokee which is a big car.. and this guy would have made a very large hole in it.
Shaking slightly…we carried on northwards to revisit the Mammoth Hot Springs area where a colossal set of limestone terraces has been spreading itself across the land for who knows how many years. It’s really odd to see an inside-out limestone cave! In the visitors centre I bought my Yellowstone Pin – I’ve been collecting them from each national park, and had a quick look at the displays before heading west across to the Tower-Roosevelt section ,another new area for us. Or at least we thought we were heading west, after a few miles we realised we were heading North and were about to leave the park altogether! A quick U-turn and we retraced our steps to the missed turnoff.
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| Mammoth Hot Springs |
At Tower Fall we bought a few sandwiches and dodged the crowds at the lookout to try to take a photo. That took a while as there were a large family or people all blocking the view while they took turns taking photos of their group. I really doubt the waterfall was visible behind the crowd, they could just as easily have taken it in front of the restrooms! (I may have been getting a bit tired-and-grumpy at this stage after my early start!)
Tower is a pretty waterfall but it doesn’t have the magnificence of Yellowstone Falls in the Grand Canyon. We had explored the canyon pretty extensively on our previous trip so we just stopped in to see one of the outlooks that we hadn’t previously seen. The traffic jam for a parking spot at the viewpoint was pretty busy but Neil managed to grab a spot and we juggled with the crowd for a photo.
Our aim for the middle of the afternoon was to return to the Midway geyser basic to take a high shot of the Grand Prismatic Spring. This is an enormous, gloriously coloured thermal pool which really needs to be seen from a height. When we visited in 2009 we saw it at ground level on a cold day in a thick cloud of mist, definitely NOT ideal conditions. In his browsing on the internet, Neil had come across the account of a chap that had discovered a high level viewpoint for the pool which was away from the normal crowded viewing area. It was “off-site” from the normal viewing area and would require a steep climb, but we were both keen. We managed to park nearby but somebody in Park management must have heard about it because they’d posted a “No Entry” sign on the rough track. Quite a disappointment!
We tried to find a parking spot in the park’s designated viewing area but the place was like Pitt Street, not a spot to be found! So we gave up there and headed back to Old faithful to enjoy a wander around the Upper Geyser Basin.
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| Walking around the geyser basin |
Neil decided to wear his GoPro and do a time-lapse video of our walk. With his ordinary camera as well he really looked like a paid up member of the Paparazzi but he had a lot of fun. We came across another Bison right on the road, with two attendant rangers shooing away anyone that came to close an finished up our walk with a tasty mountain Berry ice-cream, before heading up to the viewing stands to catch the latest “showing” of the Old Faithful Geyser. She blows every 90 minutes (give or take 10 minutes) and this afternoon she drew a huge crowd. A few tentative, pre-spurts and away she blew. Very satisfying. We had to wait for 15 or 20 minutes and it was entertaining listening to the people around us, lots of accents but the most strident one was the lady from New York saying that if “that thing doesn’t blow soon, I’m gonna go over there and slap it!!”. You just can’t mistake a Bronx accent
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| Paparazzi Neil and Old Faithful Geyser |
The crowd of on-lookers amazed us but it’s in keeping with our experience here this time. We’ve been stunned by how many more people are around now, only a month earlier in the year than our previous visit. However, we’ve now been told by 2 staff that this is a pretty quiet time.. “You should see it in late July!!” We think we would hate it in late July, just too many people juggling for photo spots.
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| Crowd waiting for Old Faithful to Blow! |
We’ve just returned from a lovely dinner up in the Old Faithful Dining Room. It’s a HUGE space constructed entirely of logs with a massive fireplace and enormous rustic chandeliers. We ordered local trout cakes to share for our appetizer and I opted for the Montana meatloaf and Neil the Sockeye salmon. Our wine and bread arrived promptly but there was a (pleasant!) delay before our waiter returned and asked how things were going. He rapidly realised that he’d made a blue – our meals had not been ordered so instead of the Montana-rush we’d been accustomed to up north we had our entrée and main served in a relaxed and comfortable fashion. He was SO apologetic, obviously expecting a blast that we’d had to wait all of 15 minutes for our food!. I don’t know if he really believed us when we said we were in no rush and happy for a nice slow meal. Americans up here really must expect their food FAST!
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| Old Faithful Inn Lobby |
Tomorrow we head on to the Grand Tetons National Park, another of our “second attempt” visits. Wish us luck!
Tuesday September 8
On to the Grand Tetons
We joined a queue for breakfast this morning in the main Dining room, the usual eggs, bacon and sausages etc. had the addition of grits on the menu. I’d had Grits when we visited the Deep South in 2012… so I gave them a WIDE berth. Yuck!
On the way out of Yellowstone we stopped briefly at the sign marking the Continental Divide. I think I’ve mentioned before that this line runs crookedly down the Rockies and marks the line where rivulets and streams will run either to the Pacific on the Western side of the Divide and to the Atlantic on the Eastern side. My bottled of water will end up in two different oceans….eventually!
We revisited the West Thumb Geyser Basin before finally heading south. This one is unusual in that the geysers ate scattered along the shore of the lake and even in the lake itself. Some of the smaller hot pools look like the perfect place to cook any fish that you may happen to catch, but I guess they’d taste pretty foul after bathing in sulphurous water.
The drive down through the John D Rockefeller Scenic Byway (that links Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Parks) is through thickly forested hills and canyons but it’s not long. After less than an hour we had our first glimpse of the mountain peaks rising up ahead of us.
As we drove nearer the peaks grew higher and our jaws dropped lower. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more spectacular mountain range! They rear up out of the plain to spectacular heights and are just so spikey! They are very young in geological terms and still rising which accounts for their sharp peaks. To add to the perfect aesthetic, laying at their feet are two gorgeous lake – Jackson Lake and Jenny Lake.
As we drove around the loop that takes you along the lakes edge and then back up to the top end of the ark I kept checking to see that Neil was watching the road ahead, the mountains just kept drawing the eyes. We stopped at several overlooks, one with a great view of the peaks reflected in the lakes almost still water and others where the Snake River winds in front of the mountains to create the perfect foreground.
Another short drive to us to see the tiny, deserted Mormon settlement and it’s remaining barns and cottages. The community thrived for a time in the 1800’s but now the building provide another striking foreground for a classic mountain shot. The only trouble was that someone had decided to erect a bright yellow porta-potty right near one of the most photogenic barns. Every keen photographer that arrived while we were there had a few sharp words for the brains behind that idea!
When we arrived at Jackson Lake Lodge the room wasn’t ready yet so we spent some time with a coffee admiring the view from the hotel lobby’s enormous windows… and I tried to get the internet on my iPad sim to work. It’s been playing up the last couple of days which is awkward when we’re relying on it for navigation assistance.
Our room is delightful, not big but nicely furnished and we have a patio with a view straight across to the mountains. We sat up on the deck of the hotel bar and watched the sun drop down over the flats between here and the lake, straining our eyes to see if we could catch a glimpse of a Moose. This area is a favourite haunt of theirs. We didn’t see any Moose but the nachos and burgers were good compensation.
Back in the room Neil set up three ( yes THREE!) cameras to record the sunset. I made do with one! From our viewpoint we couldn’t actually see the sun but we could watch the sky darken from blue to magenta and the silhouette of the mountains grow darker. Not a bad way to end the day…
Except the day wasn’t quite over! When the sky was really dark we went outside and saw he milky way and a million stars overhead. We decided to have a go at some night sky photography, something that’s impossible at home with all the light pollution. While we were falling over furniture and trying to find setting on our cameras in the dark we heard wolves howling and a moose bugling way down in the valley. Now THAT was a good way to end the day.
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| Milky Way over the Tetons, and a plane trail. |