Yellowstone- Thursday, July 6, 2017

     We heard the news that there was an earthquake in Montana at 12:30 AM last night, but we didn’t feel anything.  We checked the news website and saw that the map included where we were, in Billings, but the epicenter was quite a ways further west from where we are.  A few weeks ago, the news said they were having earthquakes in Yellowstone.  Maybe we’ll feel one before we’re done.

      As we headed west out of Billings, we caught our first glimpse of the actual Rocky Mountains.  It was hard to tell how far off they were, but we were heading towards them.   We took Beartooth Pass to get through Custer National Forest to Yellowstone, and that trip was an adventure in itself.  It is a winding road that takes you up into the very mountains that we had seen from a distance.  Julie was getting a little nervous on the drive up, especially when she was in the outside lane of traffic.  The temperature back in Billings was about 78 degrees, and yet here on the mountains, the snow was still melting.  It made for some pretty waterfalls.  Our first real stop to get out and look around was at Rock Creek Vista Point, where the elevation was listed as 9,190 feet.  We figured we’d be heading back down soon after that, but there was still more “up” to go.  We went even higher to a rocky flat field near the top, that looked like it should have Julie Andrews singing and dancing through it.   We were right at the Wyoming/Montana border.  The highest elevation we reached was near the summit at 10,947 feet. The lowest our car thermometer got was about 59 degrees, but we were driving between the packed snow banks.  We all got out to touch it.  On a dare, Anna and Emma put their feet in a pool of melted snow water that had ice floating in it. 

     Before entering Yellowstone, the road swept back into Montana.  We ate lunch at the Prospector Restaurant in a town called Cooke City and went shopping in the gift shop across the street.  The girls had earned some t-shirts for sticking their feet in the snow-melt pond.

     After entering Yellowstone at the Northeast Entrance, it didn’t take us long to see buffalo along the roadside.  Scott and Anna both pointed out the first one at nearly the same time.  Just a short distance further was a small herd and we stopped to watch the handful of them grazing in the distance.  From what Scott’s parents had said, Scott predicted that we would look back and laugh at how we gawked at these few from such a distance away.  He was right.  Before the end of the day, we had seen hundreds of them in large herds throughout the park, and several up close by the roadside.  Two were even inside the walkway by the “mud volcano.”  We also saw a small herd of pronghorns and several mule deer.

     We saw the stage coaches leaving as we got to the Roosevelt Lodge and we stopped to see about taking one, but it was already after 3:30 and the last ones of the day were the ones that had just left.  We did see a big, fat ground squirrel by the ticket office, though.   We started to follow the loop road counterclockwise through the park, because our ultimate goal was to get to the East Entrance where we will be staying.

     Since we were going past the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Scott talked us into going to Artist’s Point to view it.  Unfortunately, some RVs had apparently maneuvered themselves into a position that they couldn’t get out of, and we ended up spending over half an hour in a traffic jam just waiting to get into the parking lot.  Once rangers came to break up the log jam, the trickle of traffic started to exit past us.  Scott said that if you have to wait this long, you know that means the view is going to be spectacular.  Emma disagreed with that premise, but it was a great view.  A short walk from the parking lot took us to the view that the painter Thomas Moran judged to be, “beyond the reach of human art.”  As he did, we were looking up the canyon to the lower falls.  The canyon widens out on each side of the falls, offering quite a spectacle.  Looking down the canyon, away from the falls, was also an impressive site.

     We stopped at the Sulfur Cauldron, where the smell was distinctly of brimstone.  Heat bubbles up from the earth and feeds these muddy gray and yellow pools.  The sulfur smell comes from bacteria that live in the hot acidic water.  A short distance away was the Mud Volcano.  We walked a little bit there, and saw two buffalo inside the wooden walkways there, and of course, saw the mud bubbling away.  

     We made our way past Yellowstone Lake, through a large fire damaged area, and out to the East Entrance of the park.  Our lodge is just a mile beyond the East Entrance.  It is called the Pahaska Tepee.  We didn’t realize it when we made the reservations here, but apparently this lodge was originally built as Buffalo Bill’s hunting lodge.  We didn’t know what exactly to expect, but the girls had already deduced that we weren’t really going to stay in tepees.  We had seen pictures of A-frame cabins on the internet, and there are some here, but we are staying in cabin that is a little bit more traditional in its shape.  There are two units per cabin, so we’re sharing ours with another family.  Our room is roughly the size of a decent hotel room.  It has two large beds, and its own full bathroom.  It doesn’t have a tv, though, and there is no cell-phone service.  There is a land-line in each room, and there is Wi-Fi, but it only works at the main lodge building.  Once we got checked in, Julie and the girls had dinner in the restaurant here. 

     Scott didn’t eat because he was a bit upset for a number of reasons, but it didn’t help that his video camera mysteriously stopped taking video somewhere around the Mud Volcano.   He couldn’t figure out why, but eventually found a way to re-initialize the camera.  He had saved the video from the day, but lost all of the stills he was taking with it today.  That’s not as big of a loss as it might sound because he has been downloading them to the laptop, and Anna was taking a lot of pictures, and Julie had a few on her phone too.    He still has the video from today.  Without good Wi-fi, we’ll probably post a couple of days’ worth of blogs altogether when we get back to civilization.  Julie asked about laundry facilities, but there aren’t any here.  The closest ones are 28 miles away, back in the park, so we won’t be doing any laundry tonight either.  

     Now that Julie has seen a lot of buffalo, she really wants to see a bear.  We’re reminded all the time that we are in grizzly country.  Our cabin has safety rules that were handed to us and gone over with us as we checked in.  Julie said that she wasn’t leaving Yellowstone until she saw a bear.  Anna said, “Oh, yes we are.”

     In many ways, this has not been a fun trip for the girls, and we’re reminded of it almost constantly.  We’ve had long car rides, and even on a day like today, when it’s a relatively short distance to get to Yellowstone from our last hotel, once we were in Yellowstone, the main thing that we did was drive around in a car for probably over a hundred miles.  When we got out, it was only briefly, and then we were back in the car again.  Anna has had a little time in the front seat this week, but Emma has had none, and life in the backseat can certainly be cramped in boring.