Fri 15 Aug 2014 – Yellowstone
Drive: 0 miles
Highlights: First official visit to Yellowstone NP; looking for Bison and Grizzly Bears
To start with this is our new motor – welcome to our Chevy Sonis:
I was up super early – just couldn’t sleep beyond about 3:30, so I got planning our attack of Yellowstone. I dug out recommendations about the key attractions to visit and marked them on the map.
billinghamv was up around 6am and we hit breakfast around 7:15am, which was lovely – all home made dishes served at Yellowstone Basin Inn just outside Gardiner. Breakfast comprised typical cereals, home made yoghurt parfait, bison sausages and the like. All very good and highly recommended.
We had a plan for today – start at Mammoth Hot Springs, and then head clockwise around the upper circle of Yellowstone – aim to complete as much of the north circle as we could and then leave the lower circle for tomorrow. If we needed to leave anything to our last day, we needed to leave those aspects on the left side of Yellowstone since we would be heading out of the west entrance.
We got on the road just after 8am and got into the park not long after – we were at Mammoth by 8:30am and spent a fab hour walking around the boardwalks carefully laid out – the colours of the rocks when the warm spring flowed over them was amazing – see selection of photos below.
From Mammoth we headed to Undine Falls – we missed it initially but got caught up in the classic ‘one car stops and looks in a particular direction and all the other cars behind also stop and look in the same direction expecting to see something’. There was an object that vaguely looked like a bison, but we couldn’t tell, so I took a picture of it anyway – as it happens it was still there in the exact same position later in the day, so we consider that to be the ‘fake’ bison!
Undine falls was nice, but nothing desperately exciting – one of those side shows, that is only 50 yards off the road, minimal effort involved but pales into insignificance compared to some of the other attractions Yellowstone has to offer. In the UK it would be the attraction!
Next we were heading towards the Petrified Tree and Roosevelt Lodge. On the way
billinghamv suggested we try the Blacktail Plateau Drive, which was 6 miles long and took us away from the main road. Fair enough. Well the first 15 mins we thought we could have been in Epping Forest it was that dull (remember that everything is relative when you get to a place like Yellowstone), we turned a corner and Vick screamed BISON! – well I am not sure who was more shocked – the bison or me! Anyway, we both looked at each other (the bison and me) and decided that she had lost it, but we could go about our normal business anyway. Consequently the bison carried on eating grass and I grabbed my camera to take some snaps.
We were well chuffed, and
billinghamv deserved a lot of praise for recommending we turned off the main road and tried this dusty one way, single lane track. Next up was the Petrified Tree, which was another white elephant to be honest, although you have to take a photo once you are there, don’t you!
We popped along to Roosevelt Lodge to pop to the loo and grab a coffee. We also started on our packed lunch, which we had ordered from the Yellowstone Basin Inn – the raisin cookies came out, which were gorgeous. That gave us a sugar hit and spurred us on to the Tower Falls and then the Canyon Village. The traffic was starting to build now, so it was slow progress to the Canyon. We briefly stopped off at a view point and took some further piccies. A thunderstorm was on its way in – we could see the lighting in the distance and hear the thunder.
Once we reached the Canyon Village we turned off on to the North Rim Drive and drove all the way to Inspiration Point. Wow – another amazing picture postcard of a view. We turned our attention to our packed lunch, which included a salad and a home made sandwich, packet of crisps and water. All amazingly well prepared and very much appreciated at this stage.
We took a walk down North Rim Trail and the Grand View. Vick was a bit worried about seeing me eaten alive by a grizzly, so she sang and talked loudly all the way. We headed back and decided we had done our walking for the day. At this point, we almost ran into another bison (wow – how lucky are we?) and managed to grab a few photos of it as well. So two bison in one day, we were even more impressed!
We walked down Brink of Lower Falls and got soaked when a downpour and hailstorm hit us. However the views at the bottom were unbelievable. They look like paintings, but they’re really real!
There were roadworks on the Norris to Mammoth road with delays so we decided to head back the same way we came (up to Tower and across to Mammoth), and it was deadly slow going. When the speed limit is 45mph I don’t understand why people drive at 20mph. Anyway I appreciate I am impatient at times, but a bit of hassling encouraged them to move over (as they are advised to do I might add), and we were able to make reasonable progress on the way back to Gardiner.
Popped into the market at Gardiner to pick up some cheese, crackers/bread and a bottle of wine to enjoy on our balcony instead of hacking out to a restaurant and taking our chances.
Then had a dip in the ‘chav pot’ (as Sam calls them) with a French lady and her American daughter. Totes exhausted.
We’ve both concluded that Yellowstone offers far more variety than the Grand Canyon, but is just as stunning, if not more, and therefore wins the ‘battle of the major national parks’.