Yellowstone National Park

2nd – 7th May: Days 24-29

I suppose that this is the first big ticket destination on our non-itinery. The National Parks are a big deal in the US, and they do the whole thing very well.  In fact Yellowstone was probably the world’s first national park and was established in 1872. Quite an amazing foresight really. We have purchased an annual pass for the National Parks (and monuments) for $80. It will have easily paid for itself by the end of this week.

We are staying in a town called West Yellowstone which sits at the western entrance to the park. It is a classy tourist trap, and every motel, hotel, campsite, bar, restaurant or shop has either ‘Grizzly’, ‘Buffalo’ or ‘Yellowstone’ in its name. Just about.

Our roost for these 6 nights is Grizzly RV Park. Obviously. The park has space for approx 220 RVs, plus some campsites. Happily it is only about 10% occupied and only opened the day that we arrived.

This whole area is at quite an altitude, between 6,000 and 6,500 ft, and it’s been a long snowy winter so there is still a reasonable amount of snow around. Yellowstone is only half open.  We are undeterred however, as the huge advantage of this is that it is still relatively quiet. I can’t imagine how busy it gets in summer. I read somewhere that in peak season there can be a 2 hour queue just to get in through one of the gates.

Our first day here we decided to not go into the park as the weather was mediocre and is forecast to be fantastic for the following 3-4 days.  We visited a Wolf and Bear Discovery Centre, which homes animals that are not able to be released back into the wild. Some of this was due to injury but for most of the bears it is because they were too habituated to humans, and were getting too up close and personal for comfort. Neither of us like seeing animals like these in captivity, but it was cool to see them so close without the fear-factor and they are doing a good job of education at this centre, which is all non-profit.

West Yellowstone also has an IMAX cinema and runs a rather dated, but very watchable movie on the park. So we did that too, by ourselves. Nothing like a private IMAX viewing experience. (Nick was thrilled to discover that at the end of the week the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie is showing.)

The next 2 days we did early starts, and were rolling into the park by 7.45 am. Picnics packed, camera batteries charged, binoculars to the ready. It was very cold initially (-4 deg C the first day), but with clear blue skies.  By the mid afternoon it was 25 deg C. We just drove around as far as we could, approximately 80 miles, then drove back again with lots of stops along the way. The scenery was fantastic. Loads of bison, a few deer, a couple of wolves (or possibly coyote), but unfortunately no bear sightings. The place is amazing, and I won’t even try to describe it.

 

 

 

 

 

The next day we had managed to book a room in the Old Faithful Inn. This is a huge log construction hotel built in the early 1900s. It has an amazing open atrium which is about 6 floors tall. (Our photos really don’t do it justice, but google has some good images if you are particularly interested.)

This evening was it’s first day of opening for the season and it was packed already. The Inn is named for the Old Faithful geyser which reliably fires off every 90 mins or so. The whole area is awash with geysers and hot springs and we had a great few hours hike along a loop trail to see most of them. One section of the trail was shut: we weren’t arguing… Even with bear spray, one can feel a little vunerable.

We had an amazing room with a rare view of the Old Faithful itself. After 3 weeks of living in our tin can it was a treat to have a huge room, a bath, and a double bed each. We had dinner, a drink on the mezzanine listening to a musician on the piano who then performed Prince’s Purple Rain on the cello (oddly fantastic), then went out to watch Old Faithful erupt by moonlight, pretty much by ourselves.  We also didn’t get up until we had seen it in the morning too.

 

The next day we mooched back to the Tin Can and had a lazy afternoon. In the evening we saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 on the IMAX. Very entertaining.

It was really nice to be in one spot for nearly a week, and we are ready to move north further into Montana tomorrow.