Day 6: Breakfast on Safari, Grizzly Surprise, and Sulfur Education

Amazingly, we all slept well in the triple queen room of an older hotel. How did we know it was older? The phone jacks next to the toilets in the bathrooms. That must have really been a thing a few decades back. Who makes calls from the toilet?! Anyway, when Buck checked in to the hotel the night before, the kids caught a glimpse of the lobby. But were they prepared for breakfast . . . in Africa?!!

Imagine a lobby filled with taxidermy—a diving crocodile, a family of lions frozen in their frolic, a zebra guarding a corner table, a full elephant head over your shoulder as you eat your cereal. I’ll admit, the breakfast itself was pretty awful. They were out of everything, one biscuit for a community mound of gelatinous gravy. Raisin bran advertised as Kellogg’s (but so obviously not). I’m not sure if the southern tour group who hit the tables before us cleaned out the breakfast fare or what, but we took our meager portions and found seats scattered through the savannah. Was it a unique experience? Yes! Would I recommend it as a stop to my friends? Hahaha ;)

We dumped a bunch of trash at the hotel, repacked, and decided to go to the grocery store for something to eat. But first, a gas station fill up. Sitting in the car, Graysen looks out the window and says excitedly, “That guy just picked his nose!” Brennen says, “Sweeeet!!” Yes, only one of Buck’s car games could cause such a reaction from our boys. The girls and I were laughing pretty hard. Who wouldn’t want grocery store donuts after that? :)

Fueled up with gas and sugar, we were ready to check out Yellowstone National Park—just an hour west of Cody. With our handy dandy America the Beautiful pass, we set out to see the northern end of the park. Here’s the logic: the park is huge! To drive back to the top loop (it’s set up like a giant figure eight) would take nearly six hours round trip . . . that leaves not a lot of time to sight see, and it requires a very early departure time. Here’s where the logic was faulty—there is A LOT to see in Yellowstone. We thought we’d be able to do all the things on the upper loop and still get to the big house in Jackson Hole by 6 PM. Ummmmm, no.

Almost as soon as we entered the west gate of the park we saw a bighorn sheep, right there! Next to the road! We passed through crazy landscapes that seemed to be constantly changing, all beautiful. As we made our way towards Yellowstone Lake, we came across our first of many similar experiences—abandoned cars lining both sides of a winding road, people of all ages and cultures adorned with cameras ranging from cell phones to cannon-sized lenses, and stressed out rangers trying to keep this combination from getting run over or eaten. In this particular case, we joined them :) We too ditched our car and wandered across the street to where all those cameras were pointed.

Guess what we saw. A wild grizzly bear!! What?! Yup. Super exciting. She was crawling around on fallen trees, oblivious to the commotion she was creating on the road above. Then she started moving towards the road. The rangers moved everyone out of the way in case she planned to cross. We could no longer see where she was, due to the steep embankment leading up to the impromptu parking area. Since we were only halfway through our vacation, we decided we’d rather not have any of our party get a bear hug, so we got back in the van. No sooner were our doors closed, than a white SUV stopped in the roadway (blocking traffic) and a foreign woman hopped out of the car and ran towards the ranger-made gap with her camera! The rangers started shouting at her and Buck said, “I do not want to see that lady get eaten!” But we couldn’t move since her vehicle was blocking ours. Keeping one eye on the embankment, the ranger shooed the lady back into her car, yelling, “You can’t be there!!” She was like, “Oh, I didn’t know.” Good gravy, Marie. There are signs EVERYWHERE talking about how dangerous the wildlife is, but people EVERYWHERE treated the animals like they were domesticated or animatronics or in a zoo. Eeeek!

Do you see the bear? I didn't. It would have eaten me for lunch before I found it :)

As we descended to the lake level (one of the world’s largest Alpine lakes), we started to see puffs of steam. Of course we stopped to investigate at Steamboat Point—I believe these were fumaroles, which might as well be called “fume-a-rolls” because they were sulfur stinky!! 

Back in the van we moved on to the mud volcano (talk about smelly! blurbles of muddy, sulfur driven splashes . . . even the “hole in the ground” toilet system at the park didn’t compare to those sulfur springs, and they were NASTY!). A boardwalk allowed us to tour several hot spots, surface indicators of the super volcano brewing below the earth’s surface. If you stop to think about it, the whole thing is pretty terrifying. We’re paying to walk across a catastrophic event—but because a catastrophe hasn’t occurred in remembered history, let’s build some walkways and add some signs for the tourists. Eeek! We were those tourists! But, as you are reading this, you know we survived. I know; you’re relieved. And had the super volcano decided to erupt, we would have missed the bison going head-to-head in an unfenced meadow near our van . . . there were no fences for the animals anywhere; this is their park, we’re the intruders. Dust flying! Whew, that was exciting!

Why did the baby bison cross the road?

Is this cool, mom? Dad?

Look at that line of cars waiting for the bison to cross the road :)

Answer: Because bison can walk ANYWHERE they want to in Yellowstone National Park, and I'm sure not going to argue with them :) Hey there big fella!

By taking a wrong turn we found a place we wanted to see all along—the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone featuring the Upper and Lower Falls. I have to say, for as absolutely huge and beautiful as those falls turned out to be up there with our view from Artist’s Point—those names are totally lame! Even the place you look at them has a better moniker than the falls themselves. How about Glorious Falls or Roaring Thunder Falls or Knock Your Socks of Falls or Where-on-Earth-did-all-these-tourists-come-from Falls? No joke, I think at least 10 busloads of visitors from each and every Asian country on that expansive continent were at Yellowstone for an extended vacation during our visit. We expected emptiness or at least a reduction of the famous summertime swarms of humanity. Nope. There were times we felt like we were touring a national park in Asia, not the other way around. It was so interesting! We felt like the English-speaking minority in our own country. It also seemed that forming lines and traffic patterns must be opposite in Asian communities, because we kept meeting these visitors on “the wrong side” of the sidewalks and pathways. Oh, and the selfie taking :) It was pretty endless for this and subsequent visits to our Wyoming-based national parks. I’m glad the other tourists were enjoying the beauty; we certainly were!

At this point, we needed to make a decision—abandon the north of the park and get to Jackson Hole on time or accept the inevitable in a park filled with 45 MPH zones, and arrive around 9 PM. The family we planned to meet in Jackson texted that they were running late, planned to get dinner in town, and wanted us to take as much time as we wanted to enjoy the park. That helped make our decision. We had to skip the Tower Falls and Lamar Valley (where the wolves and the most Aspens are), but we’d seen several breathtaking waterfalls and the Grand Canyon section was stunning in its vastness and depth. Oh, I should mention Brennen’s deadpan comment, “We’ve been here for hours and I have not seen a single yellow stone.” Who knows why they name things the things they do? :) This was the first national park, designated by Teddy Roosevelt. Devil’s Tower was the first national landmark, and later in the trip we saw the first national park cave, but I’ll get back to that.

Bypassing several intended stops, we did veer off on a narrow road to see a petrified redwood tree. I guess there used to be two of them, but souvenir seekers chipped the other one into a second extinction. So, they put a big fence around the remaining petrified tree (which is not as big as the famous ones on the west coast), and we took pictures of it before scooting to the main northern “must see” the Mammoth Hot Springs.

At this point, we were maybe 10 miles from Montana. Other tourists told us they’d seen a massive elk herd at the Roosevelt entrance (an arch into which President Roosevelt placed the capstone—we didn’t see that either). But, we did see one majestic-looking elk fellow posing atop a hill not far from the Springs. I took as many pictures as I could with my phone, because we’d packed the big camera in a suitcase not thinking we’d need it that day (duh!). I’m sure the Bald Eagle sighting, too, would have been better with the big camera’s zoom. We’ve taken so many pictures. I imagine if you added the three phones and the two battery-operated cameras together, we’ve got to be in the thousands. Buck says I’ll have to make a coffee-table book of our pictures; I think it will be as thick as the table is tall :)

Back to Mammoth . . . descriptions elude me, so you’ll have to information gather through pictures. Here’s what one Yellowstone explanation says: “Constantly changing, colorful terraces began thousands of years ago. Mineral-laden water from beneath the earth’s crust deposits up to two tons of travertine daily.” DAILY! That’s so interesting to me. We walked the wooden pathways around Mammoth, and became very winded as the stairs to the top seemed to climb to the sky. Graysen was wishing for his inhaler, and I was happy to keep pace with him. We weren’t quite ready for the altitude changes, I guess. Those 5,000 feet make a difference (or maybe it was the bags of trick-or-treat candy we brought along for snacks—so much sugar).

By the time we finished admiring the bizarre, but beautiful Mammoth formation, the sun was preparing to set. We had to hustle, because not only did we need to drive from top to bottom of Yellowstone, but also Teton National Park before we reached our destination for the week. At least it wasn’t snowing.

Four hours later (road construction in the park), we wound our way up a steep, curvy road to a house our GPS had no idea how to find. The family we planned to spend the week with was still out eating their late dinner in Jackson Hole. Thankfully, they texted the entry code so we could pop the lock box and retrieve the key. There may have been a brief jaw drop when we walked into the spacious interior and observed the wall-to-wall glass windows and sliding doors that stretched across the back of the expansive upstairs living space. Then we put the hustle on.

“Get all of our stuff out of the van and to our room on the lower level as fast as you can; we don’t want to shock them with the amount of luggage we have.” Some of this luggage included trash bags full of dirty laundry—maybe five or six? Just as many suitcases. A couple of heavily-laden cardboard boxes (I literally lugged a crock pot for 3,000 miles and did not use it once). A giant tote of shoes (carrying approximately a dozen pairs, not counting those on our feet). Six back or fanny packs. Juice boxes and food. It was crazy! But we did it :)

No sooner were we settled than our hosts arrived back at the big house with hugs all around. I’ll describe them and the house on the next blog post. I feel like this one is long enough :) 

(I'm noticing I often end punctuate with smiley faces . . . umm, I'm an English major, so I think that's okay ;)