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| On the road between Cody and Yellowstone |
Cody, WY to Yellowstone National Park
We have finally arrived at Yellowstone, which in many ways
is sort of the apex of our trip. We’ll
be staying here for four nights, which many have said is not enough
(Yellowstone is bigger than Rhode Island), but should give us a good taste of
the park. The road from Cody to
Yellowstone was, like all the roads we’ve been driving on lately, beautiful,
remote, and hilly.
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| I won't spoil this scene by talking about how later Nadia found a leech on her leg (which, thank heavens, she removed herself before telling me about it). |
Yellowstone is amazingly beautiful. We stopped at a random pullout on our way in
to have our lunch, and after a short hike (during which Lanie fell in deep mud,
I sank to my calf and dropped my glasses in mud while trying to rescue her, and
Bob ended up knee-deep while carrying her out) we arrived on the coast of Yellowstone
Lake where it was joined by Pelican Creek, with the mountains towering across
the lake and the sun shining on the deep blue waters. Any other place this would have been an A1
destination, but there’s so much stunning scenery here that this is barely a
blip on the Yellowstone map.
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| The mud incident. Apparently Bob found time to take a photo before coming to our aid. |
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| Crazy bear lady. Note (a) the bear mace in her hand, and(b) that she has arranged things so that she has a protective layer of children surrounding her. I am the rear guard. |
Bob has been a little worried about bear encounters, so
naturally the first person we met at Yellowstone was this crazy bear-obsessed woman,
walking around the beach with bear mace in her hand, who tried to convince us
that we immediately needed to buy a can (at $50). (I’m glad we saved our money, since the bulk
of our time at Yellowstone was spent on semi-crowded boardwalks surrounded by
other people, with approximately 0% chance of a bear sighting.)
We’re camping at the Canyon Campground, which is fairly
crowded but nicely wooded so you don’t feel cramped. I was initially displeased that we were right
next to the bathroom, but this actually turned out to be somewhat of an
advantage since not many people seemed to use it and it was nice and close for
the two occasions when I had to carry Lanie to the bathroom in the middle of
the night through the bear-infested campground (at least according to the crazy
bear lady).
The best thing about this place -- we’ve finally escaped the
campfire ban! At last, s’mores can be
made and consumed. In our excitement, we
even cooked our dinner over the fire – kielbasa and apples.
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| Fire! |
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From Bob:
We were only a few minutes into our first Yellowstone experience
when we encountered one of the things that sets this place apart from all of
the other places we’ve visited. I sunk
into it right up to my knee. It was
thick, thick MUD (thankfully not the boiling, sulfurous, volcanic kind). I was rescuing Lanie, who had fallen
all-fours into it, giving Jen a chance to dislodge her leg. It was dicey for a few moments about whether
she would be able to save her sandal.
It’s
been so dry everywhere we’ve gone that the only surfaces we’ve seen have been
parched grass, ancient volcanic rock (as in the Badlands and Devil’s Tower) or
dried-up, hard-packed dirt. We took it
as a good sign, once we got ourselves out of the morass. Maybe, if it was moist enough to be muddy in
places, we would be able to have our long-awaited campfire. Close readers of this blog might remember
that we haven’t been able to have one of those since Ohio, before we had a
chance to stock up on s’mores ingredients.
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| Bear print on the beach |
Aside from giving us a greater
appreciation for the fates of all those mammoths in South Dakota, this first
hike in Yellowstone, Pelican Creek trail, also gave us our first exposure to
another aspect of the Wild West that we had not encountered before: grizzly
bears. Once we made it through the swamp
and over to the shore of magnificent Yellowstone Lake, we saw footprints from
many different animals (this time mud was our friend), including grizzly
bears. We have entered Bear Country.
We would later find out at a nearby
visitors’ center that a grizzly had walked along the shore early that morning,
only three hours before we had been there.
Before we got to the visitors’ center, however, we got a crash course on
bears from a fellow park visitor who seemed to know a lot about the
subject. A woman from Colorado who was
sitting on the beach when we got there was almost giddy when she found out
about the bear tracks. She began to tell
us everything she knew about bears.
These tracks were probably black bear because they didn’t have any clawmarks.
No, wait, maybe those are clawmarks. The’re
definitely grizzly. A ranger told her
she would definitely see bears on her visit, and she had. She had run up to a roadside crevasse –
against park regulations – to take a picture of a black bear and cub down
below. She made her husband walk in
front of her and carry their can of bear mace in his backpack where she could
reach it in an emergency. She tried to
make him walk right in front of her on the beach, where visibility was several
hundred feet (we’re meant not to get closer than 100 yards to bears).
When you encounter a bear on a
trail – and she made it clear that we would encounter a bear on the trail – she
told us that we should not run or turn around but walk slowly backward and not
make eye contact with the bear. We
should talk calmly, not scream, to the bear.
She was very happy to hike with us
back the parking lot (those guys knew a
mud-free way back) because you’re
supposed to hike in parties of three or more and you’re supposed to make lots
of different noises on the trail. This
last bit is something we’ve already mastered.
It turns out she may have been a
little coocoo for cocoabears. During the
3/4 –mile walk back to the cars, she prattled on nervously about bears. It seems, in fact, that she is so concerned
about bears that she sent her children to Catholic school. Actually, by this point I only heard snippets
of her conversation with Jen and the girls, so this part might not be
100-percent accurate. I was walking ahead
with her husband, a Red Sox and Patriots fan who was eager talk with someone
from New England about these things (and, apparently, to anyone who could talk
about anything but bears). We talked so
ardently and walked so far ahead that our friend was out of reach of the bear
mace for a while.
Luckily, we made back to the
parking lot without further incident.
Except, once we got to our car, guess what we saw? You’ll never guess. A HAWAII license plate. You can imagine our excitement. We’ve already seen Alaska on our trip. We’ll almost certainly get a full set by the
time we get home, even if we have to drive through Delaware to do it.
Delaware, a bear-free state, as far
as I know.
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