We had the most FANTASTIC time in Yellowstone! We had originally planned on leaving on Monday, August 26 - getting into Yellowstone on Tuesday - and then leaving there on Friday. Reservations were made back in June, but then about a week before we left we decided that we wanted an extra day. We called Yellowstone to add an extra day (thankfully they weren't fully booked at the campsite!) and called the hotel in Boise to change our arrival to Sunday. I am SO happy we added the extra day because it allowed us time to travel all over the park and see all sorts of amazing things. Be warned: This post is long and photo heavy. But it doesn't even scratch the surface of our experience.
I couldn't get out of being on call for work on Sunday the 25th, so we packed up the night before hoping that I wouldn't get called in and we could head on out. Worse case, I'd get called in and we wouldn't be able to leave for Boise until 7pm. Thankfully the phone didn't ring and we were able to pack the car up, run our last minute errands, and get on the road by 1pm. Also, thank the Lord we have a minivan because that thing was packed up as full as it could get while still allowing us to see out the back. Packing enough food for 7 days of camping/road travel (especially important since we have dietary restrictions to think about now) required a lot of space and a large cooler. There are also a few things we brought but discovered we didn't really need, so that's something to keep in mind for next time. Since this was only our second camping trip ever, we're still learning but I think we have a pretty good idea what we need to do for next time.
We're going to Yellowstone!
The weather on our drive changed so drastically every few hours. Storming then sun and back again, but it certainly provided us with interesting weather watching opportunities.
Can you see the faint second rainbow?
We arrived in Boise around 9pm and checked into the hotel. Nathan had lost a front tooth two days before, and the second one had gotten super wiggly on the drive. Once we got to the hotel, Nathan was ready for the tooth to come out so he could eat dinner. I grabbed a wet washcloth and pulled (just barely), and it came right out. Toothless for our vacation and the start of 1st grade!
We got on the road by 10am the next morning (after a terrible night of sleep - the pillows were too hard and the room temperature kept fluctuating too much), grabbing Starbucks and filling the gas tank. This little guy kept us company at the gas pump.
The drive between Boise and Yellowstone isn't as gorgeous as the drive between Portland and Boise, but we had our Harry Potter books on CD from the library to keep us occupied. Best idea ever. It really helped to pass the time and the boys LOVED listening to the story. We got through the first two books on the trip! We had also starting playing a license plate game to see how many state plates we could find during the trip. I kept a pen and piece of paper in the glove compartment to record each one.
We got into Yellowstone around 6:30 and it just happened to be the one free day of National Park admission of the year. Yay for saving $25! Our campsite was great, the bathrooms were right there, and they were clean (and were even heated!). I'd really recommend Madison campground, and would definitely stay there again if we decide to make another visit.
Our first night there made me decide that I loved this place. We had been sitting around the fire after getting the boys in bed when I looked up at the night sky. I gasped. The stars were so vivid and covering the sky like I had never seen in my life. The milky way was visible and we saw multiple shooting stars, one with a huge tail that streaked across the sky and lasted for a good 5 seconds. There were tears in my eyes. It was just THAT beautiful.
I had been checking the weather report religiously for two weeks before our trip and was (mentally) prepared for the 35 degree nights. That first morning though.....I wasn't so sure about it.
It is COLD. Yes, I wore a hat, three shirt layers, and two pairs of socks to bed. This is with a 25 degree cotton lined sleeping bag and two fleece blankets. COLD.
Visiting Old Faithful was on the list for our first day, but of course we made stops along the way to various things. Like our first herd of bison!
Don't worry, this was as close as we ever got to bison when we were out of the car. Intentionally, anyway. I'll explain in a bit.
Visiting Old Faithful was very fun and it wasn't crazy busy. We also got lots of license plates for our game in the parking lot! I ended up not thinking about putting sunscreen on, which turned out to be a huge mistake at that elevation. My neck is still slightly pink over a week later.
We popped in the visitor center to get a fishing license and our National Park passport. The boys loved putting our first stamps in it! We hope to do National Park visits each summer and thought this would be a fun addition to our experiences.
We got so lucky with the geysers. We just happened to arrive at Beehive just a few moments before it went off. It erupts every 24-36 hours, 200 feet into the air. It was just amazing.
Hopefully this video works for you. It was so loud and forceful, I just had to get it on video!
Nathan found a friend in the gift shop. "Teddy" Roosevelt. No, we didn't buy it. Nathan did get a choose a small stuffed bison that makes noise though. Aiden chose a handful of Yellowstone related bookmarks (yep, he's my kid).
We went fishing the next morning and took this great family photo. No fish though.
We headed out to Norris, but the parking lot was backed up and overflowing out in the road, so we gave up. That was the only one of the main areas that we didn't get to see. Norris was just a stopping point on our way to Mammoth, so we headed on.....and got stuck in a 30 minute delay due to road construction. It was very much worth it though, as the landscape sights along the way and once we arrived were just breathtaking. And Mammoth is awesome!
We wanted to try fishing again, so we headed out to Tower Roosevelt and went further out until we were almost at the Northeast entrance. We wanted to give Trout Lake a try, even though that required a bit of a crazy steep hike through bear country (we didn't bring any bear spray). We hiked and huffed and puffed our way up to the lake. Did I mention that we were super sore from walking around for 8 straight hours the day before? This didn't help. We were making enough noise from groaning in pain that it probably kept any bears away. The views were certainly spectacular once we got up to the lake though. Just a few families walking around and two other fisherman. Again, no fish. On our way back down we met an elderly gentleman headed up with his fishing equipment. He asked if we had gotten anything and John said no. The gentleman says, "That's the story of this lake, I'm afraid". Oh well. At least we had a great view.
Ah yes, this is also where our "unintentional bison encounter" happened. We were almost back down to the parking area when we turned a corner around some bushes and there was a HUGE bison just 15 feet away. His back was turned to us, thankfully, but it was a bit of a shock. I whispered to the boys to move quietly and we made it to the car without disturbing the bison. While I know that bison probably don't care too much about people since they see them all the time, we were not going to forget that this was a huge wild animal who might not appreciate being startled.
We did see plenty more bison on our way to Canyon Village. I got super excited when we had to stop because they were blocking the road. The bison on the left of the picture was still refusing to move for traffic going the other way five minutes later. No amount of honking from the minivan he was blocking was making him move.
Later that night, after 12 hours of hiking around, we collapsed into our tent. Throughout the night, we heard a baby crying from the campsite next to us. A very young sounding baby. We thought it was crying quite frequently, but it didn't bother us too much - we were exhausted after all. In the morning we discovered why crying was happening so frequently: they had twins! I asked the mom how old the babies were and she said, "Five weeks". I told her she was extremely brave for camping with five week old twins. She said, "Well, either brave or crazy. But you do what you have to do when all the hotels are full." They only stayed that one night as they were just traveling through to other areas, but I still shake my head at the thought of camping in 35 degree weather with five week old babies.
This was the morning we also discovered that after hiking up steep hills in already very high elevation, Nathan and I had both ended up with bloody noses overnight and I started coughing up some blood. I have to assume that my asthma was not pleased with the situation. Thankfully it was only a little bit of blood and it didn't happen again. Definitely was a little worrying though.
What might look like a random picture to you was my documentation of one of the best inventions ever. Starbucks VIA instant coffee packets. Just add it to hot water and you've got a steaming mug of Starbucks coffee. It made cold mornings bearable and I will never camp without it.
The next day was our trek out to Lake Village, Fishing Bridge, and West Thumb. Aiden's absolute favorite thing was Mud Volcano. It was a pretty awesome stop and I'm glad we did it. The mud makes an awesome "gloop gloop" sound as it bubbles up.
I thought the Dragon's Mouth cave was fantastic. It makes a roaring sound while steam shoots out, as though a dragon were sitting inside. So cool. It was around here though that I started feeling a little sick. The sulfur is really....potent in this area. After 25 minutes, I was feeling quite lightheaded and sick to my stomach, so we left while I sipped water and nibbled on a granola bar.
We considered driving the 30 extra miles down to Grand Teton National Park, but we had planned on a slower day and making back to the campsite a little earlier than we had been (translation: before it got dark), so we decided against it. We still explored plenty that day though and still managed to give our aching legs a little rest.
We were at the visitor center for Grant Village when John looked at the weather report they had posted at the door. He said, "Did you know there's a chance of a thunderstorm tonight?". We had ended up with fantastic weather all week and it was super sunny without a cloud in sight at that moment, so I shrugged it off. However, as we started to get closer back to our campground that evening, the sky started looking a little ominous. We had barely gotten back to the campground when dark clouds arrived overhead and lightning started flashing everywhere.
This doesn't even begin to explain what the sky looked like a little while later.
Thankfully a friend of ours had lent us their easy-up cover, which made making dinner much easier and provided us with a dry place to eat. The rain started to pour, the thunder was booming loud, and the sky (which had gone completely dark by 7pm due to the clouds) was being lit in all directions by lightning.
This is what Nathan and I think about camping in the rain.
We quickly ate, got the boys in bed in the dry tent, and then John and I sat under the easy-up by the campfire, watching the lightning flash all around us. It was amazing and terrifying, and made our last night there quite memorable. It poured hard all night and we only ended up with a few drippy spots in the tent by morning. We packed the van back up, took all of our garbage and recycling to the recycling area (loved that they had a recycling area!), and made one last stop Paint Pots before leaving the park.
This happened to be John's 32nd birthday and we "celebrated" with Denny's (ew, but I wanted pancakes and it was right by our hotel) once we got back into Boise that evening. After dinner, we thoroughly showered (our first in five days).
I'm fairly sure the stink our feet alone kept any bears away.
We then swam in the hotel pool, which Aiden barfed in after 15 minutes. John found out the hard way that he shouldn't rough house with Aiden in the water after Aiden has eaten a pizza, since Aiden actually barfed ON John in the pool. I'm just happy that was our only barf accident the entire trip (no car sickness, yay!).
We got back home the next evening after sleeping quite soundly on a real bed (I brought our own pillows into the hotel so I wouldn't be bothered by their hard pillows again). The dogs were very happy to see us (we'd hired a friend's niece to house/dog sit for the week) and I was happy to sleep in my own bed. I did wake up the next morning feeling very sad that I wasn't waking up in the tent in Yellowstone though. I think that means I enjoyed myself. :-) We plan on more adventures like this one next summer. Fingers crossed for Banff National Park in Alberta!
Oh and speaking of Alberta, our license plate totals for the trip included a grand total of 40 states, 5 Canadian provinces, as well as plates from Chihuahua, Mexico and Brazil. We also want to note that the first New Jersey plate we saw was from the car driving
backwards down the road. Oh, New Jersey.
To see ALL the pictures from Yellowstone, follow this link to the album:
Yellowstone August 2014
