The Melting Glaciers
Reclining in the driver’s seat, I expect to wake up with the sun and have an early start to the day. Instead, a combination of the overnight Greyhound and relative car comfort means the first time I look at my watch it’s 10.30am. I’m stunned we’ve slept that long. I wake Alexis and we go back to our favourite supermarket to tidy up and stock up. From there, we drive towards Glacier National Park.
As we motor through Columbia Falls, I spy an RV park with cabins, so we stop to check their prices. $26 for the cabin for the night seems like a bargain. We have a look at the room, which is quite nice, with a double-bed size bunk bed, but the previous nights’ occupants have left a note saying there seems to be a yellowjacket problem in the cabin. Apparently yellowjackets are wasps. The owner explains they have sprayed the nest, but the wasps still seem to be finding their way into the cabin to die. The ones inside are sluggish and there are a lot of dead bodies on the windowsill. We decide we can deal with dying wasps and tell the owner we’re okay to take the cabin, but she is embarrassed so gives it to us free. Free is worth a few crawling creatures.
Our next stop is the visitor centre at Glacier National Park. The park is beautiful, although it may have to change names – the glaciers are melting due to global warming and will no longer exist within the next 12 years or so. Even now, there are only a fraction of the original number left. It is a beautiful park, with towering snow-capped mountains and deep gorges.
Our pre-lunch hike is through an old cedar forest with dark-brown dirt, low-lying ferns and moss growing in the shady patches. It’s a beautiful walk and winds up at a large lake with mountain views and more entertaining chipmunks. The walk back is not quite as pleasant as it starts to rain, but we are reasonably well protected under the trees. The temperature drops though, and as we exit the forest we can see our breath.
We stop at a few viewpoints and Alexis knocks us up some wraps as we make our way to the next hike. This is a short hike to a small waterfall. On the way we see a deer grazing in the undergrowth. The falls are not much to look at, but on the way back, another hiker advises us that the walk to sunset point is worth the effort. The trail winds around the side of a lake and terminates at a piece of land that juts out into the lake. From here there are mountains on every side. We feel like we are sitting in the middle of the lake. As the sun starts to sink, we hike back to car and call it a day.
Back in Columbia Falls, we don’t find a lot of food options, so succumb to KFC and head back to the cabin to relocate the crawling wasps. The wierdo magnet has a feeble attempt at flaring, with an introduction from our neighbours who saw us arrive earlier and made enough stew to share. A little presumptive perhaps, or over-the-top generous? I’m not sure how they made the stew anyway, as the cabins don’t have kitchens.
I flick all the moving wasps out the door of the cabin, but naturally, as I grab my towel from my bag I put my hand directly on a wasp crawling into my rucksack and get stung. Not so keen on the wasps now. The cabin also only comes with a bottom sheet on the bed, no other linen. I crawl between the sheet and the mattress protector, put my towel over the top and use a sweater as a pillow. It’s not ideal, but it is a step up from the car…just. In the middle of the night, I’m woken by Alexis talking to a wasp that has landed on her bed. It stings her, so now we are even.
The Delight of a Microwave Meal
We head back into Glacier National Park for a morning hike and find the park covered in a blanket of fog. It’s quite a drive in and we spend it wondering whether it’s going to be worthwhile if we can’t see anything. The hike is at elevation, starting at one of the visitor centres. They say it will be patchy, but still worth walking, so we set off. We walk uphill, through meadows full of wildflowers, catching glimpses of the mountains every now and then as the fog swirls and moves across the mountainside. When we get to the top, Hidden Lake remains hidden. It is thoroughly covered and while the fog is moving round the mountains to the sides, it is lying still in the valley, so it’s not likely to clear. It doesn’t matter as the walk has been lovely anyway. On the way back, we discover a young buck foraging in a little wooded copse.
The rest of the day is spent driving, aiming for Gardiner, a small town at the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park, just inside the Montana state border. We arrive just as dusk settles in. Again, we haven’t booked any accommodation. We really should have learned our lesson by now. There are not a lot of motels and no RV parks with cabins, but we see a motel that has bright pink neon trim and a few letters missing from the sign and recognise this is the most likely place to fit our budget.
The room has a microwave, so we dash across the road to the supermarket and buy microwave meals for dinner. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a microwave meal before. I have corn chowder cup-a-soup and fettuccini with chicken and broccoli, which is surprisingly good. It’s much like airline food, which I generally quite like.
The Hotspots of Yellowstone
We’re both excited about Yellowstone given that it’s the best known park in the United States and was the motivating factor in us getting together to travel again. We stop only at North Yellowstone to pick up a coffee. Yellowstone is a popular park – there is a queue at the entry gates. We get waved through an easy access lane since I have the annual pass, and an antelope grazing off to our right keeps our attention while we wait.
Once through, we head to the closest visitor centre at Mammoth Springs to get information and plan our visit. The ranger there takes one look at us and decides we can’t possibly be interested in hiking, so when I ask him for trail information, he only tells us about the easy trails in the path. I have to push him for any information on longer hikes and still doesn’t give us much.
Since we’re right by Mammoth Springs, this is our first stop. Much of Yellowstone is thermal, with geysers, mud pools and sulfur springs. Mammoth Springs is an area of thermal activity, with calcified pools of hot, steamy, sulfuric water. The walk is easy as it is on a boardwalk above ground level – you can’t walk in these areas due to the heat of the land – your shoes would melt. The springs are beautiful in their own odd way, as the area is quite barren and ashy, but the bacteria in the water causes rust and yellow colouration on the white cliffs. The information board says it will take a minimum of two hours to walk all the trails, but it only takes us about 40 minutes, including photo stops.
We plot a circular route of some of the main areas and plan to come back for more tomorrow, so time is on our side, or it would have been, had we driven in the right direction. Somehow, we end up in a different place than expected, which means we have to backtrack to see our list of sights. We are also realising the immense scale of the park. It takes hours to drive between each point, and the in-between areas are often basic forest that look much the same. We stop is at a geyser basin where we have lunch. We walk to the main geyser, which has not fully erupted for around five years but spurts out a constant jet of steam and sporadic splashes of boiling water. We eat lunch to a background track of the bubbling, boiling, roiling earth.
Alexis is keen on maximising our animal-viewing opportunities, whereas I’d rather get out and hike, but I agree to head backwards to an area known as the Serengeti of Yellowstone. There are supposedly good chances of spotting bison, moose, elk and perhaps even bears. As we drive, we come across a traffic jam. It’s caused by a huge bison wandering along the middle of the road. Cars are stopping in both directions for photos and the cars on our side can only pass in the moments that the bison veers left and allows enough space. We follow him for a while, marvelling at how huge his shaggy head is. When we arrive at the plains, we see hundreds of bison, roaming in herds. Some are very close to the road, giving us up-close viewing opportunities.
It is heading towards the end of the day and we have a long drive to get out of the park again. We are popping out of the east side to stay in Cody, Wyoming. The drive takes hours and is not especially interesting, apart from the occasional stray bison, until we are some way out of the park, where the landscape changes to dark-brown, odd-shaped rock formations and cliffs, with the occasional farm or ranch. As we approach Cody, we come across a huge dam, the deep blue water contrasting with the red-brown cliff surrounds.
We’ve tried to book accommodation at an RV park in Cody. In the morning they confirmed our booking, but told us to call back at 4pm to reconfirm. We did this and were told they would be unable to confirm until after 5pm as they were waiting for three groups to show up and will we only have a room if they don’t arrive. With no phone reception, we can’t call again to triple check, but make our way there with our fingers crossed. We’re in luck. We arrive just before the 8pm closing time and secure a cabin with a double bed and bunk bed. We pay extra to hire linen this time.
There is a rodeo in Cody that we’re both keen on going to, but it is already half-way through by the time we’re ready to move, so instead we go for dinner. Cody is a kitsch cowboy town, named after Buffalo Bill Cody. Everyone knows the name Buffalo Bill, but we realise we actually don’t know who he was, even though his face was on an Australian ice-cream with a bubblegum nose, called a Bubble O'Bill. Turns out he was a showman and buffalo hunter, among other things. The town is packed with little wooden saloon-style buildings, so it feels rather strange eating sushi here, but we do.
There's a Bear in There
The day does not start off well, as Alexis starts to feel sick on the drive back to Yellowstone. We have to do emergency stops by the side of the road a couple of times and then she naps to recover. The drive is slow, long and dull, as it is scenery we’ve seen before. It takes nearly three hours to drive from Cody through Yellowstone to the entry of Grand Teton National Park. Thankfully Alexis is feeling better by the time we get there.
Grand Teton is a much smaller and less-visited national park, based around a mountain range. As it has taken several hours to get here and will take a similar amount of time on the way back, we won’t have enough time to hike. Instead, we drive the park circuit, stopping at all the viewpoints and historic sites. The Mormons originally farmed this area, so there are old farmhouses in scattered areas of the park, as well as two old chapels. The views of the snow-topped mountains are spectacular. We see more bison, eat our picnic lunch near a dam, drive up a mountain for views of the plains, and drive by the lake.
As we head back towards Yellowstone we come across a section of road with a lot of parked cars, and temporary signs saying “wildlife ahead”. We stop to find out what the fuss is about and find there is a grizzly bear feeding on a deer carcass a few hundred metres from the road. We can only just make out the outline of the bear, but the rangers have set up a telescope for close-up viewing. I’m glad that after all the driving, we get to see a bear.
Back at Yellowstone we make one final stop: Old Faithful, perhaps the most famous sight in the park. It is a geyser that erupts regularly, shooting water high into the air. It used to erupt quite frequently, but it’s slowing down and now only blows it’s top every two hours. There is no schedule posted for this, so we have no idea when it is going to be. Dormant, the geyser is none too exciting to look at. We wait for a little while, but nothing happens and the viewing area is scantily populated, so we figure we’re not going to see any action any time soon. We decide we have seen enough geysers to do us, and continue driving. For the first time on this road trip, I hand over the wheel to Alexis. Since I sleep if I’m a passenger, I’ve stuck with driving, but it’s been a long day and I need a break.
Tonight we plan to stay at West Yellowstone, another cowboy town, right at the entrance to Yellowstone. Originally we were considering coming back in the morning to do a hike before departing, but we’ve had enough of driving. We try to find something to stop at on the way back, but everything requires a detour and more driving time. Instead we plan a lie-in.
We stop at a few RV parks in West Yellowstone, but the cabins are expensive and don’t have WiFi. On our third try, I find people willing to negotiate and manage to secure a luxury cabin for the same price as a motel room. It’s a beautiful log cabin with a queen-sized bed, television, microwave, fridge and our own bathroom, stocked with pocketable shampoos and lotions. It also has a WiFi room, with couches and a conference table. We pay less than half the standard retail rate, so this is an absolute treat.
Having travelled together for this long, we’re ready for a break from each other, and I am keen to eat a proper meal, rather than budget supermarket microwave stuff. Alexis goes to the supermarket and I go into the main tourist district and chow down on a pulled pork sandwich at a saloon-style diner. It turns out the supermarket was closed and Alexis bought food at the same restaurant, but as takeaway, so we didn’t see each other. We meet up back at the cabin and spend the remainder of the evening online.
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