National Parks – Page 2 – Lemon Drop Pie

After seeing bear scat on the trail to the natural bridge in Yellowstone, we decided to rent some bear spray for our morning hike up Mount Washburn. Bears scare me, and for good reason. We looked into buying bear spray at the park, but it was $50, and renting it was much more reasonable. All four of us watched a video about how to use bear spray, and Ed and I practiced pulling the trigger with an empty can of bear spray.

And we were off to climb Mount Washburn! It is one of the more popular trails in Yellowstone, but since we got an early start, there weren’t that many people on the trail yet. We were basically going to climb three miles up at about a 10 percent incline, and then come back down. Ed and the girls, of course, were faster than I was. Even with all my training for the 2 day breast cancer walk, and working out at the gym, I still felt woefully out of shape. However, I think because I had been exercising, when we rested after a steep climb I recovered faster, and walking on the treadmill at an incline strengthened my ankles, so I felt strong as I was climbing.

halfway-up

We ran into another group stopped at a logical resting place, and started chatting with them. One of the fun things about being a tourist is meeting new people from different places, although if I remember correctly, they were also from Illinois! The daughter was working at Yellowstone for the summer, so her family came to visit her and she was showing them around. She took the picture up above.

At the top of Mount Washburn is a fire lookout tower. We got warm while we were climbing, but then at the top the wind was blowing and it was really cold!

10000-feet

Before we headed back down the mountain we warmed up inside the lookout tower and used the bathroom. (I was so happy there was one up there!) We saw some bighorn sheep in the distance, and also a little yellow-bellied marmot. We spent some time looking at them through our binoculars.

at-the-top — I love how you can see part of the trail in this picture!

On the way down the mountain, we ran into a number of people walking up the mountain. The day was getting warmer, the path was getting busier, and I was glad that we had started so early that morning! Unfortunately for me, however, we still had a lot of time to explore Yellowstone. I’ll tell you what we did next tomorrow.

Keep up with our road trip:

The Great American Road Trip: Badlands National Park
Leaving the Badlands and Entering Wind Cave National Park
Not National Parks: Mount Rushmore and Devil’s Tower
Driving Through Wyoming

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Ed and I made a conscious decision not to bring our laptop on our road trip. It wasn’t that we were intending to go “off the grid.” Instead, we knew wifi access would be limited. We both had our phones, after all. And since we were moving from hotel to hotel, we wanted to travel as light as we could. Our goal was to move from car to hotel room with only one trip, and most of the time, with the girls carrying their own backpacks and rolling their suitcases, we were able to do just that.

Emmy and Lily standing on the border of South Dakota and Wyoming

I checked my email a couple of times, but when I really wanted to send someone a reply about some volunteer work I’m doing at my church, I was in the middle of Wyoming, I didn’t have cell or data service, and couldn’t get a signal for a long time. I was so frustrated, and I decided that yes, I was going to go off the grid. When I finally did get a signal, I replied that I was on vacation. And then I really did disconnect. And you know what? I didn’t miss the internet at all! (I was surprised!)

I even decided to write a journal the old fashioned way. I brought one of my favorite notebooks, and started writing in it the first night. My journal writing skills were a little rusty. Typing blog posts is so much easier and faster for me. My first entry was just bullet points of what we did that first day, which was mostly driving. My journal entries became longer as the days went by, however, and, as cheesy as it sounds, I remembered the joy of putting pen to paper.

Even though I get car sick easily, I have also become pretty good at looking at maps and navigating. I helped navigate us through Death Valley a couple of years ago and on this trip I navigated us through the Badlands. Now we were going through Wyoming to Yellowstone, with a pit stop in Cody. Even though a major highway doesn’t go to Cody, it was still easier than driving my girls by myself through rural Michigan in the middle of the night!

Just outside of Cody is the Buffalo Bill dam. We stopped to take a look and visit the Visitor’s Center. It is a little bit of a walk from the Visitor’s Center to the parking lot, but there were a couple of guys taking tourists back and forth in golf carts. We didn’t really need a ride, but we took one just for fun!

Ed at dam

reservoir

In about an hour, driving through gorgeous scenery, we finally made it to the West Entrance of Yellowstone National Park!

Yellowstone sign

There’s just something special about entering those gates to a national park. We couldn’t wait to see everything, so we stopped at every view point. Time seems to slow down, and driving to your destination doesn’t seem as important as just looking at what’s around you. And you don’t even want to go inside for a second! We ate our first picnic in Yellowstone at Gull Point, overlooking Yellowstone Lake.

We walked our first trail, the Natural Bridge Trail, and saw bear scat on our way. Grizzlies freak me out, so Ed and I were keeping a watchful eye the entire time, and making lots of noise! I had made the girls bear bells when we went to Alaska, and Emmy was especially faithful about wearing hers during our hikes. Those bears (and other hikers!) knew we were coming!

We also stopped at the West Thumb Geyser Basin, and the girls soon had their first taste of what soon became their favorite part of Yellowstone; thermal features! Steamy, smelly, and a little scary, (Just this spring, a tourist walked off the boardwalk, fell into a hot spring, and died a horrible death–I don’t even want to think about it!) thermal features are scattered all over Yellowstone. They are easy to spot since the heat kills the trees and plants, but the thermal features and hot springs are also always changing places and moving around. Yellowstone has hundreds of small earthquakes happening every month. We saw spots in parking lots that were blocked off because a hole had collapsed and now steam was coming out of the ground. Geysers that were once active will lay dormant, while a hot spring will suddenly become a geyser. All sorts of interesting things happen in Yellowstone! We were never tempted to step off those boardwalks.

Lakeshore Geyser