Day 29: Whitefish, Montana

As Tristan told a friend, we’ve cancelled the tour! Not quite but we’ve decided to rest up in Montana, enjoy Andy and Lisa’s hospitality and fly back to Virginia from here. Mark flies back on Saturday, the children and I follow ten days later and tomorrow, my aunt and her partner arrive from Canada. As Andy says the stars have aligned! So the blog will be signed off …

Celebrating July 4th at the Big Fork parade

Karen and Moe join us for three days from Calgary, and we take a hike in Glacier National Park (no bears!!)

Lisa has nine kids over for a sleepover and they all spend the night on a trampoline!

All hands on deck; cooking for 13!

Day 28: Yellowstone, Wyoming

Well we’d survived the bears but barely slept again due to the cold – we had hoped more bodies would have increased the warmth factor but it hadn’t worked out. So, Mark and Andy had come up with a plan. Why were we wasting our time in Yellowstone when we could be enjoying the equally beautiful scenery of Glacier National Park, a stone’s throw from the Pollards’ lovely warm, bear-secure house in Whitefish, Montana? I came back with the ‘but we haven’t got time to drive back to Virginia, Mark has to be at work on such-and-such’ only to discover they’d sorted all that out as well. The plan was we’d sell the car in Whitefish, Mark would fly back at the weekend, the children and I would stay an extra week in Montana and fly back the following weekend. It was too good an opportunity to miss. So we packed up the cars and waved goodbye to Yellowstone. I wasn’t sad to leave. It had been a great place to visit but busy, cold and scary. Plus, there are only so many geysers and bison you can marvel at.

We decided to stick to the day’s plan and take the children to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Centre in West Yellowstone and we’d then do the 400mile drive to Whitefish. The discovery centre was fantastic, it’s a collection of ‘problem’ bears and wolves that are put on display rather than put to sleep (actually, most of the bears were the cubs of ‘problem’ bears who had been shot for attacking humans). The bears were incredible, especially watching them wrestle and play, but it did make me very glad to be leaving the campsite, there were just too many scary stories of bear encounters.

Next stop Whitefish, Montana. We set off mid-afternoon and stopped off at a small town called Ennis for an early supper. What a find! Ennis was a picture book copy of a cowboy town – complete with wooden hitches outside all the stores. We called into the local saloon - which had real live cowboys sitting up at the bar – and were blown away by the menu which served ploughmans and smoked trout pate!! This country never fails to surprise me. Five hours later and after one of the most beautiful drives we’ve done, we arrived in Whitefish all ready for warm beds and a good night’s sleep.

Today’s Tune: In a Big Country by Big Country
Wildlife Watch: Our first bear!!! But I missed it – Lisa and I were in a different car when Mark and the children spotted a black bear cub by the roadside.

Day 27: Yellowstone, Wyoming

Another ‘oh dear’ day! It hadn’t been a good night and we were all suffering from lack of sleep. The temperature had dropped to 40 degrees – just above freezing – and despite layering more clothes and towels over us, none of us had managed to be warm enough to sleep. It wasn’t until the sun had come up and begun to warm the tent that we’d managed to get some shut eye. The boys were in pretty good spirits considering and more than happy to explore the camp site whilst the rest of us dozed in the sunshine. Our spirits dropped even lower when we picked up a text from the Pollards telling us they’d given up trying to get accommodation for the July 4th weekend and wouldn’t manage to get down to see us. And then we ran out of tea  Life was beginning to feel like it couldn’t get any worse! However, in true military fashion, we rallied our spirits and decided to find somewhere for lunch and then go and hike the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

The canyon is where two powerful waterfalls cascade into a 20-mile-long, half-a-mile-wide, 1000-foot-deep canyon of the eroding yellow stone that gives the park its name. It is incredible, even after seeing the original Grand Canyon. We hiked the rim for two miles and marvelled at the power of the water. The park had had a particularly heavy winter and consequently the snow melt was massive. This was a river you definitely didn’t want to be paddling in.

We didn’t get back to camp until sunset (another bison jam) and had the slightly unnerving trauma of cooking supper in the fading light and hoping we’d managed to clean and clear away everything thoroughly. We’d just cracked open a bottle of local ale and were wondering how we were going to endure another three nights of Yellowstone camping when the boys came running round the corner, squealing with delight, “ The Pollards are here, the Pollards are here”.

Andy and Lisa had woken up that day and decided 400miles wasn’t too far to go to squeeze into our tent, freeze their butts off and brave the Yellowstone bears. We were delighted; the kids all picked up where they left off five years ago and the grown-ups settled down round the fire with a pile of beers and tried to work out the logistics of nine people in a six man tent.

Day 26: Yellowstone, Wyoming

After a hearty breakfast, it was back on the road for the remaining four hours of our route to Yellowstone. We were approaching the park from the west on US20 and decided to stop at the small town of West Yellowstone for lunch before setting up camp. We were very conscious of the strict regulations of camping in bear country and felt the less food we carried with us the better. It was also our last opportunity for the children to use Wifi and for us to pick up a phone signal . I sent a quick message to the Pollards, UK friends who had relocated to Montana and were hoping to join us for a few days, to see if they had any luck in finding accommodation and then we were on our final stretch and into the park.
Yellowstone is the oldest national park in the world and the largest in the US. It straddles the Continental Divide as well as the three states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and was first discovered in the early 1800s by the frontiersman John Colter. When Colter described the wonders he had seen – spouting steam vents and glowing pools of boiling sulfurous water – nobody believed him and thought his days in the rough country had sent him mad. My overwhelming impression was what a fantastically dangerous place it was to be. From the moment you arrive, you are bombasted with warnings, rules and regulations – all designed to ensure you leave the park alive. If you don’t get eaten by bears, you could be gored by bison. If you survive that you could fall into a pool acidic enough to burn through the soles of your hiking boots. If you manage to avoid that you could be scalded to death by a steam vent, spouting boiling water over 100 feet into the air. Alternatively the footpath could give way and send you tumbling down into the canyon or you lose your footing and get swept away into the raging torrents of the river. It really was quite a terrifying introduction to the American wilderness. Throw Tristan and Jowan into the equation and I knew I was destined for some sleepless nights.

Our first hitch was the campsite. We had been very helpfully booked into a site with a pad for a 12” square tent, despite having given our tent size of 18”. There was plenty of space around the pad but apparently, if the pad is there, the law says you have to use it. So there was much sucking of teeth and scratching of heads but despite there being a full campsite, they managed to find a spare pitch and all was well. Meanwhile, Mark and I had been reading and rereading the ‘Camping in Bear Country’ regulations with our hearts sinking; all food, cooking utensils, toiletries, bug spray, clothes that you have cooked in, to be stored in the car every night and nothing with any kind of scent or food association to be left in the tent. They even recommended not washing before bedtime (there were no showers) in case the bears picked up on the scent of the soap! It was really quite worrying.
Anyway, we took a deep breath, thoroughly cleaned the tent, strip searched the children and set up camp. We decided we’d save the dangerous activity of cooking a meal for the following day and opted to watch the sun go down over Old Faithful Geyser after a meal in the lodge nearby. It was a wise decision; the food was surprisingly good and Old Faithful was as reliable as her name implies.

The geyser’s eruptions are as reliable as clockwork, to the point they list the timings in the visitors’ centre and rarely get it wrong. At 9:15pm we watched her send nearly 5,000 gallons of boiling water nearly 150 feet up into the air, a spectacle that lasted nearly five minutes. We then drove back to our campsite, just as the sun was setting, to experience our first Bison jam. The Madison River herd was moving across the valley and taking an evening stroll along the road.

It was the most spectacular sight and difficult to believe that these enormous hairy, lumbering creatures could be at all interested in reaching 30 miles an hours and spearing you on their horns. But, apparently, it happens!
Today’s Tune: Buffalo Girls by Malcolm Maclaren
Wildlife Watch: Buffalo/bison by the hundreds

Day 25: Pocatello, Idaho

Today was the biggest drive of our entire road trip; 784miles to Idaho in a bid to make it to Yellowstone by tomorrow lunchtime. We were up, washed , dressed and on the road by 8:30am. First stop was just outside San Francisco for supplies and a batch of cheap DVDs to keep the children occupied for the next 12 hours.
We drove and drove and drove – through the Sierra Nevada mountains, past Lake Tahoe, into the northern desert of Nevada (stopped at possibly the worst rest area in the Western World and it was populated by creatures out of the dodgy bar scene in Star Wars – it made Gosport High Street look like a Miss World competition!) and finally into the rolling potato fields of Idaho. A quick stop at MacDonalds for supper – the first of our trip – and we finally arrived at our hotel at 10:30pm. We had all – kids, parents and car – coped brilliantly but felt hugely relieved it was over.
Today’s Tune: We’re on the Road to Nowhere by the Talking Heads
Wildlife Watch: The two badgers that scuttled across the road in Idaho, just as the sun was setting.