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