Prune Creek to Yellowstone

It's been hard to find wifi places to keep up with the posting. But back to the story...

When we woke it was COLD! I've got a great Northface sleeping bag, but it's only a three-season bag, so I have to use the maximum warmth configuration.

This really is an amazing sleeping bag. I've had it since 1992 and it still looks brand new. It packs down to the size of a football.



But as I was saying, it was icy cold. You can see the frost on the grass and on the car. One of us had a great idea of just jumping in the car and finding a warm restaurant to eat in. Luckily the Arrowhead Lodge was only a few miles away, and was open at 6:30. This was a great place that caters to snowmobilers in the winter.
Here's Lena filling out some postcards after some superior eggs and pancakes.

The 64-year-old waitress lives in Florida, and every year she chooses a different national park, then gets a waitressing job there for the summer.

It was time to clean out the trunk and get things reorganized, and then we were off for Yellowstone.

We chose the northern route

and there was plenty of snow at the 9,430 foot pass over the rockies.


I had expected continuous mountains from here to Yellowstone, but instead there is a wide low plain between the Bighorn Mountains and Rockies. We split a filling steak salad at Granny's in Cody, Wyoming. Here's a photo on the wall of the restaurant compared with a photo I took:


The drive into Yellowstone was much further than we had expected, but the scenery was spectacular. Here's Yellowstone Lake, the highest big lake in the country.

Our first wild animal encounter was a buffalo, which Lena used to work more on the pointing thing.

We also saw a grizzly bear, but at a great distance. We came upon a lot of cars pulled over the side of the road, with a crowd looking in binoculars. Most of the people are unaware of what they were looking for, but eventually you get someone to tell you that to the right of that patch of snow, no the other patch, near that ridge by the dark greenery is a grizzly with two cubs. Finally, you can make it out with the binoculars. Kind of exciting, kind of not. It mostly made me want to get a bear costume and frolic around at great distances while the tourists wet their pants. Then I could move closer and do line dancing. I'll do this next time.

We got the campground at 4:30 to discover that it might be full. After much searching, we find one of the last sites. The sites are packed pretty close here, and we're somewhat surrounded by other tents and RVs, but we're glad to be able to stop driving. Actually, this had been a long day, and we were starting to think more about how nice it would be to get home again. Lena apparently has a strong allergic reaction to high-altitude pines, and the Claritin wasn't cutting it. This was my problem as well as hers because Lena's default sneezing mode is what I call a "scream sneeze." My knee was a bit sore also. Lena, who would be dictator tomorrow (we take turns), announced that we would probably get the hell out of Dodge.

But we had a job to do, so after a great dinner of something or other than we forget, probably hot dogs and beans, we went on a hike to the Norris thermal area. Most of Yellowstone is the crater of an active volcano (last eruption 634,000 years ago, but it is an active volcano -- it says so at the visitor center). About a half mile into the hike, we started encountering more and more fallen trees so there was a lot of climbing, crawling, and detours. After the big Yellowstone fire in 19?? the place is swarming with tall dead trees and new trees 6-10 feet high. The dead ones fall all over the place.

Anyway, we finally arrived at the geyser field, and got a good show.




We walked back to the campsite along the road, and we fell into bed around 9 PM. There's still a lot of noise in the campground at this hour, but we've got earplugs that filter out all noise, and we slept through until 7:30 PM the next morning.

Wait until you see what 2,000 pound creature greeted us right in the campsite when we woke up. Great video in the next post. Don't miss it. I know that the "camped in the crater of an active volcano" wasn't quite as exciting as what you expected, but this one will live up to its billing.