So off to the original US National Park, created by Ulysses S Grant no less, to preserve the unique environment.  Didn’t stop some of the early park custodians making a little money on the side with poaching and logging but it was rescued, like so many things in the US, by sending in the army.  They administered the park and built much of the infrastructure up until the First World War when they were strangely occupied elsewhere.

We picked up our hire car, a brand new (the Enterprise attendant was very excited that it had a grand total of six miles on the clock) blue Hyundai Sonata, which Alex promptly nicknamed Bluebell and drove in convoy with Reg back up through Grand Teton to the entrance to Yellowstone.  There had been a massive fire at some point along the John D Rockefeller Jr driveway and much of this area is bare of trees and regenerating so not as pretty as we had been told it would be (although it is much prettier going the other way as you have the Teton range in front of you).

We crossed into Yellowstone and drove past two frozen lakes before seeing Yellowstone Lake, which is enormous and was also partially frozen.  There was still a lot of snow beside the roads which gave us both a foreboding that many trails would be closed during our trip.  We visited the visitor centre at Old Faithful to ask about trail access and a supercilious volunteer said we would be better staying on the boardwalks, of which he was proud there were a whole 15 miles of in the Old Faithful area.  Hmmm … a whole week to walk fifteen miles, I’ve walked further than that drunk on a Saturday night, including the additional distance for weaving!  He also waved a photocopy of a map that had a large amount of the park greyed out as restricted, this is to let bears have plenty of space for whatever bears do in woods.  Actually, it’s to let them recover from hibernation without being disturbed by humans all staring at them, but it did curtail a lot of the hiking opportunities.

So, we’d arrived, the park is covered in snow, the ranger says to walk 15 miles in seven days, what else can restrict our enjoyment?  Road closures of course!  There had been subsidence on the road between our campsite at Fishing Bridge and the Canyon region to the north.  Yellowstone is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined (neither are that big a state) and there is basically about four roads that cross the park, the closure would mean adding an extra 45 miles to any journey above Old Faithful.  It doesn’t sound much but when the top speed limit in the park is 45 miles an hour and often traffic is held up for wildlife, it would add two hours of driving to many excursions.

Traffic held up by wildlife?  On several occasions, we encountered bison jams where they walk along the road between grazing areas.  They are pretty awesome owing to their size and at this time of year they have calved so several had their calves with them, which are nicknamed red-dogs as they are the size of a large dog (slightly bigger than a German Shepherd but smaller than a Great Dane) and are ginger.  You do not, we were warned several times, want to get between a calf and their mother unless you want several hundredweight of irate animal bearing down on you at up to 30 miles an hour.  So, everyone sat there patiently while the bison wandered oblivious to the humans in tin cans around them.

Bigger than bison jams are bear jams, because bears are rarer (there are about 700 – 1,000 grizzlies versus 4,500 Bison) when someone spots a bear they pull over to watch, closely followed by generally another hundred vehicles all pulled in beside the road to do the same.  We were guilty of this ourselves when returning on our second evening and coming across around 50 cars and several RV’s parked by a spit of land that runs into Yellowstone Lake.  They had all stopped to watch a single grizzly who was fishing off of the spit.  Really amazing site to see him (we always presume single bears are him for some reason) launch into the water, then wade out, shake off the water and on one occasion emerge with a fish in his paws.  We watched him until he wandered off into the distance.

During the week we saw another nine bears, three were mothers with cubs although we didn’t see the cubs of the third bear.  They are majestic creatures, but also very cute with their cubs playing beside them.  Not cute enough not to heed the parks warnings about the dangers of hungry and maternal grizzlies attacking humans.  We carried our bear spray, an aerosol of stringent pepper spray, with us at all times, apart from once when we were walking our friend of boardwalks trail near Old Faithful and we came across a mother and two cups really close to the trail.  Fortunately, she wasn’t interested in us and continued to feed her cubs before walking further away. 

One morning, we got up at 6:00, unheard of on holiday, to drive up to the Hayden Valley to watch the wildlife that are out earlier than holidaying tourists.  We saw herds of elk, a grizzly with her two cubs, and loads of bison.  We drove further up and visited Tower Falls, a massive waterfall above the Lamar Valley through the road between our campsite and Canyon that had recently re-opened.  On our return trip we spotted two adult bears up on a snow covered slope above, they were amazing to watch as they climbed higher on the mountainside.  Coming back into the Hayden Valley we saw a number of cars pulled over to the side, we got out and spotted the black wolf they had been watching.  While we watched an elk began chasing the wolf around, we feared for its life as at one point it seemed to be tiring and the outcome would not have been pretty, however it rallied and the wolf gave up and slunk off into the forest while the elk re-joined its herd that it had with hindsight been protecting.

Apart from wildlife, Yellowstone is famous for its geothermal features, which they are proud to tell us there are more of in the park than in any other location on earth.  We visited virtually all of them, West Thumb Geyser Basin, Old Faithful, Lone Star Geyser, Mammoth Hot Springs, Prismatic Spring.  All different in some way, all thought provoking on their geology that they are driven by chambers of molten rock two to five miles below ground superheating steam, which is released through fissures in the rock.  We watched Old Faithful, so named because of the regularity of its eruptions, twice and saw Castle (even bigger than Old Faithful but erupting only every 13 hours or so) in the distance once spout water over 70 feet into the air.  We looked into beautifully clear blue pools that gently bubbled and would boil you if you fell into one and we smelt the bubbles of sulphur omitted by many of them.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t participate in one of the highlights of the park by swimming in the hot springs at Mammoth (as recommended by Kelsey in Steam Boat) as the Boiling River Trail, as it is named at this point, was closed due to high water volumes.  Possibly fortunate for other visitors as we forgot our bathers and would have had to go skinny dipping (there’s a thought for you all!).  We did walk the Lava Creek Trail up to the Undine Falls, a beautiful waterfall on the creek. 

So, wildlife, geo-thermals, what else … beautiful scenery would be the other reason for visiting Yellowstone.  While there are no standout mountains such as the Teton range, the park is very high with lots of rivers and lakes.  These rivers, along with glacial erosion, have created a range of gorges and canyons.  The most famous, and spectacular, is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.  The canyon is carved from yellow sandstone, which is streaked by seams of minerals, such as iron, that create a range of colour layers in the rock.  The Canyon also has an upper and lower falls, where the Yellowstone river flows over harder volcanic rock into the canyon, they are both over 300 feet in height and were thunderous to hear with the volume of water flowing down the river.  The trails to the brink of falls were closed to allow maintenance of the trail, considering we wouldn’t be coming back, we and two other Brits decided to hop over the barrier and walk down in any case.  Awesome view of the water, green with nutrients washed from the mountainsides with snow melt, rushing across the lip of the fall to plunge hundreds of feet below.

We both loved Yellowstone, one piece of advice would be to camp or stay in lodges in the different regions to cut down on travel, however there’s nothing you can do about snow.

M