Day Trip to Yellowstone

We all climbed in the truck (Tom and I, mom and dad, and the two dogs--it was cozy) and took the great circle route from Big Timber to Red Lodge to the Yellowstone entrance by Cooke City, through the park, back out the North Entrance at Mammoth, up to Livingston and back to Big Timber.

Last night we discussed how long this would take and when we needed to get up. So we decided to aim for 7:30am, thinking it was going to take 12 hours. Major sacrifice by Tom and I to be ready to go anywhere at 7:30am, ameliorated slightly by the fact that we are still on Minnesota time which made it feel more like 8:30. But I decided that the only way I would be ready to go anywhere at that time would be to skip the whole shower-do-hair thing, so I can truly say I've been camping now having spent a day with no shower.

The initial question was the weather. We could not get any straight sort of weather prediction for the coming day. (Or, should I say, we got every sort of weather prediction for the coming day.) So we decided to get up, look at the sky, and see whether we would take the trip today or wait until Wednesday or Thursday. When I took the dogs out this morning at about 6:15 for the morning outlet the sky was completely clear. So we made the sandwiches, packed the water, and went. (The day turned out to be beautiful until late afternoon--pretty good I'd say.)

The first milestone was to be scones in Red Lodge. Red Lodge is a really cute town, and we spent quite a bit of time walking around it, but the place that made the scones was out of business. We found a bakery to buy apple turnovers and "schnecken" (I googled those, they go by about five different names) so all was not lost.

From Red Lodge to the Yellowstone entrance is a mountain pass road over the Beartooth Mountains. What a beautiful drive! Mountains, meadows covered in wildflowers, streams, rocks, winding climbing hairpin-turned roads. Here is a shot of us at a scenic overlook near the top.


To me this looked like a pretty big trip, so I was ready to just dip into Yellowstone on the north road, see Mammoth Hot Springs and head back out. But once we got into the park we wound up driving the upper loop--stopping at Tower Falls, taking the North Rim Road and looking down on the Lower Falls and Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, then wrapping around the loop back to Mammoth Hot Springs. Here's an obligatory shot of the canyon, which is so beautiful the photo is pretty much required. Also a shot of the four of us on the North Rim.


We had very good luck with wildlife. On the northern road after entering the park we saw several large herds of bison, including a rather flirtatious couple just off the roadside. On our way out we saw a gaggle of big-horned sheep just up the hillside from the road. There was at least one rumored bear that was just out of sight (there are always one or two of those).

I was pretty excited to go to Mammoth, because I have visited the park only once before, and we did not get up to Mammoth, and the pictures of it look so cool. Having been there I can confirm, it is really really cool. Alien and otherworldly. Water loaded with calcium and minerals gets squeezed out of the ground, heated by the underlying volcano magma, and the minerals harden as the water runs off, leaving these glacier-like rock formations. We have a number of great photos of this, but I'll show this one.


We ran into all sorts of road construction, of the sort where one direction holds up and waits while the traffic from the other side uses the one available lane. Except with the added twist that everybody gets to wait awhile while the men working work with no traffic at all. At one we sat for about 20 minutes, while the bikers ahead of us swatted mosquitos off their faces and necks and got basically eaten alive. (At one hold-up Tom got out of the truck to wander off taking wildflower pictures, at another in the town of Cooke City he ran into a drugstore for batteries.) So that ate up quite a bit of time, and in Livingston we spent about a half hour trying to get some pizza from the Pizza Hut, so all in all it was 13 hours door-to-door. But a day of simply stunning mountain scenery. Just beautiful.