Iowa Trip Tuesday

The next morning we packed up and went to West Yellowstone to get some supplies and have breakfast. The one thing that I didn’t bring along was a light vest and I think that it would’ve made my sleeping situation a little warmer. While Sandi was at the grocery store I drove all the side-streets that I could find looking for a 2nd hand store to no avail. We stopped at a gas station to get gas and they happened to have some clothes there. No, I didn’t buy a vest there. I wasn’t going to spend $70 for a vest with a Yellowstone logo on it.
Upon entering the park we had to wait about 15 minutes to go through the entry point. It seems that everyone else wanted to go into the park about the same time that we did. We drove about 2 miles into the park and joined another line of people. There was a bald eagle nest visible from the road and everyone wanted to stop, get out, and take pictures even though the signs said ‘Study Area, Don’t stop, Don’t get out, Don’t scare the eagles.’ We drove on and stopped at the places that we hadn’t got to the evening before. At the southern end of the park we found a tent site. Actually, Sandi stood in line for about 2 hours to get a tent site. We set up the tent then went to see some more hot springs. In case you’re wondering, I did not get into any hot springs. I followed all of the rules set forth by the park. I didn’t step off the trails, I didn’t go anywhere a person wasn’t supposed to, I used the outhouses and not the trees, I didn’t cut down any trees for firewood. In fact, we bought a box of wood. That hurt. The rangers said that we could gather wood around the campsite for fires. Since this was in part of the area that burned in the fire of ’98 I guess they want to clean things up a little after Mother Nature did such a poor job of burning it all completely.

The road through the park goes over the Continental Divide a couple of times and I am always entranced and amazed by it. Call me an amateur geologist. I have to ponder to think that two little drops of water can actually go down a different drainage and end up in different oceans thousands of miles apart. Or if the drop of water hits in just the right place it can split and become two half of drops of water and end up in oceans thousands of miles apart. Anyway, you get my drift. There’s a place in the Rockies where the mountains are such that 3 drops of water can actually go into the Pacific, Atlantic, and the Arctic. Of course I had to test the theory out. Now, to figure out a way to prove it.



We drove down to Grand Teton National Park. To save on signage costs the entrance signs are backed up to each other. That was so they can have ‘Entering Yellowstone’ on one side of the sign and ‘Entering Grand Teton’ on the other side. We kept saying that this high country reminded us of Alaska. Not that we’ve seen a lot of Alaska, it’s just that it that it has this look that says it’s only free of snow about 3 months of the year. The Tetons of course were magnificent in their beauty jutting up from a high mountain lake. Seems they were named by some poor hapless French fur trapper sitting around a campfire by himself looking up at the large mountain peaks missing his wife after spending too many days and nights away from the home-front.

When we got back we had hot dogs over the fire and Smores in the fire. It was a really clear (read cold) evening and Sandi and I walked out in a clearing to see the stars. It was stellar. It doesn’t happen often enough to be able to see the night sky without the ambient light of a town or city. It didn’t hurt that we were at about 7,000 feet either.