On Wednesday we drove into the Northeast entrance of Yellowstone and were immediately greeted by the great roaming herds of bison that roam Lamar Valley. The bison are king in Lamar Valley and seem to frequently cause traffic jams as cars stop to gawk and just make way as the bison cross the road. They don’t seem very concerned about the cars. I was pretty excited to see them. The sheet number of them roaming the valley is awesome. Seeing them in valley, you can imagine yourself, just for a second, as an intrepid pioneer encountering a view of bison for the first time roaming the immense plains of the west. Then, of course, you realize you are one among a throng of other tourists excitedly snapping pictures with their phones.
The crowds in the National Parks that we have been to so far have been crazy. I guess, we should have expected it, because it was high season, but somehow they came as a surprise. It’s a little hard to feel like you’ve escaped the city and are enjoying nature when they are so many other people and cars. But it another way, it’s also awesome to see so many people out and enjoying nature. We really do have a pretty awesome National Park system and it’s neat to see that some many people utilize it and enjoy the parks. I blame and applaud the sort of awesome marketing being done by so many wonderful travel photographers that are so prolific on instagram and outdoor outfitters like REI. The outdoors is cool now. The specialized equipment you can buy for almost any outdoor activity is made so readily available with the internet that I feel like more people are getting out there than in the past. I think a lot of the parks were created so long ago though that they are not set up for the throngs of people visiting them now. The buffalo traffic jams and the lack of camp sites available at almost any national park unless you book months in advance (or arrive at 5 in the morning to first come first serve sights) is evidence of this. We’ll see how it all plays out in years to come, but really how can you begrudge even the laziest of tourists, who only want to drive through these awesome spaces, from enjoying all the beautiful bits these parks have to offer.
We went to the visitor center and got a map to plan what hikes we might do. Yellowstone’s hsitory of volcanic eruptions means that there is a lot of petrified wood. We went at first to see the most visited petrified tree that lives right above a parking lot. The poor thing is a big stump, but sadly behind a giant iron fence, probably because too many people have pilfered souvenirs from it over the years. We didn’t even walk up the short path up to see it. This to me, was somehow sadder than animals in cages at zoos. They’d had to cage a petrified tree. We did a short hike to Lost Lake where we saw some bison bones down by the water and started to get a glimmer of just how much water runs through Yellowstone everywhere you turn. The path to the lake followed a small water flow that trickled and burbled as we went.
We also went on the hike to the Brink of Falls. It was a beautiful hike with different viewpoints of the upper and lower falls. This hike was remarkable uncrowded. In retrospect, we realized we’d accidentally stumbled onto a trail that I think was actual under renovation. I guess we should have realized what was going on when we had to shimmy down a steep incline with a roap to get to the trail (most of the trails here are pretty well established so a rope assist would be pretty surprising), but it wasn’t blocked off on the side we entered. So sorry, Yellowstone, we didn’t mean to do where we weren’t supposed to, but tt was a welcome relief from the crowds though.
It took us probably and 1.5 hours to drive back to camp just due to the size of the park and the fact that there were even more people just parked in the middle of the road to view buffalo in the late afternoon.
In the morning we stopped in town before heading into the park and talked to a nice guy at the rock shop. We waffled for a while on buying a piece of petrified wood, but decided to wait.
We had waffled on what hike to do the next day, but eventually decided on one that was not marked in the maps. We had seen a small sign along the the side of the road for the Petrified Forest hike, but even the ranger we asked about it, didn’t seem to know much about it and it was not even mentioned in the hiking map we purchased. We had pretty much made up our minds to just try it anyway, but asked the ranger at the entrance gate about it when we came in the next morning. He confirmed its existence and said that it was steep, but had excellent views of Lamar Valley as well as examples of petrified wood. We climbed up past a few scattered buffalo, butterflies and grasshoppers, skittering away from us every step we took into the tree line above Lamar Valley. Some switchbacks led us further up until we hit paydirt. The live trees disappeared and petrified stumps started to appear in abudance. Near the crest of the hill we had climbed nearly all the rocks were petrified wood shards. It was hard not to slip and fall because of all the loose rock shard. I may have slipped and fallen once, but it does’t count because I popped right back up. For some reason, whevener I fall, my instinct is to pop back up as quickly as possible and pretend nothing happened and proclaim myself fine even before I have fully assessed any wounds. Nope, nothing happened, nothing here to see people.
It was fun to go hunting for larger and larger stumps. Best of all this hike was people free! It was just us and one lone buffalo lurking near the top. That’s another funny thing we are starting to notice. The parks themselves are overrun, but actual hikes are fairly unpopulated.
After saying hello and appreciatively oohing and aahing over about a million pieces of petrified wood we headed back to camp. It seemed like weather was coming on and we actually had some paperwork we needed to get done so it seemed like the right choice. At camp, we checked on the Wonder Beast and then took him into town with us to get a snack and partake of some wifi. Cooke city is a cute little mountain town with a couple little restaurants if you want to eat away from camp one night. After a light dinner snack we hunkered down in the car for a minute until an impressive hail storm passed.
Even though we had not seen the more iconic Yellowstone sights like Old Faithful, we decided we’d move on in the direction of Glacier National Park in the morning thinking Glacier would surely be less crowded and also trying to be practical as we needed to keep heading north because we wanted to be in Washington in about a week. Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic would have to wait until our next trip when we head the west side of the park.
