We drove through Wyoming today, up the Shoshone Canyon and into Yellowstone. A half-day drive-by is really a completely inappropriate way to see this park but it’s what we had time for so that’s what we did. My first impressions of the park were rather sad – there’s been tremendous fire damage and coming from the East Entrance slope after slope is filled with barren fire-scarred trunks. But Lake Yellowstone is spectacular, and we ran into a herd of bison that strolled through the parking area we were in (this guy in particular, I thought might kill us). We just missed the action at Old Faithful (though, saw the plume from the road there). It was dark and cold and late at that point so we didn’t wait for there next cycle. The ride out is surreal though – there’s fields and fields of steaming vents exuding their vile clouds of who knows what into the sunset. Pretty trippy.
States seen: WY, MT, ID.
Total/daily miles driven: 2752.3/560.2.
Number of violations of the “No Chain Restaurants” policy: 1
Number of children seen playing in the Old Faithful “thermal area”: 2
Number of children scaled by boiling water, acid pit or magma, per posted warning: 0
ps. It’s consensus that my driving partner has completely lost his mind. He won’t stop singing about peas and unicorns. I actually like him better this way.
pps. I may have failed to mention that we almost hit a smallish baby deer on the way back from Devil’s Tower yesterday. We slowed down, another followed across, and we were on our way. I was reminded of this today as we approached Yellowstone at a healthy 60mph clip and a fully sized adult deer sprinted right to left across the highway directly in front of us. MV was driving and slammed on the brakes before the deer cleared our front end by about six feet. If he had stopped, we woulda had a big bloody broken-glass broken-deer broken-us sized mess.
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