Business and Pleasure–Days Seven and Eight: Another Shot at Yellowstone
The night fell… and so did the snow. The next morning, I made the decision to take advantage of the low number of visitors due to the snow to see parts of Yellowstone I had not seen previously. I worked my way to the easternmost park entrance, taking lots of pictures along the way: Yellowstone’s bison roam freely across the park. This one got a bit too close for my comfort: The rest of my pictures of this Yellowstone winter wonderland are available at https://singin1.pics/piwigo2/index.php?/category/glacier-and-yellowstone-nps-may-2024-day-6. I guess most folks would find it hard to believe that all of this was happening the week before Memorial Day weekend, but I had had a similar experience ten years earlier and had lived in Iowa for eighteen years. Winters here can be intense and long, even when the calendar says it is Spring. I exited Yellowstone from its East Entrance Road and made…
Business and Pleasure–Days Five and Six: More Glacier
The forecast on Tuesday morning was, if anything, more ominous than the one from the night before. But even if I hadn’t been checking the forecast, I could see that darker clouds already beginning to form in the distance. My GPS routed me through a back road rather than the main roads between my hotel and the park. It was not crowded, so I could take my time and enjoyed the scenery. I went by the Apgar Visitor Center to get my usual walking stick medallion and magnet, as well as to talk to a ranger to get information about the best use of the time I had available. Even though I had looked at information on the website, the ranger’s info is always up-to-date, and they can answer specific questions I have. I learned that, not only was the middle portion of the Going-to-the-Sun Road completely closed due…
Have Card, Will Travel
Now that I had SB and she had proven herself to be road worthy, I wanted to really put her to the test. Also, with my recent last birthday, I could now purchase a senior lifetime national park card, thus ending the annual card fees. The only thing I had to determine was whether there were any parks I hadn’t already visited that I could make happen in a weekend. Then, I remembered that I had not visited the Grand Teton National Park even though it had been just a few miles away from Yellowstone National Park during my northwestern United States in 2014 and didn’t realize how close I was at the time. The drive to Grand Teton was over 900 miles each way, and I was going to drive the round trip in basically two days! Plus, I was considering the possibility of a brief stop at Yellowstone–this…
Afterthoughts about Goin’ West 2014
This is the map of my 16-day, Goin’ West 2014 trip: This surpassed my previously longest car trip from Grinnell to Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, by a whole 17 miles!! I stuck pretty closely to my original route, with some new additions–especially Little Bighorn National Park and North Cascades National Highway–and only two major deletions. After the magnificence of Yellowstone, I didn’t feel the need to deviate 250 miles from my westward trip to see Glacier National Park in Montana, although I’d heard many wonderful things about it. I also didn’t cross into Canada to visit Vancouver. The trip included visits to seven national parks: Little Bighorn (Montana), Yellowstone (Wyoming), North Cascade, Olympic, and Mount Rainier (Washington State), Redwood, and Yosemite (California). The parks were fantastic and more than worth the cost of the annual season pass. My favorites were Redwood and Yosemite, but none disappointed. There were other parks…
Day 4: Yellowstoned
Yellowstone National Park has been on my bucket list for years, and I’d missed two previous opportunities to visit. With this in mind, and looking forward with concern that the visit would not live up to expectations, I left Billings earlier than usual and without visiting the two sites I’d added to my list for the town because I wanted to spend as much time as possible at Yellowstone. The park entrance was in Montana, but I shortly entered Wyoming during my driving tour. (This was not my first visit to Wyoming. In 2008, one of my nieces and I crossed briefly into the state during the first Goin West adventure–our visit to the Black Hills in South Dakota. A couple, who were also there to tour Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, suggested we should see The Devil’s Tower since it was only about an hour’s drive further west. …