The Great (North) American Road Trip: Pic-a-nic Baskets in Jellystone (Yellowstone and Montana)

Montana, USA

I like tracking a bug as it comes crashing to its demise at the windshield. It is interesting to see it get stuck in the draft of the automobile and have no choice in the matter as it is propelled into the glass. I don't mean to sound malicious it is just a rather interesting matter of science. The bug is going about its business, when all of a sudden it gets trapped and sucked towards the car like a magnet. In that moment it has little, to no possibility of survival, as it will soon turn into nothing more than a snotty, mucus looking stain on the windshield. The whole process seems to be in slow motion if you can catch it right, and is as close a thing to ballet that the insect might ever be a part of.

This is pretty much the most interesting thing that happened in Montana besides us doing laundry and visiting a comic book store. The laundromat was pretty cool, as far as laundromats go. It had a free wifi service and some cool 1980's rock LP album covers on the walls as well as an multi-game arcade game. We were enjoying ourselves until a lady came in with her four children of satan. The mom pretty much sat and either talked or texted on her phone while her kids pounded away on the video game. It would be one thing if they had quarters to play the game, but they did not. They just banged away at the joystick and buttons while fighting with each other over whose turn it was. This went on and on while mom just ignored them. This is why you should need a license to have children. That is all on that, as I can write a book on the matter after dealing with kids and parents for the last seven or eight years professionally.

Besides doing laundry, I had the itch to visit a comic book store. It had been a good month and half since the last time I visited one, and that is about a month and a half too long. Now we don't have room (or money) for me to be buying a bunch of stuff, but the final installment of Scott Pilgrim came out that week and it needed to be bought. Unfortunately, the book was not in stock, but they did have the newest Walking Dead book, which was just about the next best thing. The owner, Brooks, was a nice enough guy, and as we chatted with him, we let him know what we were doing and asked if there were any other shops around that might carry the Scott Pilgrim book. He told us a little about the town and gave us directions to a Barnes and Noble type store to try. We drove over to the store, but it too did not have the book. Following this unfortunate news, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. Next stop was Yellowstone, and it was destined to be better and far more interesting than tracking bugs as they hit the windshield.

Yellowstone National Park, WY

Jen and I first visited Yellowstone National Park in a June of 2005 with my family. It was early in the month and when we arrived to the park, we were greeted by herds and herds of buffalo all with snow draped across their backs. We were surprised that there was snow...in June...in America...and there was plenty of it, too.

Flash forward to July of 2010, as Jen and I woke up in a KOA. We were awakened by the sounds of cows mooing in the field near the campground. The cows all seemed to have their own personalities, as they all had different sounds. There were the couple of classic moo's in the crowd, but there were a couple of odd ones too. One cow sounded very surprised that she could make sounds, as her voice was sharp and ended at a higher pitch than it started. Another cow sounded very scared as if she had just been startled. A third cow sounded like Peter Griffin, from family guy, was making moo sounds. If you don't know what I'm talking about he has a thick New England accent that tends to be shaky and shifts in its pitch. Since the cows woke us up, we had no reason to lay around anymore, so we made breakfast, packed up camp, and then headed for the showers. After a short drive, Jen and I ventured into Yellowstone for our second trip through the park.

The weather couldn't be further from what it was six years earlier. It was hot and muggy. Besides the weather there were no buffalo to be seen. Now, granted we entered through a different entrance of the park, but we were shocked at the difference a month could make. You would think that a month couldn’t have that drastic of a change in weather, but you would be wrong. The worst part was that it lasted through the whole park and wasn’t isolated to lower altitudes.

We entered through the north, which was new territory to us, as we only traveled by the southern loop on our last visit. The north had some pretty sights like the Mammoth Hot Springs and The Norris Geyser Area. We made a detour for a quick bathroom stop and short exploration of the visitor’s center, and then we did a little walking around Mammoth Hot Springs. The sites in Yellowstone are amazing. The geyser and hot springs parts of the park look like they were implanted from another world. The whole place is shear amazing as the geology of the park is stunning. If you aren’t familiar with it, Yellowstone is a huge caldera, which is the crater part of a volcano, which is the largest volcanic system in North America. It has been labeled as a super-volcano. If Yellowstone ever erupted again it could be the demise of mankind, as the climate would take a serious turn and the ash and debris would wreak havoc on all living organisms.

On our next stop at The Norris Geyser Area we found more interesting geothermal pits and mini geysers, as well as that sweet smell of sulfur. On our previous trip it was nice to get near the geothermal parts of the park, because they warmed up our cold bodies. This time though, we were already hot and the steam and hotness that came out of the earth were like unwanted blow dryers. It was all very cool to look at and we got a nice walk out of it.

As we drove the loops, we noticed that there were no buffalo in sight. We had previously been overwhelmed with all of the bison that was around, but this time there were none. We thought that maybe the heat had something to do with it. Every now and again one would pop up, but the herds were nowhere to be found. We did see some other animals along the way, like the black bear that was asleep in the forest. We could not get a good picture of it, because it was sleeping behind a log and all you could really see was its ear. Further down the road a young moose was holding up traffic as it crossed the river and cut across the highway. There were also sightings of a fairly decent sized elk with an impressive racks and a couple of longhorns, yet the elusive buffalo herds were not to be seen. We had even started counting the loner buffalos for the random facts section.

Jen and I continued to drive the loop, checking out all of the stops that we hadn’t seen and skipping all of the ones that we had. We skipped over the ever popular Old Faithful, for the traffic looked bad going in, and we weren’t in the mood to deal with a crap ton of people standing around in our way for something that we had already seen. It was really cool the first time, but I think we got the gist of it. (Sorry we don’t have pictures of it, but you can get just as good of one from google.) We stopped near Lake Yellowstone to have some lunch, and were greeted by some very hungry mosquitoes. They may have been hungrier than we were; as they feasted on us for the short minute it took us to put some bug spray on ourselves. Even after the spray down, they continued to hover around us up around our ears, causing that annoying loud buzz to shoot into our ear canals. We then took to the rest of the north loop all the way up to the northeast entrance and Lamar Valley.

We were notified by my parents that Lamar Valley was a hot spot for wolves, so that sounded like a good place to drive through. We looked and looked but found no wolves. We did, however, find out that Lamar Valley was where all the buffalo were roaming. Upon the entrance to the area herds and herds of the bison blanketed the fields. At this point, we stopped keeping track of the buffalo since the number was going into ridiculous areas. Upon our leaving the park, we even had to wait for a herd to cross the street, which luckily was a small herd and only took about 5 minutes or so for all of them to cross.

Yellowstone is a great place to visit and is easily the best National Park we have been to yet. The place is crawling with interesting geology and scenery, not to mention the wildlife that you can run into. I would suggest going in early June though, since it got rather toasty and sticky in mid to late July. It was fun to drive the roughly 80 mile loop all the way around and see the things that we hadn’t seen previously. It really is worth it to see all of the things in Yellowstone that you can’t find in many other places around the world.