Yellowstone: Part 1After Cody being lackluster, we were excited to move into Yellowstone. We were going to have 7 nights at Fishing Bridge with full hookups. It is the first electric of the trip, and sewage to boot! The life of luxury.
Showing up at Fishing Bridge, we had to sit in line to check in. As we came and went throughout the week, it appears that check-in is busy during the first half of the day, requiring around 45 minutes. That’s what it took us too. The campground is what it is…a place in Yellowstone to pack ‘em in like sardines. The roads were in terrible condition. The potholes were more than 12” deep, full of water, and large enough to fit the entire truck in them. It didn’t rain while we were there, but still took 3-4 days for the potholes to drain out.
Our site was enough…with nothing more. It didn’t feel as much like a parking lot as I expected. Maybe it was because of the large tree right at our door which made entering and exiting a small challenge. Proximity to neighbors was…well…close.
We did not anticipate the ferocity of the mosquitos. I suppose Fishing Bridge is surrounded by enough water that that the bugs were a problem. A real problem. Like…you can’t be outside problem. Fortunately, this was true only of the campground, but they were minimum elsewhere in the park.
Since it sounds like I’m covering only things we didn’t like, I would like to get the final one out of the way and then get on with the good stuff. The laundry at Fishing Bridge. The facilities were old and tight. There was no sitting area while waiting, and it was packed shoulder to shoulder with people. The price was higher than any campground we’ve ever been to, and since the equipment was not maintained well, it too about 3 turns with the dryer. In all, we spent $38 to was 3 loads. AND, WE WENT HOME WIITH DAMP CLOTHES!
Wait, one last thing. The electricity gave us brown outs about once a day while there and the one morning we stayed in late to relax and have a big breakfast, the power was lost completely for about 3 hours.
Taking all of the above into consideration, we left our 7 night reservation 2 nights early. Okay, done with the negative. ;)
We had purchased bear spray at a Walmart in Nebraska somewhere, and were happy to run into a ranger at the nearby visitors center that was letting people use his practice can. We were what I’d call a “healthy nervous” about the bears. Okay, maybe a little on the too nervous side a few times we were on trails in the late evening hours. These nerves proved to be warranted a few times throughout this summer. More to come.
It didn’t take long to get into a Bison Jam. The first one was enjoyable, by the 4th or 5th, we had enough. My boys often tell people that their least favorite animal is the Bison. Twice, they came so close to the truck (within inches) that I rolled the windows up. Not that a quarter inch of glass was going to help. :)
Since the park is divided like a 4 leaf clover, our gameplan was to do one loop each day. This seems easy enough when looking at it on a map, but proved to make for 4 sunrise to past sunset days. We had picnics with us each day and didn’t have to make special stops for food. If we had, I don’t think, errr, I know that 4 days is not enough. We also decided that on this trip we would not do day hikes, we would stick to what there was to see in proximity to the roads. Many roadside stops included small to up to a mile hikes anyway. I’m thinking on any day, we walked about 4-6 miles even with doing only roadside stops.
Our first loop was the SW or Geiser Loop. We knew that the geisers smelled of sulphur, but didn’t anticipate the entire loop to smell. I grew up in a sulphur mining town, so it felt like home to me. You hear of ‘Old Faithful’ all of your life, but I also didn’t aniticipate that we would end up seeing maybe hundreds of thermal features, most of which were at least as interesting as Old Faithful. I highly recommend walking the series of boardwalks that leave from Old Faithful. They are easy walks and you end up seeing plenty. We didn’t go to the top of the hill, but there are a few miles of flat stuff to walk.
Yellowstone is going to take several sittings for me to get posted, so I’ll stop here for the moment.
