After getting a great night’s sleep last night at the Wind River Motel in Dubois, WY (pronounced Doo-boys), we got a few supplies, including some scratch made doughnuts, and headed west yet again toward Grand Teton and Yellowstone. It was cool this morning, about 45 degrees when we left so we were all bundled up. We’ve had beautiful weather so far on the trip. Thank you God!
We only had to travel about and hour and a half before we made it to Grand Teton National Park. If you have never been here, I highly recommend it. The Teton mountain range is one of the most breathtaking vistas you will ever see. There was A LOT of snow on the ground on the way in and in the park. This made us a little concerned since we knew we would be camping tonight, but we’re here so we were camping snow or no snow. It was pretty cool to see snow on the ground on July 2 when I know it’s 1,000,000 degrees at home.
We stopped a couple of times on the way through Grand Teton to just take in the views and snap a few photos. I think Grand Teton is a park that not a lot of people know about and it not used as much as it could be. It is probably my favorite park of any I’ve visited so far. We got a great shot of Mt. Moran and its reflection in a small lake. I love pictures like that.
We weren’t planning on staying in Grand Teton long, but we pushed extra hard to get out here fast enough to have half a day here. We made our first stop at the Jackson Lake Lodge, which is an incredibly expensive and beautiful lodge overlooking a meadow that backs up to the Tetons. We really just wanted to show Jim and Steph the view from the lodge and take a quick pit stop, but Jim and Kate spotted a full grown bull moose grazing in the meadow below the hotel. We immediately grabbed the binoculars and spotting scope and watch the moose for about 15 mins. He was a huge moose with a huge rack of antlers and a nice beard. Kate and I had seen moose in Glacier two years ago, but we never saw an adult male with antlers. It was awesome! We had a great viewing spot and watched him in pretty good detail for a while. We couldn’t take a picture because our cameras don’t have much a zoom, but we all got to see it and it was a lot of fun.
Next we headed down to Jackson Lake and took a little walk around the lakeshore to see what we could find. We didn’t see a lot of wildlife, but the lake is beautiful with the mountains framing it in the background, so it was well worth the walk. The girls got very excited about all the new flowers they got to see that we don’t have back in NC so we took a few shots of those as well.
We departed Grand Teton around lunchtime and after a nice picnic lunch on the John D. Rockefeller Parkway, we made our way into Yellowstone. Again, we saw a lot of snow on the ground as we were traveling through the park so that made us a little scared about freezing our bums off camping, but there’s not much we could do anyway except hunker down and bundle up! Our first stop in Yellowstone was the Old Faithful area. We got to the area just as Old Faithful was erupting, so we had about 90 mins to kill until the next eruption. We explored the Old Faithful Lodge and made our way over to the viewing area to get a front row seat for the show. We had a quick snack of Huckleberry ice cream while we waited and it was delicious. By the way, the girl who scooped our ice cream was from NC and her name was Marin, which is my niece’s name as well. Pretty neat. After a few squirts of water that teased us, Old Faithful finally let loose and erupted. I’ve seen it before at a pretty good distance, but it was really fun to see up close. There were lots of people there, which we understood since it is 4th of July weekend. We were treated to another geyser erupting as soon as Old Faithful stopped. The Bee Hive geyser erupted just a little ways away from us and it is taller that Old Faithful. It only erupts once a day so we were excited to be there at the right time.
Old Faithful is cool, but we were happy to get away from the crowds and head towards Canyon Village to our campsite. On the way we stopped to view the thermal features at the Great Prismatic Spring. If you look it up you will get a better view that we did, because it’s best viewed from above, but the colors were still pretty amazing even at ground level.
We got to our campsite and set up our tents. There is a big pile of snow under a fallen tree in between our sites but we’re not camping on snow or anything. The main problem with the snow is that it leaves a lot of standing water when it melts which leads to hoards of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes here are so big that they were able to carry Kate away. We’ll go looking for here tomorrow and hope that she’s not shriveled up into nothing.
We got everything set up and Steph cooked up a great spaghetti dinner that really hit the spot. We bought some firewood to have a campfire, but we’re all pretty beat after a full day so I think we’ll turn in early and get some sleep so we can hit it hard again tomorrow.
You’ll probably read this 4 or 5 days after it happened since we don’t have internet here in the park. Tomorrow is horseback riding and dinner at the Roosevelt lodge, which we are very excited about. Hopefully we’ll see some bears and wolves tomorrow as well. Keep your fingers crossed!
Andy & Kate
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