July 6th: Yellowstone (Day 14)

We arrived at Yellowstone and discovered that we had forgotten to check out of the hotel in Cody. Luckily, Kevin has a habit of taking every hotel pen he can lay hands on so we had the phone number of the hotel and, once we found a pay phone in the park, were able to call for the address to send the key.

About five miles into the park we saw a black wolf trotting along the side of the road. Like all the animals in Yellowstone he seemed to be desperately pretending we were not there (throughout the park you could almost hear the animal mantra, "there are no cars, there are no cameras, there is not a crowd of humans following me wherever I go). He moved quickly as if on a very important mission but Cheri still managed to get some good pictures of him as he climbed the steep hill next to the road and disappeared over the the top.

On our way to see Old Faithful and Castle Geyser we saw quite a few deer but the buffalo were still elusive and mule deer are only interesting for a short while. The geysers were amazing though. We were lucky enough to see Castle Geyser erupt. It has a cycle that is much longer than Old Faithful so unless you happen to be near by when it is ready to do its thing you could wait around all day and still not see it. Castle may not shoot as high as Old Faithful, but the formation around it and the sounds it makes are much more interesting. We hung around for Old Faithful and then headed out to see the rest of the boiling thermal pools.

Since we hadn't been real sure about when we would arrive at Yellowstone we had not made reservations for the interior campsites. They were packed! Long lines of reserved and hopeful campers waited outside of each campground so we headed out of the park at the west exit to look for camping elsewhere. At the first place we stopped, the owner was kind enough to ask if we had a tarp, which we did not, and explained that the ground in his tent area had been rained out the previous day and really hadn't dried enough. We thanked him for his honesty and headed down the road in search of drier digs.

About 10 miles out of town we found a sign advertising what appeared to be a great campsite; showers, riverside camping, the works. The road to this campsite was being prepared for resurfacing and the crews had stopped just short of making it drivable without a truck, jeep or SUV. Even at 5 mph, the fillings were being shaken out of our teeth so we turned off on what looked like a side road. It was much smoother than the main road ad we could tell it was heading back towards town so we took it, even though it was only about a car width across. It turned out to be a snowmobile/ATV track! Who knew you could go off-roading in a mini-van? Yay Mazda, heart of a sports car indeed!

We finally found a KOA and even though it was more of a carnival than a campsite (it took 5 minutes to thread our way through the crowds of kids on rented hotwheels and bikes) we took a site and settled in for the night.

Pictures for Day 14