States: WY
Location: Yellowstone N.P (Fishing Bridge, Canyon, Tower)
Total Miles Travelled: 1452M
Man I hate the cold, and during the night here it get’s frosty but for once I don’t really care – we we’re in Yellowstone Park. Yeehaw! We were all anxious to explore this humungous volcano waiting to blow but as we didn’t have to rush, we stumbled out of bed at a leisurely 9am! Hold your horses though, we had to find an RV park still since we haven’t dumped anything since we left San Francisco. 3 guys in an RV for 17 hour drive meant we were pretty full but as it turns out, this wasn’t all our fault – the RV must have come part pre-filled with waste in the tanks – thanks go out to the previous renters :@We paid our 20 bucks to checkout of the camp site and headed north through the park towards Fishing Bridge where there was apparently an RV park. The road took us round the north west edge of the massive yellowstone lake, which looked like a giant mirror as it was so still. A smell of sulphur started to fill the air which promted us to all start scanning the horizon for the source. As we turned a corner, steam peaked over the crest of a hill as steam vents started cropping up all over the lake’s edge. This was already very cool even though this is far from mud volcanos and geysers as we witnessed volcanic activity for the first times in our lives!
Miles & Miles later (Yellowstone Park covers 3742 sq miles and the grand loop drive that takes you round the park is 156 miles long!) we found our RV park, Fishing Bridge. All fingers were crossed that they had some room here and our luck obviously turned as we saw a vacancy sign marking the entrance. We parked up an registered - $28 dollars a night but no electric – no worries as we have a built in generator :D
We park up, empty waste, fill up water and leave again – we’ve got the hang of this now! Straight over to the visitor centre we go and get some advice from a local park ranger – she happily points out the best sights in the park if you only have 2 days there. Today we would be going to canyon and tower whereas tommorrow we’d hit Geyser country as we’d have longer.
Off to Canyon we went but before we got there we saw a sign saying “Mud Volcanoe”. Better have a look at that then!
Wow, what a smell!! The hydrogen sulphide was pretty concentrated up here with the smell of rotten eggs filling the air more and more as we approched the volcanoe. Pretty cool sight this was – exactly how one would imagine earth millions of years ago.
We hit the road again and all the trails on the way to get a view of the upper and lower falls as well as all the Grand canyon of the Yellowstone. First we went to upper and lower falls for the these views:
Next on the list was to hit Artists point and although Yellowstone is all about the thermal features it turns out this is the most photgraphed view in the park – we could see why when we were greeted with this:
Quite breathtaking the view which we started sharing with some of the local wildlife:
Right then, we still had a few hours to fill so we headed up further north beyond Canyon toward Tower-Roosevelt where we were promptly stopped by a park ranger – they were periodically closing the road as they were currently battling a massive forest fire! Obviously, being ignorant tourists we had to check it out by continuing north knowing we’d eventually have to turn back – fingers were crossed they had an area large enough to do a 3 point turn in a 27’ RV!
We travelled for a good 20 minutes before we realised what looked like a cloud before was actually the smoke from a forest fire and we had underestimated the scale of this fire (which was apparently a small one by Yellowstone standards. We turned one final corner where we could then view the fire burning across the landscape.
We stopped the RV in a nearby turnout and walked across the road towards the edge of the dug-out to see the fire and have a chat with Tracie (with an ‘I’), a NPS firefighter who was overseeing an operation where they were dumping fire retardant via aircraft to stop the fire spreading toward the road and keep the rest burning (trees here require fire in order to reproduce). Turns out Tracie had been standing on this dug out for 4/5 hours and was now pretty desperate for a restroom so was especially happy to see us turn up in an RV. We let Tracie use our our throne but also warned her that this was pretty much a blokes toilet so apologised in advance however we were pleasantly complimented on how clean it was for an RV – obviously just different standards over here!
After chatting a little more we learned that the firefights were due for another dumping run in 15 minutes so we stuck around to see the NPS firefighters at work – I missed the moment slightly as I was chatting to Dan with Phil in the background yelling at us “Dudes. Dudes!! They’ve started!”. I still managed to get a shot though.
We said our goodbye’s to Tracie, filled up here water bottle with our spring water and then headed back to the camp site for a rest – our first propper chillout night in the entire holiday and I can tell you now that we all desperatel y needed it. We had some beers and tried to make a BBQ with coals, firelighting fluid and the tray & grill from the disposable BBQ. This thing was a b@stard to light but we got it in the end and started cooking some beef patties (aka. burgers) under the stars and moonlight of yellowstone park.
Burgers all done and it was time to eat but a nightmare followed – turns out one of Phils burgers was undercooked – a dent to the alpha male ego here as we realised how much we had failed at cooking on a BBQ. At this point Phil had already taken a bite and was getting more and more paranoid about food poisoning the more we talked about it. He disappeared into the night toward a nearby toilet to ‘let go of the problem’. I’ll leave out any photos at this point and simply say goodnight…
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