The Beginning of the Adventure - Vacation Part 1

Jill & I always travel during the "shoulder season". We have also been hitting the various National Parks in our general area. Since moving to Colorado, we have hit Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Mesa Verde and Rocky Mountain National Parks. Next up for us was Yellowstone and Grand Teton, an easy day's drive from home for us. Since Yellowstone is such a huge park, and is really crowded we decided to go a bit later in the season hoping to find some solitude amongst the park.

The initial plan was to spend 2-3 days in Grand Teton, then hit up some Yellowstone attractions for the next 3 or so days. Well that plan was turned upside down before we ever left the house as several low pressure systems passed through the area in rapid succession. So much for the glorious weather we've enjoyed during the "shoulder season" thus far.

So with a new plan of action, we headed off. Day 1 was driving to Jackson Hole, WY where we would enjoy our only taste of luxury as we stayed in a posh resort hotel at the bottom of the ski area. We ate fine cuisine at the Rendezvous restaurant, which served up some amazing Alaskan Halibut. The next morning we headed north through Grand Teton as we made our way to Yellowstone.



The weather was drab, dreary and pretty much deplorable. A gray, rainy day with an extremely low ceiling meant that we never even got a glimpse at the looming giant mountains just to our west as we passed quickly through the park. We got to Yellowstone, took in a few sites and then headed to Old Faithful to do our obligatory viewing of its eruption. Of course, the snow and very cold temps made it pretty difficult to see what was going on, but we watched as the snow fell anyway.

We procured our back country permit, and as the snow fell fast I double checked with Jill that she wanted to head into the wilderness knowing what faced us. We loaded up our packs and hit the trail about 3:30pm knowing we needed to make pretty good time on the trail to make sure we had some daylight.



Our hike to our back country site wasn't too bad at 4.3 miles. Along the way we would pass a tremendous amount of "thermal features" in the park. As luck would have it, just as we arrived at the biggest feature on our trek, Lonestar Geyser, it erupted (happens every 3 or so hours) and we got to take in that event without having to wait around.





As we continued on we tried to ignore the less than favorable weather and just enjoy the hike and features. Everywhere you looked you could see the steam rising from the countryside, a surreal experience for sure. We hiked along taking in the mud pools, geysers, and springs as we went.











We arrived at our campsite with plenty of daylight, and started the process of setting up our home for the night. Since grizzly bears are a real concern, you have to store your food hanging from a tree about 10ft off the ground. We boiled some water for the coming day, cooked our meal and settled in. We put our Nalgene bottles in the nearby creek and tied them to a tree so we would awake to clean, cool water or so I thought...



As we went to sleep, we could hear the snow falling hard as we drifted off. To our surprise we awoke to several inches of snow blanketing the grounds the next morning. A chilly start to the morning was made a bit worse by the discovery that somehow the 50lb test nylon cord we used to tie up our Nalgene bottles had snapped leaving us without good water. Ugh.



We used our remaining Nalgene to gather some more water and cooked up some rather disgusting scrambled eggs. After taking in some breakfast, we quickly packed up camp and headed out so we could see some more more sights within the park.





We made quick work of the hike on the way out, hitting the car at 10:30am leaving us plenty of time for the day. A quick check of the thermometer in the car showed a brisk temp of 32, and that had surely increased from when we had gotten up at about 6:30.

That leads us into the 2nd day of our adventure, which will be detailed in another never ending pontification coming to this blog soon.