05-25-2007 - Tetons Redux, Yellowstone, & Idaho Day One

Wow - not surprisingly, finding internet connections when you are traveling between parks or campgrounds on two-lane highways is not easy!!! Tonight (5/25) we are spending the night in Sun Valley, Idaho and will head into the Sawtooth Mountains tomorrow and then up to Glacier National Park in Montana. Oh yeah, "we" is myself & Jeff, my buddy from Denver who will be with me through Banff in Canada.

Tetons day two was sunny and really amazing. The mountains were out in all their glory


and we had the great fortune to see a moose in the woods by the road on our way between Tetons and Yellowstone.


I've never seen one up that close, and they are big and freaking ugly! (but still fascinating). It's funny because as I've read, and as the park ranger told us, he'd get closer to a grizzly than a moose - I've heard they can be nasty. But this guy was focused on getting his grub on (eating). Looks like he has a few battle scars as well.


We intended to camp at Tower Falls in Yellowstone, one of the few campgrounds open this time of year (pre-memorial day it's a skeleton crew apparently), but the road up to it was closed (until the day after we left), which would lead to having to go a long way around. So we stayed at Madison Campground in the west-central area of the park, which was still great (I stayed there last year as well). Both nights were in the 20's, but with my zero-degree bag it was completely comfortable. Props to the people at Big Agnes. We hit snow flurries a dozen or so times, but nothing big, and considering it was cold anyway we were happy to have snow instead of rain.

We pretty much toured around the whole park, focusing on the Canyon area with the Upper and Lower Falls.

Unfortunately, we didn't see too much sun, so my pics from this summer pale in comparison to last year. Still an awesome experience though, and kind of cool to hit the same areas at half the temperature (no pun intended). It was pretty windy, evidenced by the puffed up jacket and flying lettuce.


Last night at sunset we sat down by the river near our campground and watched two huge buffalo grazing along the opposite shore, with four elk grazing along the hillside above them. At one point we could hear either coyotes or wolves howling in the distance, and there was pretty much nowhere else I would rather have been. It's been really awesome out here on the road so far.

Today we drove through a good chunk of Idaho, which is absolutely gorgeous. I don't really have any photos to post at this point (but likely will after we hit the Sawtooth Mountains tomorrow) because the beauty of it is the vastness of it, and that is just hard to communicate on film. Suffice it to say that even while driving past lush green farms and amazing blue rivers, there was never a time a snow-capped mountain wasn't looming in the distance in one or more directions.

Tonight we are staying in Ketchum, Idaho, down the road from Sun Valley. Along the way we went through one small town with about 5 buildings, including the Wayside Cafe, Lounge, and Laundromat, featuring entertainment which made me wonder if I had taken a wrong turn and ended up back near a certain fictitious mountain in Wyoming.


We also hit Craters of the Moon National Monument along the way, a vast volcanic field which began to flow 15,000 years ago and last was active 2,000 years ago.


We figured we'd spend about a half hour there, but ended up spending 2.5 hours. There was an 800 foot lava tube you could walk through, and we hit three caves which required us to use our headlamps. It was pretty hot on the surface (I can't imagine what it's like later in the year), but just a few yards into the caves the floors had patches of ice.


That's pretty much it for now. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of Idaho tomorrow and heading up to Glacier in Montana - hopefully I can find an internet connection up there again. So far I'm ecstatic about the way things have gone, even with wintry conditions, and cannot wait to see what the coming days will bring. I guess that's the joy of the roadtrip.

Thanks to all who have commented, and good luck to all those now in bar review classes doing the responsible thing!

1900 miles down, somewhere around 3300 to go....