We started out the day in Lander, Wyoming, had breakfast at the hotel, and headed north toward Yellowstone. We drove some ways and stopped in Dubois, which is spelled like “do-bwah” but is actually pronounced “dew boys”, as we discovered when we went to the Jackalope gift shop where they had stickers that told you how to pronounce the name of the town. There was a jackalope outside the store, and I rode it. Riley refused on the basis that someone would take his photo and put it on social media, I’m sure.
While we were in Dubois, we stopped for lunch. We got some barbecue at a place called Two Z’s Barbecue, which was super, super good. We stuffed ourselves with way too many ribs and made ourselves feel bad, but didn’t feel bad having done so. We rolled ourselves into the car and got the car rolling again, this time heading farther north towards Yellowstone.
We got to Teton National Park, where they charged us an entry fee just to use the road, basically, to get past Teton National Park and through to Yellowstone. But in Teton National Park, we got to see Grand Teton, the actual mountain, and it is truly majestic in terms of the scenery you see out here.
We passed through Teton National Park using a highway. Actually, it’s not a highway; it’s a parkway, which I found ironic, between these two national parks, named after John D Rockefeller Jr., that connects the two parks. It’s the only road between these two parks, and there’s no way to leave the parkway so you wouldn’t have to pay the two separate fees to get into the national parks. So I just got the America the Beautiful pass, which was an extra ten bucks that’ll let us get into any national park for the rest of the year, which I probably should have done several national parks ago.
In any case, we entered Yellowstone, which turns out to be gigantic and takes up what looks like a good eighth of the state of Wyoming. As we drove through Yellowstone, we saw many mountains and waterfalls. The most conspicuous thing, I think, was that there are dense, dense evergreen trees everywhere that prevent you from seeing anything off-road, which is unfortunate. Even though the trees are lovely, I would rather have seen some of the landscape formations.
We got to where you turn off for the campsite but kept going and went to see Old Faithful. We arrived at a time when Old Faithful was about to erupt, and within 15 minutes, we got to see Old Faithful spray water into the air. It was humid and smelled like a moldy basement. We were convinced that it must erupt every 20 minutes or so, but it doesn’t. It erupts roughly every hour and a half, so we were rather fortunate to arrive when we did.
From there, we left to try to see the Prismatic Springs. We parked the car and walked along a trail that led to Fairy Falls but split off toward Prismatic Springs. However, from the trail that led toward Prismatic Springs, you couldn’t see anything well through the trees. That was kind of disappointing.
So we walked back to the car and went a little further down the road, but we could not find a parking space. The parking lot for Prismatic Springs was simply too busy. At that point, we gave up on the Great Prismatic Spring and headed back to camp before it got dark or cold.
We returned to our campsite, set up camp, and made some dehydrated food amongst the mosquitoes. We sat at our campsite for a little while, waiting for it to get dark. The sun seemed to stay up and keep the sky bright until around 10 o’clock. It wasn’t until somewhere between 10 and 11 o’clock that it really got dark.
Ultimately, we took a walk down to the bridge that looked out onto Yellowstone Lake, which was pretty cool. We saw some stars out that way and then some more stars at our campsite through the trees after we returned. Then, we went to bed to dream of our continued exploration of Yellowstone and a drive to Butte, Montana, in the morning, the last leg of our trip. It should be exciting.