Grand Teton and sneaking a peek at Yellowstone

I'm sorry I skipped a day of posting but I was so spent last night when we finally got to Cody, there was just no way I was booting up the PC. I hope you all understand. So now I have two days to catch you up on.

So two nights ago we didn't make it to Cody as I explained in the prior post--you know the whole Marianne shrieking, deer in the road, mom on the phone situation. Let's not revisit it. So we woke up outside of Grand Teton National Park, camped along the Snake River. The river is just gorgeous, and being the mother of a pile of kids growing up the desert, it was a real treat for them just to go rock hopping and throwing stones in the river. The place was amazing.

I had very little idea of what to expect from Grand Teton National Park. Holy mackerel! The pictures will never do this place justice. I know they say that Yellowstone is the crown jewel of the national park system, but the sheer beauty of Teton really gives Yellowstone a run for its money in the crown jewel department. We entered the park just after the noon hour and everyone was starving. So we ate lunch at a park concession--unlike any other--we ate buffalo burgers inside a teepee. For real. We drove through the park and it was fairly crowded. So the more popular spots (like Jenny Lake) had no parking for our rig. No matter. We ended up at a spot called String Lake and for most of the kids this was their very first time swimming in a naturally occurring lake. And it was a glacial pond no less. But since it was a fairly small body of water, the water was plenty warm enough for swimming even though, as you'll notice in the pictures, there is still a hefty bit of SNOW on Grand Teton. Although he has not said it, I think this was Mike's favorite part of the trip so far. Once we finished hanging out at String Lake, it was time to head to Cody. Well...

Cody was further than we thought. You see, we hadn't counted on having to travel 30 MPH through Yellowstone. (In order to get from Teton out to Cody, you actually have to enter Yellowstone on the South side and exit on the East side.) So we didn't end up in Cody until about 11pm. The drive through Yellowstone was not without it's own special excitement. Halfway through, there were 5 bison on the side of the road. All of the cars were at a halt to take pictures and see them. One of them was literally 10 feet or so from my door. So I, like a good tourist, roll down my window for a picture, and as soon as the flash went off the beast huffed and slammed his hoof down. The pictures didn't come out, and I wasn't too keen on hanging around and seeing if he would charge. So that was the end of that. The drive through the park in the dark was treacherous. I don't look forward to doing that again. The road out to the East entrance is really desolate, and there are bear warnings everywhere. I kept thinking, "crap this is all we need, a Grizzly Bear in the pitch dark out in the wilderness." I have visited Yellowstone twice before in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, there we bears, of course, but your likelihood of seeing a Grizzly outside of the back country was really low. Their population must have increased, because now there are whole areas closed because mother grizzlies are living there with their cubs. And Charlie actually spoke to a woman who had seen a mother grizzly and three cubs crossing a road in Teton. Back in the early 90s a grizzly on the park road was practically unheard of.

A thing that I want to mention that is positively striking. I was in Yellowstone last time, maybe a year or two after the huge fire and huge portions of the park were black, but with verdant grass and flowers on the burned forest floor. Now, 20 years later the new trees are growing up in place of the old, but the sticks from the old trees are still there. It is amazing to me, now, just how large of an area it was that burned; you can drive for miles and miles and there are literally millions of dead trees, and the things are still standing. I've put a picture of what it looks like.

So today we woke up in Cody and went for pancake breakfast at the campground. You can't beat it; $2 all you can eat. Our big activities of the day were going swimming, playing in the playground, getting "provisions" down at the local Wal-Mart (Big W to you Aussie folks who are reading) and last but not least, going horseback riding outside of Cody. All of the kids, save Claire, had their own horse. Claire rode with Charlie and would you believe it, she actually fell asleep on the horse! ON the horse. I was amazed. We would have liked to have made it to Cody Rodeo, but we were all just too tired. So we made a giant fire, cooked up some chicken, corn on the cob and baked potatoes. It was a great dinner. Then as I worked on this blog entry, Charlie and the kids made s'mores.

One final note. We made a new family purchase today. You can see a photo of it here. The new item is on top of our car in this picture. We are planning to go back to that lake in Teton on the way back out of here and use it. Then we intend to use it on some of the ponds in Northern Arizona on weekend trips.

So tomorrow we leave Cody and we are going to tour Yellowstone for real. We going to see Old Faithful, which the kids are really anxious to see and we'll probably go up to Mammoth Hot Springs as well (since on two prior trips I never went out there). The only problem with Yellowstone is its size. The park is so gigantic, you could really make it your life's ambition to get to know the place and we, unfortunately, have only a few days. There are a couple hundred miles of park roads and countless hiking trails, lakes, mountains, canyons, geysers and sulfuric smelling hot pools. We got to see a few vents on the way in and when the kids saw them and the boiling water and steam coming out, it finally sunk in that this is a giant active volcano. And they kept asking "why does it smell like that?" Just the earth passing a little gas...whaddaya gonna do?

On that note I'll sign off. We are camping in Yellowstone tomorrow night and I will probably not have Internet access, let's rephrase that. I will not have Internet access, so I will probably not be able to post again until after we leave the park. Take care, and pray that we see no Grizzly mamas, and that we don't inadvertently piss off another bison. And of course, we don't want any geologic events on a scale larger than Old Faithful.