Cheesy Street: Road Trip (Part 5): Montana, Wyoming, & Yellowstone

Yellowstone

Sunset in Montana
on the way to Bozeman

So continues the onslaught of states I’ve never seen. Leaving the Black Hills we almost immediately enter Wyoming. Until we get to Yellowstone, there’s nothing much to stop and take stock of. While mostly boring, the western half of Wyoming was an impressively consistent manicured warm palette of golden farmland and modest hills. I had grand plans to stay in Cody, Wyoming that night, a mere hour away from Yellowstone, allowing plenty of time to visit the park the next day. Turns out lots of people want to go to Yellowstone and therefore Super 8 Motels’s could charge me pants-crappingly obscene rates to stay so close without camping. If only I had a tent. So instead, I opted for the much cheaper option of two nights in Bozeman, Montana, two hours away from Yellowstone. I would just have to wake up earlier but the benefits of Plan B ended up being a better deal. First of all, Bozeman is actually pretty fun. We had a great dinner at a pub on the main street and a grand time guffawing at the drunk college students. I’m sure a Moons over My Hammy at the local Denny's in Cody, Wyoming would have been lovely too.

Site where Custer's body was found
on Last Stand Hill

Little Bighorn River

The biggest bonus of the Bozeman pick was the opportunity to drive north through Wyoming right past the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Anticipating a long boring drive on many stretches of road, I purchased an audiobook. I wanted to get something interesting and relevant to the Wild West, westward expansion, and thereby the bulk of my drive. I opted for Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand, the historical account of Custer’s last stand against Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Bighorn. I figured some good ol’ non fiction would make me smart at the very least. I was aware that the conflict involved the Black Hills in some way, but I actually had no idea where the battlefield was. I assumed it was in South Dakota, but didn’t think to look it up and see if we could visit. I wasn’t even sure if the book was going to be any good. Turns out, not only does the book rock, but the Battle of Little Bighorn is right over the Montana-Wyoming border—almost a couple hundred miles from the Black Hills. Coincidentally, we ended up at the park’s entrance just as the book was finishing up with the big battle narrative and reaching the climax of the “last stand.” The timing was perfect. I’ll admit I was a bit on the edge of my seat, excited both for the narrator’s account of the grand finale and excited to get to the battlefield before it closed. I’m not sure if rolling up to a historical battlefield while listening to the story of that battle in your car makes you a badass or a total nerd. I’m suspecting the latter, but I don’t care. It was awesome.

We arrived in Bozeman late that night, leaving Wyoming just to re-enter it the next day to get to Yellowstone.

Bison crossing!

The path visible on the hill below
led to our secret lunch spot

I love Yellowstone. It makes sense to me now why so many people want to go there. It’s like a fun-house of natural wonders that would keep you entertained for weeks. We started the day with a hike up to Mount Washburn. The climb was short but a steady uphill to over 10,000 ft elevation (granted, we probably started at about 6,000 ft elevation). The view at the top was incredible. You could see all of Yellowstone: the canyon, the lake, and the tippy tops of mountains. We ate lunch around the side of a neighboring hill at the top of the hike. Our nook was part of a backcountry trail so nobody was venturing our way. As we ate our pbjs, it felt like the whole park was all ours. On the hike, we saw indigenous big-horn sheep, and some sort of small squirrelly looking things (I clearly know a lot about my park fauna). We had seen a couple solitary bison earlier, which we pulled over to ooh and ahh at. On the drive after the hike, our ogling would seem just foolish. Further into the park’s grassland and river valleys there was a bison party. There were bison EVERYWHERE, snarling cars and non-chalantly crossing the road in front of us. Despite the signs telling us the bison were dangerous and should not be approached, they were right there a few feet away. Traffic jams because of wildlife on the road or side of the road would be a common occurrence in the park.

Geyser party--as soon as the geyser
in the foreground finished erupting
the geyser in the background put
on a show.

We continued on and saw the canyon and overlooks of the waterfalls right on their brink. Then came a barrage of natural oddities: a hole in the ground filled with steaming green sulphur water (sulphur cauldron), a pit of mud that shoots up from the ground (mud volcano), a cave that shoots gas like a dragon’s mouth, fields of geysers spouting water and smoke, geyser basins where the ground is so unstable and acidic that it can burn off the bottom of shoes. It was like an amusement park with mother nature’s freak show.

The day ended beautifully with a viewing of Old Faithful and a few other active geyser eruptions as the sun set on the park.

As much Yellowstone as possible was packed into a 10-hour day. We circumnavigated the park and, in the process, crossed the Continental Divide twice. I’d say it was a fairly productive day.