Leslie and David's Wanderings: 15 June 2019 Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Today we decided we needed to see something other than the Geothermal sites (which is hard since they are everywhere in Yellowstone), so we headed for the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone river. Once again, we got up early and hit the west gate around 08:15 thinking we would beat the worst of the crowd. The local merchants had warned us this would be the first really big weekend of the season. We surprisingly breezed through the gate with no line! Only to come to a screeching halt about two miles later in a miles long traffic jam. We crawled along for an hour and a half only to find out the huge traffic jam was caused by people stopping on the road to take picture of the buffalo in a herd that was close to the road. A ranger had apparently showed up to urge people along but not before traffic was backed up for 5-6 miles. Our first stop was at the Artist Paint Pots. The small parking lot was full when we pulled in but a spot opened up quickly. People were parking all over the place and blocking the flow of traffic (later an Enforcement ranger showed up and wrote a lot of people tickets!). The hike up to the pots was easy and there were multiple geothermal features along the way (Hot pools, bubbling geysers) to keep us entertained. There were two pools of mud pots, one was pretty thick and provided delightful bursting mud bubbles and the other was soupier and not as entertaining. Fortunately there was plenty of room on the boardwalks so the crowds were not as bad as yesterday.

Then we headed for the Canyon area of the park and turned into the South Rim drive and then stopped at the Uncle Tom parking area. We did not have any problems finding a parking spot (the crowds were at Old Faithful). But it had taken us four hours to get to the canyon area. After eating the lunch we had brought with us, we strolled over to the Upper Falls viewing platform. The Upper Falls of the Yellow Stone river were pretty spectacular and the roar of the water reached all the way up to the canyon rim (Note: the Brink of Upper Falls and Uncle Tom’s Point trail were closed for construction). We then hiked the South Rim Trail around to get some beautiful view of the 308 foot tall Lower Falls (over 60,000 gallons a minute were flowing over the falls). There was a family that was hiking the trail at about the same rate we were so we kept taking turns taking pictures for each other. After hiking about half way to Artist Point we went back to the truck and drove up to Artist Point. The Parking lot was fairly full and there were a lot of buses dropping off hoards of people. The upper deck of the overlook was packed with people from all over the world. Most politely taking turns to get pictures both up the canyon toward the Lower falls and down the canyon with the river rapids and colorful canyon walls. It was very clear why this was called Artist Point, the views and colors were spectacular. After shuffling through the crowds (and yes, our friends from the trail were there and we again took turns taking each others pictures) to get our pictures, we escaped back to our Behemoth and drove around to the one way North Rim Drive. Again, the parking lots at the major over looks were chaos. We skipped the first over look since Leslie’s knee was not up to the hike down to the Brink of the Lower Falls overlook (a very steep trail down to a observation deck at the edge of the lower falls) and continued to Lookout Point. We think the views from the south rim were better.

Then we moved on to the visitor center at Canyon Village where we hoped to find the Park Series pottery cups that have been commissioned for all the National Park units. But they did not have them in the visitor center store. So we went over to the General Store next door and learned they only carried them at the Tower and Fish Bridge stores. Feeling the 4.5 miles we had walked already, we headed over to the Canyon Lodge for a beer before heading back to the Wanderer. At the bar we met another couple (from Missouri) that were also RVers that were thinking of going fulltime. So we had fun swapping stories from the road. Just as we prepared to leave, the skies opened up and torrential rains and sleet came down for about 15 minutes. We kept running into these showers off and on as we drove. Fortunately the sleet was soft, so there was no damage to the Behemoth.

We decided to head back to the Wanderer via Fishing Bridge instead of the way we had come. This would allow us to see the Hayden Valley, Yellowstone River valley and Yellowstone lake areas of the park and yes, stop and pick up our Yellowstone Park cup. The Hayden Valley has a lot of wildlife. We saw many buffalo and elk along the road (the traffic stoppages were pretty minimal). The General Store at Fishing Bridge (where they used to allow people to fish for cut throat trout) did have the Park Series pottery cups and we picked one up for our collection. The views looking out over Yellowstone Lake toward the Absaroka Mountains were spectacular. We then followed US191 back to West Yellowstone and our Wanderer. A wonderful day!