Training: Day 6 - Our Yellowstone Adventure

Today was to be our big adventure to Yellowstone national Park...unfortunately Kip was living up to his name and could not get out of bed due to a monster hangover. I had got up at about 8:30 and gone for breakfast, then Mark surfaced about 10:00. There being no sign of Kip, we thought it best to leave him to his recovery, so we went off for a walk around the shops near the hotel - nothing very exciting. Mark went in to get his hair cut and I went back to see if Kip had emerged yet - he hadn't. By the time it got to 12:00, we were both starving, so I rang Kip to get him up. Eventually he appeared and we headed off.

First thing on the agenda was food - we all felt like just some quick and easy junk food, so looked out for something suitable. It seems that every junk food restaurant we found was either too busy, too fancy or too odd. We must have visited 4 or 5 places, before finally getting a KFC drive-through. I don't think we really noticed what we were eating after that, we were just so hungry.

Fully fed and watered we set off for Yellowstone. It's about 90 miles from Bozeman, so it took us nearly 2 hours to get there. Near the entrance we stopped in the very small town of Gardiner - it made Bozeman look like New York! We picked up some water for the journey and went on our way.

The scenery at the park was just stunning. Huge mountain ranges, wide plains, deep snow, thousands of trees....just beautiful.

Before long we began to see some of the wildlife in the park. We saw Bison, buffalo, elk, deer, coyotes...no bears tho, as they are only just waking up, and there are wolves, but they are very hard to spot - people come with high-tech scopes just to look for wolves. The most numerous of all these was the bison though - loads of these all over. They wander across the road and you have to be careful not to knock them down.

Here's a small video of one who got a bit close!

It took us about an hour to drive through the park. Most of the roads are closed in the winter, so we could only see a small part of it - we probably saw only 15% of the whole thing. When we got out the there side of the park, we were in another 1-horse town called Cooke City. They may only have 1 horse, but they have dozens of snowmobiles. And perhaps we should have been riding one, because the road out of Cooke City, and the only way back to the motorway other than going through the park, was still covered with 2-3 feet of snow! So, after confirming with a local that we would have to travel back all the way through Yellowstone, we decided we should eat something to keep us going. So we had some more just food at the local diner, then filled up with petrol and set off back through the park.

As we drove back through the park, it was starting to get dark and we were conscious that we had come totally unprepared for any emergency. They recommend you bring a mobile phone (ours don;t work round here), some warm clothes (we were in jeans and t-shirts!), food (we had half a KFC left...), water (we had some - yay!), and much more. It just goes to show how little we appreciate what life is like over here.

The trip back though the park seemed much quicker than when we went through in the other direction, although the journey from the exit back to Bozeman seemed to go on forever. It was dark and Mark (who was driving) was tired enough from the night before, without having to drive long distances as well. It was a long ride home, but eventually we arrived back at about 8:30. We all went straight to our rooms for an early night!

To see all the photos I took on our adventure today, click here. To view them as a slideshow, click here.