The Road from Lander to Yellowstone National Park

O beautiful, for spacious skies
Wyoming, this truly is where the sky and the earth are joined. We are driving along a roller coaster of a highway. There are dips and dives and turns as the vista expands. We enter a red granite canyon, then we are on the top of a high plain, then back through another canyon - and this is all in the first 63k of our journey. We have to admit that if we were to pick the best scenic drive of all of the scenic drives we have driven over the past 19 days, the road between Denver and Yellowstone National Park would be the winner. Every mile there is something that is awe inspiring.
This is the first day in several days we have seen cyclists. So many in fact that we stopped counting. This is not a ride for the Sunday cyclist. This really is a Tour de Wyoming. Ed looked wistful as we passed the riders. It has been a long time since he has been in the saddle.
We had our first rest stop at the Diversion Dam Rest Station. I could do an entire blog on Rest Stations. This one was remarkable not only for its cleanliness, but also for the materials they used to construct the walls and also the wall separating the stalls. It was a river rock aggregate. It was so striking that I had to take pictures. I wouldn't mind having a feature wall made of these materials in my own home.
Our next stop came as a complete surprise. We rounded the corner and came upon the western-style town of Dubois, Wyoming, Pop. 962 It has some very interesting western art galleries, souvenir shops, a saloon, a coffee haus, and at the end of town a coffee shop that sold lattes.
Some of our local businesses could take a lesson about customer service from our neighbours to the south - thank you for stopping by, thank you for coming in, what do y'all have planned for the day?
Once past Dubois the landscape begins to change. The sage brush and high wind-swept plains are being replaced with lodge pole pines and we see the Grand Tetons and Rocky Mountains in the distance. Wowoming is what they should call this state.
The first park we entered was Grand Teton National Park. (The name "Tetons" originally was intended to describe several hills near the town of Arco, Idaho. They were named by a French trapper who thought that they resembled the female body. Many years later the name was mistakenly applied to the mountains of present day Grand Teton National Park due to the poor map-making and map-reading standards of the time.) The drive between Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park is very similar to the drive between Jasper and Banff. The scenery is beautiful, just like at home we said. We had decided to go to Yellowstone National Park on our trip to see the geysers, particularly Old Faithful. We arrived at the site of the geysers about 30 minutes prior to the next eruption of Old Faithful. We took a short walk along the boardwalk surrounding some of the lesser geysers, then made our way back to take our place among the hundreds of others who had also come to see this phenomenon. The sun was shining, temp 22C and no wind, perfect, and old Faithful went off right on schedule - 10 minutes after the posted time. First there were puffs of steam, then gurgles of water, then up she went and just as she was at her peak, the wind picked up and the sulphur-smelling water sprayed the surrounding crowd. It was like were being blessed with holy water. Just as quickly as the wind came up, it was gone.
We treated ourselves to dinner at the cafeteria in the Yellowstone Lodge. Ed had vegetarian lasagna and I decided it was time for a little comfort food - chicken parmigiana, mashed potatoes with gravy and mixed vegetables. I savoured every bite.
When Ed told me that he had booked a tent site at West Yellowstone, I had assumed that it was in Yellowstone National Park, a site similar to Sleeping Giant and the Pinery. I didn't realize that West Yellowstone is a tourist town just outside of the gates of the park, across the state line in Montana. It is the jumping off spot for park goers and has all of the amenities that you would need before heading into the wilds - food, clothes, gas, you name it. It also had the Grizzly RV Park & Cabins -an RV park with about 10 sites for tents. This is high density camping. I felt like an evacuee from Hurricane Katrina as I lined up to use the facilities in the wash house.
We had heard that the temperature was going to go down to 34F that evening and so had tried to book a cabin. They were completely full and we were lucky that we had pre-booked the tent site. I had bought a souvenir Yellowstone Blanket at the gift shop and I had also brought along an old sleeping bag as a spare, just in case. It was still a cold night in Montana.
When we awoke the next morning, the air had already started to warm-up. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and we still had more many more miles to go.