Bison, Bears, and Bighorn Sheep: A Wildlife Safari at Yellowstone National Park

After a peaceful drive filled with countless vistas of snowcapped mountains, I arrived in Salt Lake City by late afternoon; the surrounding mountains looked like they’d had powdered sugar dumped all over them. I couldn’t believe it was actually early May and all I could see was snow.

I spent the night in Layton, a suburb just north of downtown and to my dismay found that while every restaurant chain known to man seemed to have a location in Layton, there were not many interesting local choices. But then I noticed an online review of a small German restaurant called Weller’s. It sounded intriguing and it was less than a mile from my motel, so I high-tailed it over there and was soon dining on cuisine that made me feel like I was back in Berlin or Vienna. I had pork schnitzel with red cabbage and German potato salad, all excellent, and shared a spirited conversation with my waitress, Kristin.

In the morning my car got its “spa treatment” – a well-earned oil change and tire rotation, and then off we went, heading northeast and anticipating some potentially snow-covered roads ahead. I stopped for lunch in Logan, Utah at the Great Harvest Bread Bakery, a northern Utah chain that specializes in homemade breads and pastries. As soon as I entered and before I’d even had a chance to peruse the menu, a young woman standing beside a cutting board covered with various loaves of bread asked me which one I wanted to sample. I opted for a pumpkin-chocolate chip sweet bread that was out of this world, and then, having felt as though I’d eaten dessert before lunch, I ordered a healthy turkey sandwich on multigrain bread. I also grabbed a couple of cookies to go. If I lived in this area, this place could absolutely pose a threat to my health.

As I exited the bakery, the graupel hail I’d experienced back on Boulder Mountain a couple days earlier was back with a vengeance, the little spheres of ice bouncing off my car’s hood like a million tiny ping-pong balls. The quaint streets of Logan resembled a Christmas village. It started to actually snow shortly after that and it fell steadily for most of the four-hour-drive to Jackson, Wyoming. As usual, I stayed on rural, two-lane roads and my route kept crisscrossing back and forth across the Idaho and Wyoming state lines.

I’d only visited Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks once before, almost thirty years ago. My most vivid memory was going on a white water rafting trip on the Snake River near Jackson, Wyoming, an exhilarating and terrifying experience. I recall all of us in my raft throwing down our oars and hanging on for dear life each time we’d hit the rapids, and feeling as if someone with an enormous bucket of icy water was throwing it directly into our faces. I was so much younger then! I also remember the Teton Mountains being breathtakingly beautiful, but my only memory of Yellowstone was waiting for Old Faithful Geyser to erupt and feeling that it really hadn’t been worth the wait.  Other than a faded shot of the geyser, I hadn’t even been able to find any photos from that trip. I do know that I’d passed through the area on one of the cross country trips from California to Massachusetts I made each year, so I’d probably just scratched the surface and hadn’t spent a lot of time here back then.

I instantly fell in love with my lodgings in Jackson. Cowboy Village is a rustic collection of individual cabins nestled amidst towering pine trees. There was a beautiful indoor pool and spa, and I was within walking distance of everything in town. It was continuing to snow, so I went out for a stroll around the property and noticed that except for my cabin, all the rest had huge K-9 Police SUVs parked beside them, which I thought was a bit odd. As I passed one cabin, a man was unloading his SUV and had a beautiful German shepherd on a leash. I asked him whether I should be worried by the heavy police presence, and he laughed and told me that officers from all around the region had gathered here for a canine training workshop. I’ve never felt so safe in my life!

I’d intended to drive north from Jackson through Grand Teton National Park and into Yellowstone via its south entrance, but I learned that the mountain pass connecting the parks was still closed this early in May. Therefore, I made a loop through Grand Teton, then had to head west over Teton Pass and then north through eastern Idaho in order to get to West Yellowstone, Montana, my destination for the next couple of nights.

My past memory of the Tetons was seeing these dramatic, snow covered peaks off in the distance as I drove across lush fields of green in July or August. On this visit if you’d told me I was in Alaska in December, I’d have believed it. Everything was snow-covered, lakes were frozen solid, and flurries persisted all morning. Those who know me well are aware of my love for snow, and since New England had experienced such a snow-less winter this year, I was happy to have a day in this frozen wonderland.

After spending the morning touring the park, I headed west toward 8,400 foot Teton Pass hoping it would be open to traffic after the prior night’s storms. Thankfully, the road was pretty clear, I didn’t see more than a handful of other cars, and the views along the way were magnificent.

Shortly after crossing the Montana border I came up behind a pick-up truck pulling a trailer that was traveling perhaps 30 MPH in a 50 MPH zone. For some time, I was unable to pass. I noticed that the trailer had no brake lights or signals on it, so I was confused when the truck eventually slowed almost to a complete stop for no apparent reason. I swerved around it and passed as it made a right turn with no indication that that’s what he’d been planning to do. I hadn’t gone more than ¼ mile further when a police car came from seemingly nowhere, lights blazing, apparently after ME. I’d hoped it was ne of the friendly K-9 officers from Jackson just wanting to say hello, but alas, I was being stopped for passing in a no passing zone.

This was, I believe, only the 4^th time in my life that I’ve been stopped by the police. I got stopped at 7:00 AM for going 40 MPH on a major thoroughfare in San Francisco where the speed limit was only 25 MPH; when I went to traffic school to have the ticket expunged from my record, even the instructor was surprised to hear that the speed limit on that street was so low. Another time in San Francisco I was pulled over for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. The officer was actually rather nasty to me, but before he was able to issue me a ticket, his radio went off, he threw my license and registration back at me and had to zoom off for an emergency call. I found myself a bit grateful to whomever the criminal was who’d forced this officer to let me go. I was also stopped for going almost 50 MPH on a rural road in Vermont where the speed limit was only 35. That officer could not have been nicer and issued a very lenient ticket, even though he shared the chilling fact that had I been going 5 MPH faster, it would have meant mandatory jail time! My friend Joyce was with me that time and joked about how she’d have had to stay at a local inn and bring me a cake with a file in it, so perhaps that entertained the officer enough for him to go easy on me.

Back to the present, I soon found myself face to face with a handsome, young, and very polite Montana State Trooper who informed me that he’d stopped me for passing the truck and trailer in a no passing zone. He did allow me explain why I’d done what I’d done, and after checking my documents, he returned and told me he was only giving me a warning and no ticket. Whew!

I rolled into West Yellowstone, Montana a little shaken, and found my hotel, the Grey Wolf Inn. I longed to be back in Jackson at Cowboy Village. West Yellowstone is a very odd little town, a ½ mile long strip of tacky t-shirt and souvenir shops, gas stations, and bars. The Grey Wolf Inn was a sprawling hotel that for some reason reminded me of a casino hotel. It was clean and modern, but sterile and impersonal. I was disappointed, but reassured myself that I was here to spend time at Yellowstone, not at my hotel. I unloaded my car, and at around 4:00 PM, drove the short mile to Yellowstone National Park’s western entrance.

In the weeks leading up to this trip I’d seen seemingly countless online videos of idiotic tourists, mostly at Yellowstone, hopping out of their cars to try and pet the bison, getting dangerously close to mother bears and their cubs, or being gored by angry elk. The very week before I got to Yellowstone, I heard a radio report about a young man who’d decided he wanted to try soaking in one of Yellowstone’s hot mineral pools. He crossed safety barriers and knelt to test a pool’s temperature with his hand, scalding himself and then falling into the pool where he died almost instantly. Park officials couldn’t retrieve the body immediately, and by the time they were able to, it had virtually dissolved in the highly acidic pool. Yikes! Of course, I have witnessed similarly reckless behavior when visiting lava flows on Hawaii’s Big Island. I recall one fool who’d climbed over the barriers to get a closer look at the flow. He was standing on a rock under which I could actually see brilliant orange molten lava and he called out to his companions, “Hey, I think my sneakers are melting!”  I always say that I studied psychology for forty-five years of my life, but I will never understand people.

I hadn’t driven more than ten miles into the park before I came upon a huge number of cars pulled off to the side of the road, indicating that there must be some wildlife nearby. Sure enough, it was a herd of bison. I’d always thought they were buffalo, but a little research informed me that the animals we commonly think of as buffalo in North America are actually bison. At any rate, the bison resemble huge, prehistoric woolly mammoths, lumbering along and across the park’s roads. Many of them had young calves walking alongside them, and I witnessed first-hand several insane tourists running up and down the road trying to get the perfect photo and risking considerable harm if Mamma Bison got pissed off.

I headed for the south side of the park and hiked along the boardwalks at the Grand Prismatic Spring, one of the park’s famous mineral pool landscapes that resemble what I imagine the surface of Venus looks like. Absolutely stunning, but clearly not the kind of place one should consider taking a dip!  Go back to your hotel pool, people! Because I was in the vicinity of Old Faithful, I decided to go there and see if I might find it more impressive than I had on my prior visit.

By now it was 6:00 PM and only about 38 degrees, with a pretty stiff wind blowing. I found a seat amidst a couple dozen fellow tourists on one of the bleachers that ring the geyser area. Everyone offered a different version of what they’d heard or been told about when Old Faithful would erupt again. Some said it would be 6:11PM, another group had been told it would be 6:25, and another said they’d been told 6:46. One young couple said they’d heard that it erupts every 35 to 120 minutes, so with that sort of variability, the more precise predictions seemed dubious. But we all sat patiently, staring at the barren hole in the ground that released a steady column of steam.

It really was chilly. Some people hung on as long as they could and gave up.

Others jumped up and down to keep warm. I focused my attention on a stunning bluebird that landed nearby and stared at the geyser as if he were waiting along with the rest of us. At one point, after studying the people around me and marveling at how we were all simply staring in the direction of Old Faithful, I got a huge laugh when I deadpanned, “They say a watched geyser never boils.”

After almost ninety minutes, something started to happen and the geyser began gurgling. You could feel the excitement in the air as everyone stared intently, cameras and phones poised to capture the event. More gurgling and a little increase in steam and then a spurt maybe three feet high that could have come from a garden hose erupted for about five seconds. And then, it stopped. There was dead silence among the audience and almost without realizing I was speaking out loud, I moaned, “That better not be it.”  The folks around me howled with laughter.

At that point, a few people left, but perhaps five minutes later a stream probably 100 feet high erupted and those of us who were still there oohed and aahed in appreciation. I was so cold by now I kind of wished Old Faithful would have splashed us with some of that hot water, but I was glad I’d stayed to see it. Still, with all due respect to Old Faithful, this was not one of the most amazing spectacles I’d ever witnessed.

On the way back to my hotel I came across another traffic jam as dozens of people frantically ran up and down the road, setting up tri-pods along the and jockeying for position to photograph a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs. She was awfully close to the road, so I just rolled down my window and snapped a couple shots, then wondered which of these zany tourists might end up on the cubs’ dinner menu that evening.

The following day I set out to explore the north and east sides of Yellowstone and spent close to eleven hours in the park. Because of the winter road closures, I couldn’t make a full loop around the park, so I had to drive about over a hundred miles out and back to see certain areas of the park. I was stunned by the amazing diversity of the landscapes I encountered.

First, I headed for Canyon Village and hiked down a very steep trail to the banks of the Yellowstone River, which has carved a deep, narrow valley known as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It was a very strenuous climb back up, and the 8,000-foot elevation made it seem even more challenging, but I made it. I will admit that I enjoyed driving along the canyon’s edge and taking photos at various observation points a bit more.

From there I went up to the northwest entrance to the park and hiked through the Mammoth Hot Springs area, the centerpiece of which is the Minerva Terrace, cliffs composed of tiers of golden mineral deposits from which steaming water continues to drain and forms eerie reflecting pools. Otherworldly is the only way to describe it.

I then made my way due east, crossing some high mountain passes before descending into the Lamar River Valley, a hauntingly desolate area where large populations of the park’s wildlife reside. Sure enough, as I slowly explored this area I saw a red-tailed fox, grey wolves, a number of black bears and grizzlies, bighorn sheep, elk, and dozens, if not hundreds of bison. Two weeks before I was marveling over my close encounters with Florida’s alligators, and now here I was feeling as though I were hosting a National Geographic Channel documentary. By the time I was returning to my hotel, the sun was quickly setting, and I enjoyed a few quiet moments walking along the banks of the Madison River and chatting with a couple of loud-mouth ducks that walked with me for a while before they hopped into the river for a swim. It was a perfect ending to a perfect day.

After purchasing a couple of amusing t-shirts at one of the gift shops, I left West Yellowstone behind the next morning and planned to cross the southern part of Yellowstone on my way east. That morning was the first day that road was re-opened after the winter closures, so it allowed me to see parts of the park I had yet to explore and put me on the right path toward exiting the park and starting slowly toward home. The major attraction in this part of the park is enormous Yellowstone Lake, its claim to fame being that it is the largest lake in North America above 7,000 feet in elevation. Even on May 10, the entire lake for as far as the eye could see was covered in a gleaming white sheet of ice, except for the southwestern shore which is known as the West Thumb. In this area there are more hot springs and colorful mineral pools that drain into the lake, clearing the ice along the immediate shoreline. A boardwalk trail winds its way past the mineral pools and along the lake shore, and one of the most famous landmarks here is Fishing Cone, a spring that for years was used by fisherman to boil the fish they’d caught in the lake.

After almost three full days of exploring Yellowstone, I’d fallen in love with the park. I was grateful that I’d seen it so early in the season, because I can imagine that in the crowded summer season, it might be a bit frustrating to deal with the traffic jams and antics of those trying to photograph the animals. A few days after my visit I saw an online news story that made me laugh out loud. Some guests who’d just visited the park wrote a letter to the park officials complaining that they’d spent a lot of money on this vacation and never got to see one bear. They scolded the officials, urging them to “train the grizzly bears better” to make them go to the places in the park where the tourists are. I have no words.

After leaving Yellowstone, I spent a night in the town of Cody, Wyoming named after its founder, “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Evidently the town comes alive in summer with cowboy-oriented shows and rodeos, but it was still too early for any of that. That evening, however, news reports were buzzing with word of a massive solar flare that was to make the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights visible in locations much further south than is typical. I’ve seen the lights in Finland and Iceland in the past and they are simply stunning. I wrestled with wanting to stay in my pajamas vs. getting dressed and braving the chilly night to see whether the lights would be visible in my area. The call of the lights won out, and so, at midnight I left the hotel and drove about ten miles north of town and with some difficulty, found a place away from any lights. I camped out in my car trying to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, frustrated by the large number of cars that were out on the roads at this hour, obviously doing the same thing as me. Their passing headlights passing kept blinding me, but eventually I started to notice some faint waves of greenish-yellow light dancing across the northern horizon. I doubted whether I’d be able to capture them with my phone’s camera, but to my surprise, I got a few photos to document what I saw, so all in all, it was worth the efforts I’d made to see the lights.

After leaving Cody, I made a breakfast stop in the small Wyoming town of Greybull at Bob’s Diner and Bakery. It was the kind of place I search for when I travel, a local joint with friendly waitstaff and delicious homemade food. They are evidently known for their biscuits, but my waitress also informed me that their pancakes were not to be missed, so I had to try one of each. They were both perfect and I’m glad I didn’t have to choose one over the other.

The drive across the Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains was beautiful and I saw few other cars along the route, but soon the road descended to a flat plain and I reluctantly hopped onto Interstate 90 to speed my trip east. Later that afternoon I arrived in Custer, South Dakota, named after the general of “Custer’s Last Stand” fame. Custer sits at the base of a small mountain range, the Black Hills, named because of their dark appearance given the type of rock they consist of and the thick evergreen forests that cover them. I checked into a charming room at the Bavarian Inn and enjoyed the quiet location and beautiful indoor pool and spa there. I took a leisurely drive through Custer State Park, taking in a few scenic Black Hills vistas. I passed Mt. Rushmore, but rather than pay $10 just to park, I simply took a photo of the faces on the mountain and drove on by. I ate dinner on the move: a juicy and delicious bison burger from the Prairie Dog Food Truck in nearby Hill City and a generous slice of strawberry rhubarb pie from the Purple Pie Place in Custer. News reports said there might be more northern lights that evening, but despite the ideal dark sky conditions in the area, the lights didn’t make a second appearance.

In the morning, I skirted the suburbs of Rapid City, and visited Badlands National Park. Approaching the park from the west, I’d never have known there was anything ahead but endless prairie, but suddenly the road descended into a colorful collection of sandstone and clay canyons that have been shaped and sculpted by wind and rain. The park’s roads were largely dirt and gravel, and other than several observation points, there were not really many services to speak of, but it was an interesting couple hours’ drive. Eventually the loop road returned to Interstate 90, which continued in what seemed like an endless straight line across the flat South Dakota prairie. The West had become the Midwest.

The rest of the trip back to Massachusetts was far less exciting than the past few weeks had been. Sioux City, South Dakota was a pleasant stop; I had another delicious bison burger and enjoyed a stroll through the city’s beautiful Falls Park, where the Sioux River tumbles through the downtown area in a series of rapids and waterfalls. I spent a night near Davenport, Iowa literally across the road from the Mississippi River. Iowa, Illinois, Indiana… I refer to them as “the I States.” Truthfully, it’s almost hard to distinguish one from the other. Much of Ohio could also pass as an unofficial “I State”, but eventually the terrain gets more scenic as you approach the hilly eastern part of the state that borders West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

I spent a night at a very nice Comfort Inn in Triadelphia, West Virginia just east of Wheeling, but was horrified by the area where the hotel was located. There was an enormous truck stop nearby, and countless 18 wheelers made their way on and off the interstate. I cautiously walked over to the only restaurant in the area, Ruttenbuck’s Bar & Grill, which was sandwiched between a pornographic bookstore called Adultland, Jill’s Lounge and Gentleman’s Club, and a liquor store called Gumby’s Cigarette and Beer World. How I longed for the wide-open and wholesome spaces of Utah and Wyoming.  

On my last full day of the toad trip, I drove into the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Lebanon to make my pilgrimage to Pamela’s P & G Diner, a small chain in the metropolitan area that – according to this pancake aficionado – serves up the best pancakes in the USA. As always, the pancakes did not disappoint, but were gone all too quickly. I crossed the beautiful green mountains of southern Pennsylvania on backroads and coming almost full circle, spent my last night in the Amish Country near Manheim.

The last day of any trip is usually a bittersweet emotional rollercoaster for me, sad that the trip is over and eager to see home again. After another stop for lemon-ricotta pancakes at Griddle 145 in Allentown, I made the mistake of listening to my GPS, which claimed I’d save over an hour of drive time by taking Interstate 95 through New York and coastal Connecticut rather than using the longer, but quieter Interstate 84 through central Connecticut. If I could, I would sue Google Maps for emotional distress. The so-called Connecticut Turnpike was a 120-mile long hellscape of construction zones, potholes as big as the Grand Canyon, miles of traffic crawling along at 10 MPH, and on those rare occasions where we could move faster than that, some of the most reckless and aggressive driving I have ever seen. It took me almost five hours to travel what should have taken only three. And then I saw that the drive through Providence, Rhode Island was subject to over an hour delay because of construction on a dilapidated highway bridge there, so I ended up taking the scenic but busy route across a couple of bridges into Newport, Rhode Island and eventually, to southeastern Massachusetts. It was almost enough to make someone who loves to drive never want to get back behind the wheel again!

And so, my six-week-long adventure came to an end and my “new” car racked up an additional 10,000 miles months before its first birthday. It was one of the best road trips I’ve ever taken and left me so grateful for the opportunity to see so much of this amazing country I live in. Well, except perhaps for that unfortunate stay near the Triadelphia truck stop!