It was a nice sunny morning with a freshness in the air as we headed out of Cody down 160km of Highway 14 to Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is the USA's oldest national park and spans across the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. It is a volcanic plateau at an average elevation of 8000 ft and has over 10,000 hot springs and geysers (more than half the worlds total). We had been told that the east entrance to the park was the most scenic -and we were not disappointed - tall peaks, pine forest, rivers, the Cody Dam, a couple of tunnels through the hill, it had a real variety of scenery.
One key focus of this trip for us has been to visit as many national parks as possible, We have both had a particular interest in the wildlife, especially what you do not see back home. So far, we have seen bison/buffalo, white tail deer, bald eagles, vultures, prairie dogs, squirrels, chipmunks,and a porcupine. I won't count the skunk and two racoons as they were road kill! What is left for us to tick off are to see bears, wolves and moose in the wild. We were hoping that Yellowstone may help us tick off some of these yet unseen wildlife sights.
We were about 5km away from the east entrance when we saw a number of cars parked across the road from a trading post store. We pulled over to see what everyone was looking at. As we looked over the roadside barrier and down into a shallow gully we saw a female moose (a moosette?) grazing only about 150 metres away from us. She wasn't fazed in the least by all the human activity a short distance away. A big tick for that one - another one off the wildlife list!
We cruised on in to the park and wound past the huge Yellowstone Lake and past a meadow where we saw a herd of bison grazing. We stopped at a trading post at West Thumb to fuel up the bike and grab some lunch. We met a couple of Aussies on a Harley who had also shipped their bike over to the states. They had seen a grizzly and her cub walking through the park yesterday!
At the junction we turned on to Highway 20 and rode the 17 miles up the road to see 'Old Faithful' - Yellostone's famous geyser. Old Faithful 'blows' about every 90 minutes and we timed our arrival to perfection. We dismounted from the bike and walked into the visitor centre to ask the ranger when the next eruption was due. She said at 2:07pm. We had arrived at 1: 57 pm - perfect. In fact Old Faithful decided to go a few minutes earlier. We had just walked over to the viewing area when a plume of steam shot up into the air - quite impressive. Each eruption lasts about 5 minutes.
We retraced our route back down Highway 20 and then took Highway 191 south towards Grand Teton National Park. We were not far from the south entrance of Yellowstone when a huge elk stepped out of the forest on to the side of the road and sniffed the air just as we rode past.
We stopped at a lookout further down the road when Dave, Trevor & Liz from Ashburton (who had shipped their bikes with ours) rode up. They had also been in Cody last night and were making their way west after Yellowstone as they were shipping their bikes back in another week and a half. We had a good catch up and then rode together for a while.
We rode into Grand Teton National Park and pulled over at a lookout when the majestic Grand Teton Mountains came into view - stunning. Further up the road there were cars pulled over at the side of the road and people with cameras were very interested in somethhing down in the stream that ran alondgside the road. We pulled over and got off the bike and saw our second moose of the day - this time a large bull moose.
We ended the day at the classy tourist town of Jackson. The town is very 'western' and many shops specialise in leather goods, native american craft and western clothing. It was only mid week, but most shops were staying open to 9:00pm every day during the holiday season.
No comments:
Post a Comment