Crater Lake National Park

We lasted two nights here.  Sadly the pictures don't do it justice.  The first day was spectacular, but we were disappointed as nearby forest fires destroyed visibility the second day (the lake was not visible from the caldera rim).  The third day cleared up but was nothing like the first.

Idaho

After leaving the Tetons we set up base in Twin Falls, ID for about a week.  What a bizarre place, this Twin Falls...

1) Its a small town of about 40,000 folks...yet it seemed a bustling metropolis.  There were greater shopping opportunities than my home town of San Angelo of 100,000.  And the stores were packed!  It was a nice change of pace from the depression of the Midwest.

2) Its flat...except for the gigantic canyon right outside of town.  Its so big that there's a golf course on the canyon floor, and BASE jumping from the canyon-crossing bridge is legal year round.  Note: for those possibly concerned, we did NOT jump.

3) Its in the middle of nowhere...outside of being just a three hour drive from Preston, ID which just happens to be the setting of my fifth favorite movie in the WHOLE WORLD: Napolean Dynamite!  Note: for those possibly concerned, we DID visit and we've got the pictures to prove it.

I'm certain we ranked high on the creepy scale, driving by houses 3 to 4 times in about a 2 minute span with a woman hanging out the window taking pictures, and sitting in the Big J Burgers carrying on a fascinating conversation of: "Hey, give me some of your tots," "No, go find your own."  Yeah, that was an awesomely fun and depressing side trip.  While I'm sure the locals knew about ND, they somehow seemed not to care that they were living in the center of my dorky-verse. 

On to the trail towards Oregon...

Grand Teton National Park - 9/13 to 9/16

We found ourselves much more relaxed here than at the northern neighbor of Yellowstone. The clientele and the scenery did a lot more to make us feel we were actually at a national park rather than an amusement park.

The Teton mountains are beautiful. From almost any place in the park you can see them rising straight out of the ground. Each perspective at each time of day is different and wonderful. We took lots of pictures of them as you can see above.

We took a couple of hikes here. One around Jenny Lake and up to some recessed waterfalls, and another in a back area of the park around some smaller lakes. We saw signs of wolves (the poop picture!) and grizzly bears (dug up berry roots). Neither seemed to be close by though. We also took a chance and ate some berries we found. They looked and smelled JUST LIKE raspberries and we felt comfortable after hearing a park ranger telling someone else "the raspberries should still be out." Well they weren't raspberries, they were thimbleberries. They were delicious though. Luckily we didn't get sick. Still, we probably won't do that again...

Several days here meant several more delicious meals in the lodges. We camped out every night in this park. After 3 or 4 days here (we only intended one) we left for exciting Idaho...

- Trent

Yellowstone National Park - 9/7 to 9/12

When we got to Yellowstone I can tell that we were both a little tired and willing to cut corners where we wouldn't normally do so. We ate more dinners at the lodges (most of them, oops) and stayed in a cabin rather than sleeping out in the tent (only once, but this was our first and has become more of a trend than we'd really like to admit). As for the dinners our excuse is that there were NO grocery stores in the park, and since we spent around 11 days here (and in Teton), there weren't a whole lot of options for food.

This is definitely a different place than I had expected. I had been anticipating a totally forested park, bears jumping out from behind bushes, and geysers spewing all of the time. It was really a lot more barren than that with fields of sage brush, no sighted bears (though a new friend saw one crossed the road right in front of his bike), and mainly lots of simmering pots of colored water.

Our experiences:
The terraces in the photo above were super cool. Its funny how the volcanic activity varies so much from year to year. The terraces recommended by our guide book seemed dead, while others not mentioned were alive and boiling.

The elk rut was in full force, and I woke up one morning to a harem of lady elk wandering through our campground, followed by a very disturbed elk bull (if you saw how he was behaving you'd understand).

We took a couple of hikes down canyon sides to the roaring Yellowstone river. Tubing on it is a popular sport once it leaves the park.

We spent one evening with some wildlife watchers stalking a wolf pack. We were so far away that without the watchers and their scopes we never would've seen their wolfey movements, much less guessed the movements were wolves themselves.

And while a lot of the park is forested, much of it was destroyed in a fire in the 1980s so large areas just seemed dead from a distance. Up close though there were definitely lots of little trees sprouting up.

Geysers and other thermal anomalies like fumaroles and, my favorites, boiling pots of mud litter the park. They don't let you walk near though as people fall in all the time and get burned to death.

Its a shame because as cool as all of this is, half of the informational signs tell of the way it used to be, before decades of vandalism and theft stripped the obsidian cliffs of their shiny rocks and filled the guysers and color pots with garbage.

It didn't seem like we spent so long here but I guess we did because the pictures just go on and on for days. Neato.

-Trent

Glacier National Park - 9/4 to 9/5

Three days on the road and two nights of national forest sites got us from the Badlands to Glacier NP. We took a couple of nights to recouperate at a KOA before heading to the park, unbeknownst to us, on the Friday leading into Labor Day weekend. Ugh.

Somehow we got a campsite that first night, but foolishly left it the next morning, hoping for a better one that had a reputation of MANY MANY BEAR!!! sightings. Well after the 1 hour drive to this campsite it was full...at 11am. We went ahead and took our preplanned 3 hour hike which was fun, but essentially screwed us over for the rest of the weekend. After spending about 4 hours searching the park for an open campground on Saturday night...we left two days earlier than we had planned.

We had fun though. We saw a black bear, lots of glaciers, a mountain goat, took a nice hike to a secluded waterfall, and had a steak at the lodge.

Glacier: you are beautiful. We are sad that we didn't even come close to seeing all of you that we wanted to. But that weekend it was not meant to be. We will be back to love you once again, and certainly not on a national holiday weekend.

-Trent

Fwd: Badlands National Park - August 31 - September 1

Well, as you can see, our blog posts are several days behind the actual events due to little time with internet access / little time to write the posts as we race the cold weather. We're at Grand Teton NP right now, but before that, we visited Yellowstone, Glacier, and Badlands National Parks (going back in time starting with the most recent). We have so many pretty pictures of and little tidbits about our exploits that we feel compelled to tell you about them in chronological order, so please forgive the time delay.

Anyway, as I sit here in the laundry room at this Grand Teton campground, I have enough time to post some pictures of our visit to the beautiful Badlands National Park. Enjoy! More to come as time and internet access permit. Sending love to anyone reading!

- Mina