Volcanoes and Snow

We left Boise just after sunrise on Friday, May 10th to begin our journey back to Iowa to finish our van build and see family. We headed east back across the previously discussed Snake River Plain, stopping thrice: once for Dutch Bros coffee, once for the subsequent pee break, and once for Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. Craters of the Moon contains huge lava flows, a few small volcanoes, and caves, though they were unfortunately closed. We walked around the Devil’s Garden and saw all sorts of gnarled, weather-beaten trees very unlike the tall and arrow-straight trees we had been accustomed to seeing in the mountains. Ascending from the garden, we hiked up a small cinder cone to get a wonderful view of the surrounding plains and mountains before again descending to see some splatter cones. Splatter cones are rare volcanic features and great insulators as we beheld a great pile of snow only 20 or 30 feet down into the cone. That was enough surprise for one day, so we kept on moving and reached Jackson, WY in the early afternoon. We stopped to fill our van with gas and ourselves with food and get groceries consisting primarily of of apples, honey, peanut butter, and cans of soup. Our lodgings for the night were north of Jackson a ways, so we took the opportunity to drive into and through a good chunk of Grand Teton National Park before getting dinner at the Jackson Lake Lodge. The menu claimed that a plate of their nachos filled two, and they were not lying. We then drove to Heart Six Ranch which offered a wonderful evening view and a room that had the smoke detector completely disconnected and sitting on the nightstand… weird.

The next day we slept in a bit before heading out to explore Grand Teton. We did a small hike around String Lake, the majority of which was on top of a foot or two of snow… except when you stepped in the wrong spot, in which case your foot plunged through. This only happened for the majority of the hike’s 4 miles, leaving us with cold, wet feet and a healthy respect for the snow around trees. We were blessed with a perfectly blue, cloudless day; however, it did come with some “features”: very, very bright snow, and a high UV index. Guess what we forgot. Yep, we both forgot sunscreen and Faith forgot her sunglasses (i.e. left them in the van at the trailhead). We opted to swap the sunglasses every few minutes as one of us would have gone blind otherwise. When we could see, we noticed that we followed either elk or moose tracks nearly the entire way, punctuated regularly by the tracks of a small black bear.

After having our fun in the sun, we poked around Jackson Hole and stopped in all sorts of stores, including a fur store that Faith LOVED. Unfortunately, the furs that she was feeling up were only between $3,000 and $20,000. All I could think about was my parents telling me to “touch with my eyes” in the past; apparently Faith had no such inhibitions! Fortunately, nothing was damaged, and we left the store without having to empty our wallets (and then some). On the way back to the ranch, we looked for ice cream and found it at $7 per cone. Devoid of ice cream, we hit the National Elk Refuge, also devoid of elk, before making our way back to our room. The refuge is only used as wintering grounds for the elk, which had by this time moved into the higher elevations towards their summer ranges. As we drove back to the ranch, we were rewarded with herds of elk foraging amidst the sagebrush in said higher elevations.

On Sunday, we made an attempt to see all the highlights of Yellowstone in just one day. We started the day out with watching the sun rise over Mount Moran from Oxbow Bend before entering Yellowstone from the south entrance on the first scheduled day of opening. The entire southern part of the park was snow covered and seemingly devoid of visitors. We were ecstatic! The entire park to ourselves? This was going to be awesome. Our hopes were quickly dashed as we arrived at Old Faithful to see a nearly full parking lot. The park was still very well visited, just not the south entrance. We watched Old Faithful go off almost exactly on time as we wandered the board walks and saw the nearby geothermal features. We continued through the park, visiting many other interesting sites and missing only a few that were still closed from winter. We saw the Grand Prismatic Spring and managed to only wait in line about 20 minutes to get a parking spot. We drove all the way up to the north entrance to see the Mammoth Hot Springs and saw the Liberty Cap, which reminded us of some prehistoric morel, the only size which stands a chance of slaking my aunt’s hunger for morels. While there, we found another ice cream shop, this one offering cones for the low low price of $8. So, no ice cream for us. After seeing most of the big sights aside from the Yellowstone Canyon, we left the park via the east entrance, which leaves one with a long mountain drive before emerging into Cody, WY. At this point, the sun was nearly down and we had no plans for sleeping and nearly nothing to sleep with aside from a bed and a big hunk of carpet that we planned to put on the floor of the van eventually. We decided that we would find some place to pull off the road and thus would need something to sleep with. We stopped at the Walmart in Cody and found our pick of Queen-sized blankets for only $4 each! We supplemented our bedding with some ice cream (a whole pint for only $2!!!) and continued down the road. About an hour later, we found a lovely little spot just off the highway in BLM land and set up camp for the night with awesome views of the Absaroka, Wind River, and Bighorn ranges in the distance on nearly every side.

We awoke in the morning to a beautiful sunrise, then continued sleeping until the sun’s rays began to warm the van. We found the first gas station we could and freshened up before continuing our drive all the way back to Sioux Falls. I’m pretty sure we were on I-90 for 500 miles, but that might be low-balling it. We stayed with a good college friend of mine, who gave us good conversation and a comfortable bed for the night.

After thanking our host the next morning (Thanks again, Shane!), Faith dropped me off at work for a half day while she ran some errands in town and did some beading. Once at work, I naturally tried to turn on my laptop, but it did exactly nothing. I took it to the IT desk, and still no joy. Finally, we ended up just taking out my hard drives and popping them into a “new” laptop. Thankfully, the new laptop has thus far worked flawlessly and didn’t require setting up again. God was good to us, as such a laptop failure on the road would have been very annoying to fix.

That afternoon, we drove the remaining ~6 hours back to Cedar Rapids and finished off the peanut butter and honey sandwiches we had eaten for the past four days straight. One can, in fact, have too much of a good thing, as the both of us were quite sick of them by the time the last was eaten. We arrived late in the evening on Tuesday, May 14th and soon crashed on another borrowed bed.

Animals Seen

• Craters of the Moon
  • Mountain blue bird
  • Pronghorn antelope
• Grand Teton
  • Elk (lots)
  • Deer
  • Bison
  • Osprey
• Yellowstone
  • Timber wolf (so cool, thought I’d never see a wild one in my life)
  • Red fox
  • Black bear
  • Grizzly bear
  • Yellow-bellied marmot
  • Bison (nearly walked into one)
  • Elk
  • Pronghorn Antelope

Stats

• ~1700 miles of driving
• 6 miles of hiking
• 1 hat nearly dropped into a geothermal feature
• 1 National Monument
• 2 National Parks