Days 42 and 43

I am posting days 42 and 43 together because I anticipated covering Yellowstone and Teton National Parks in one day. Yellowstone is a park that has several diverse areas and we wanted to visit several of them. Mammoth Hot Springs, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Old Faithful were our primary objectives. It took us about two hours to reach the entrance the morning of day 42 and once we were in the park we ran into construction delays, heavy traffic and hoards of people. When I started checking on lodging for the night I struck out completely so we made the decision to ride over to Red Lodge, Montana and stay at the Pollard Hotel. It was a fairly long ride, but it was over the Beartooth Pass, a road Charles Kuralt referred to as the most beautiful in America. Unfortunately we ran into construction delays here also. Saturday morning we decided to ride down through Cody Wyoming and enter the park from the east side. In Cody we rode past the store that made the now indispensable motorcycle bags designed by Ted. This ride was quite pleasant, but again, after we entered the park the traffic was very heavy. We did visit the locations we wanted and we saw bears, wolves, bison, antelope, elk, deer, and fox while in the park. This is a park in recovery from fires that wreaked havoc four or five years ago. Amazingly, the burnt areas are recovering quite nicely. I had visited the park the summer after the fires and I was surprised at the rate of recovery.

As we were riding we came upon a curve and I caught a glimpse of a slow moving row of cars coming in our direction. To our great surprise the fourth “vehicle” in that procession was a bison. He was trapped because he could not exit on either side of the road and this was one of the few times during our entire visit to Yellowstone that we were not behind another vehicle. So there we were heading directly toward one another and I didn’t know if I should stop, keep going or ditch the bike and run. A bison is quite a large animal and very intimidating when coming your way and it appears he has his eyes focused directly on you. Before I had time to make a decision, he was right next to us and apparently had decided we were not part of his dilemma so he trotted on past and we “got the hell out of Dodge”. Tigger was too amazed to be frightened, but my pulse rate was up 40 or 50 beats.

I don’t think I will visit Yellowstone again in July or August. The scenery is quite pleasant and the chance to see the animals in their natural habitat is wonderful, but for me the negatives can best be dealt with by visiting the park during a different time of the