In 2013, I toured Wyoming and Montana with my travel partner-in-crime Lacey. The high points of the trip were Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Oh, and the night we almost spent on a Montana roadside.
I do a lot of raving about Montana and Glacier National Park on here, but I promise it’s for a good reason. The place really is spectacular. The way most of the park’s visitors see it is from their car. But, for the love of all that is holy, if you have working legs and lungs, GET OUT AND HIKE THIS PARK. Do it. Do it for me. Do it for yourself.
Yellowstone is a place everyone must see before they die. It was America’s first national park and it’s the crown jewel. I haven’t seen all of the national parks, but I’ve seen many of them, and nothing I’ve seen come close to this.
I like to commemorate moments in life. Maybe it’s because I am the oldest in my family and every second of the first three years of my life is committed to film by doting parents, grandparents and aunts. There are albums full of pictures from the big moments – like my first birthday or my first day of school – and the everyday moments – just sitting in the floor playing. And that was before Papaw bought a camcorder – you remember those 40-pound behemoths that threatened to dislocate your shoulder and recorded to VHS tapes? Maybe that’s why I have a weird habit of recording the most mundane of activities. When I’m with friends and family – whether it be one of countless family BBQs, a standard girls’ nights on Karli’s couch, or an epic adventure in a faraway land with Lacey, I like to take a second to sit back and savor the moments just spent with my people. But even with all my vigilant watching and moment absorbing, things still slip by …
After our white-knuckle trip into Cody, Wyoming and a 2 a.m. arrival, we slept in. For the first time on the trip we weren’t worried about covering miles, making up for lost time or being stranded. That day, all we had on our agenda was exploring. Cody is about 50 miles from the east entrance of the park, so we had an hour-long ride through some breathtaking Wyoming scenery a Big Boy statue – that we never did get a picture of. He was just hanging out near the road, double-decker burger and all. When we arrived at the park the weather was a little … unexpected. We’d prepared for the trip expecting Glacier to be cooler than Yellowstone and it was actually opposite. The weather in Montana couldn’t have been more perfect. But in Yellowstone, it was raining — pouring at times — and the cheap fleece I was wearing did absolutely nothing to keep me dry. After our first stop, which was a half mile hike from a parking lot to a restroom, …
You’ll need one part wild west, one part white knuckles and a whole lotta darkness. I got a surprise late Christmas gift this year when I changed the memory card in my camera and found a few hundred more pictures from Yellowstone National Park. Talk about excited! But, it also reminded me that I hadn’t ever finished posting to Flickr or blogging about the rest of the trip. Life intervened. But, let’s see if I can sum up what’s left of the trip. I could go back and gush about Glacier National Park some more but I’ll move on. I still pull out the photos from that part of the trip and flip through them about once a week, drooling and wishing I could just pack up and head back to Big Sky Country — for good this time. But that good thing came to an end and we started on the last leg of our trip: Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. The drive was to be another long one — our last, thank goodness. …
What. A. Week. I’ve recently begun getting a Mary Kay business started (I’m an independent beauty consultant now, yay!) and between that and schoolwork, my week has been eaten up with doing everything but working on my blog. Except for that day I made an outline of the rest of the posts for my vacation and then accidentally posted it. It took me about 24 hours to realize it was live before I pulled it down. So if you saw something with a lot of typos that didn’t make any sense, it was a complete booboo. I think I left off when we finally made it to Whitefish, Mont. We made it through the epic tire blowout, the stranded in Billings and part one of white knuckle driving through Montana. (Look for White Knuckles Part Two in the next post or two.) First off, let me tell you we loved the Cheap Sleep Motel. It is cheap as in price, and definitely not a luxury hotel, but the reviews were right when they said it …
Well, we were supposed to be headed to a Cowboy Cookout with Swan Mountain Outfitters in Glacier National Park, but day three dawned with me making a waffle in a hotel lobby while wondering when we’d get out of Laurel, Montana. Not that we had anything against Laurel – its a lovely place. That’s where we met Mike and Tina of Allstar Towing and the staff at the Locomotive Inn. I still can’t say enough good things about everyone we met in Montana. Even our cab driver on our way to the airport was charming. He told us all about the rims (the sandstone land formations that surround Billings) and the suicide cliff outside the city. The story goes that a group of Native American braves rode their horses off a cliff in the midst of a smallpox epidemic to try to please the gods and stop the sickness. It’s kind of a heartbreaking story. Nevertheless, we made it out of Laurel, back to Billings and then back on the road and headed to Glacier. …
Before there was the blowout, there were the storms, We didn’t know it on day one of the trip, but storms were about to become a major part of our life. After we landed in Denver that first day, we needed to cross about 1,026 miles – about 15 hours of driving – to get from Denver to Glacier National Park. We decided to spend Saturday knocking out about half of that drive time. We covered about 435 miles and landed in Sheridan, Wy. that night to sleep. Along the way we saw some beautiful scenery and watched a storm come from the mountains and blow across the highway in front of us. (You can see more pictures in my flickr account.) But the best part of the day was driving into the lightning storm. Of course at that time we didn’t know that driving in and around storms was going to be a recurring theme of the trip, but watching the lightning show was truly a beautiful sight. I made a video montage of …
Well, the epic vacation that was two years in the making has ended. I had intended to post as we went but there were some extenuating circumstances prohibiting that. One was Internet access. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it wasn’t. Another factor was school work. I had to make sure I got that submitted when I did have Internet access. And the final factor was the Great Tire Blow Out of 2013. So here’s part one of the Cowboy Hunting Story: The day Johnny Cash died. Meet Johnny Cash. He’s a black Hyundai Elantra we barely got to know before he was snuffed out. And by that I mean his tire blew on I-90W in Montana the second day we drove him. It was an epic blow out. One minute everything is fine, the next minute the car is shaking and I see the tire go flying away from the car in the side view. Panic set in when the brakes didn’t respond and we ended up using the emergency brake to stop on the …
There has never been a better time to visit Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The summer crowds are dying down, the dog days of summer are behind us, the elk are in rut, the bears are about to hibernate and the wildfires are blazing. That’s right folks, Lacey and I are getting an earful on the daily from our respective parents about the dangers of this trip, why we need to be careful and the best ways to go about doing it. (Nevermind we’re almost 30 years old and smart enough not to chase after wild animals.) So I thought I’d do a little research. What exactly are the dangers lurking in these unassuming national parks? How can we protect ourselves? Here’s what I found: A little common sense goes a long way. See a bear off in the valley? Don’t go running after it with camera in tow. Is an elk camped on the side of the road leisurely munching grass? Take a through-the-window shot and keep it moving. Does that big bison look …
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