Day 15 - Butte to Cooke City
Similar to yesterday, Greg started the day with a golf
outing…a course in nearby Anaconda – Old Works Golf Course. Old Works is built
on an old ore smelting plant, designated by the EPA as a “Superfund” site back
in the 1980’s. Building the golf
course was part of an extensive project to clean the site up and make it
suitable for human use. Old Works
is also known for its trademark black sand, which is actually the slag used
back in the plant’s smelting days.
Like yesterday, he had arranged for the first tee-time as to not overly
delay the driving. This time,
playing as a single with a cart, he finished in 2.5 hours, and made it back to
the hotel by 11. He also ended his
golfing on the trip on a positive note, posting a 75 before throwing his clubs
back in the roof rack for the rest of the trip.
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| Old Works Golf Course - former Superfund site, present day championship golf course. |
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| Old Works showing off it's trademark black sand (slag) traps |
The timing ended up being perfect, as Ash & Alex slept
in a little bit due to the late day yesterday. After breakfast and a short jaunt in the hotel pool, Greg
came back to finish loading up the car and make our way to Yellowstone National
Park. It was only about an hour
and a half before we arrived at the West Entrance, and thanks to the National
Park Service’s military promotion, we were able to enter the park for free.
We decided to head straight to Old Faithful, as that was the
one absolute “must-do” item on our list.
However, on our way, we kept on passing bursting geysers along the
road. After reaching one spot with
a relative large and concentrated amount of active geysers, we took a short
detour to walk the boardwalk and observe all the various types of geysers that
were spewing boiling water and steam into the air. The walk lasted about 30 minutes, and surprising to us, had
quite a variety of geysers to observe.
We probably could’ve stayed longer, but not knowing when Old Faithful
was “scheduled” to burst, we didn’t want to be stuck in the park too late
because we waited to long.
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| Don't need another reminder to stay on the path! |
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| One of the neat sulfur pools on the boardwalk. |
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| Greg, Ash & Alex in front of one of the (many) erupting geysers. |
After we arrived at Old Faithful, we learned that we
couldn’t have planned the trip better, because we arrived less than 10 minutes
before it was predicted to erupt. Joining
the several hundreds of people gathered around the viewing area spread around
the geyser, we sat and waited until it finally erupted. It lasted quite a while, maybe 3-4
minutes, and took several dozen pictures.
We were far more impressed than the kids; Alex gave a “it was boring”
review, while Ashleigh’s “it was okay, I guess” was slightly (but not by much)
more positive.
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| Old Faithful putting on another performance. |
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| Ash & Alex in the foreground watching, but ended up unimpressed! |
WIth Old Faithful checked off the bucket list, we set off to
Yellowstone Canyon, where after a short dinner, drove up to take pictures of
both waterfalls and the Canyon itself.
It was very cool, and we stopped at no fewer than 5 viewing areas to get
pictures of the canyon and falls from different vantage points.
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| Yellowstone Grand Canyon |
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| Ash & Alex posing in front of the Lower Falls |
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| Greg joins in with Ash & Alex for a picture. |
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| Scores of trees killed in the great Yellowstone fire of 1988 are located throughout the park. |
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| Not much room to stray from the road. It helps keep your attention up! |
With less than an hour of sunlight to go, we started moving
towards the NE entrance of the park, towards Cooke City where we had made a
reservation at a bed&breakfast.
As we weaved through the very windy two-lane roads, we came across
various types of wildlife, including deer, elk, black bears, and even a grizzly
bear in the distance. However, the
highlight of the wildlife sightings came when we approached a herd of no fewer
than 400 bison congregating within 100 yards of the road. The first herd was just a preview of
what was about to come, as we passed through at least 2 other herds with
numbers in the hundreds, Several instances we had to stop due to bison walking
on or across the road. It was very
interesting to listen to the bison “talking” (i.e. grunting) as we passed
through, several of which were no more than 3-4 feet away from the car as we
crawled through.
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| Bison's inappropriate use of the passing lane. |
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| Coming across the first (of three) massive bison herds crowding the roadways. |
Albeit very cool, getting stuck in the “bison jam,” as Alex
called it, did us no favors as far as getting to the hotel at a reasonable
time, as we finally arrived at the Skyline Guest Ranch at about 10:00 at
night. All of us were exhausted,
especially considering how much we had packed into the day, A very memorable
one at that!
Tomorrow: as far as we can go in Wyoming
Wildlife sightings:
Bison – too many to count (probably >700-800)
Black bear – 2 (sow & cub)
Grizzly bear – 1
Black wolf – 1
Fox - 1
Elk – 3
Deer – 2
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