A short story about my first visit to Yellowstone National Park.
One early July morning in 2011. My wife and I had loaded up our SUV to make the trip to our cabin in Red Feather Lakes. Her sister and husband were going to join us there for a few days in the northern Colorado mountains. At the last minute, her sister calls us on the phone and cancels the trip. Well, we were bummed out of course, but we are loaded and ready to go, so we jump in the SUV and headed on up to the cabin, saying to ourselves “We don’t need no stinkin’ sister. We’ll go it alone.” so we jump in the Explorer and off we go to Red Feather Lakes.
While driving north of Denver on Interstate 25, my wife Trudy blurts out, “lets go to Yellowstone instead of the cabin.” I’m thinking, ” why not?” I’ve never been there and we aren’t tied down. We decided to turn the trip into an impromptu road adventure. We bypass the exit to the cabin in Fort Collins and continue on up the highway heading to Yellowstone. Now, Yellowstone National Park isn’t all that close to Denver. It’s actually about an 11 hour drive, 650 miles away. No problem though. All we need to do is figure out where we are going to stay when we got to Yellowstone. We have our cell phones and GPS unit, we’ll find something and book it on the drive there.
A few hours later, after a few phone calls from the road, we managed to find an available room in Grant Village, the only one available. It was a lucky break too. In the summer, finding a room at a hotel in the park isn’t that easy, as most have been booked months in advance. Once we settled in to the hotel, I found out from one of the people at the desk, the room we got only became available shortly before we called to book it. It seems that a day or two before we left, there as a hiker that got mauled to death by a grizzly bear in the park. Turns out, that dead hiker had been staying in that room. Needless to say, they made the room available once they cleared out the belongings and cleaned the room, and we happened to be the first people looking for a room, so lucky us. We got the dead guy’s room.
Weird.
The very next morning, we wake up early and began driving around the park. The first stop we made was along the Yellowstone River, where we found this group of Bison coming up from the river with mist and halo foggy rim-light on their backs.
A very interesting way to begin my first visit to Yellowstone National Park.
