Kim and I spent our third (and ultimately final) night in Yellowstone at the Mammoth Hot Springs campground. Having learned from our last park ranger that this campground is small, and fills up quickly, we wasted little time getting to the north end of Yellowstone. We secured the *last* tent site at the campground, and pitched our tent early in the afternoon to mark our territory.
If you're noticing the distinct lack of shade or cover in that shot of our tent, then you're thinking the same thing we were thinking as we setup... "What the heck?" And if you're noticing those heavy clouds in the hills, yeah, we were worried about those too.
But, we were proud, having just paid for the last site available at the campground, and having pitched our tent in the afternoon, rather than after dark, for a change.
Anyway, with our territory staked, we set off for a short drive to the actual springs, to see what they were all about. And they were pretty much what we expected -- hot, smelly, sulfur springs.
There are a couple of fancy hotels in the town itself. One of them has a nice little bar, *with* a flatscreen TV. Ordinarily, that's no priority of interest of ours on our trip. However, that Thursday night, the NFL Superbowl Champion and our home team New Orleans Saints were kicking off the 2010 football seasons, against their NFC rivals, the Minnesota Vikings and Brett Favre.
With free WiFi, a good bar, and the Saints on the TV shortly, we hunkered down at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Bar for a few hours. Not that we needed more encouragement, but the weather outside was absolutely abysmal at this point. More on that later...
Anyway from the bar I managed to upload some pictures and keep you folks apprised of our travels with a few more posts. It turned out we were in pretty hostile territory, with the majority of the patrons being Viking fans. We kill a few good hours, watching the Saints start this season where they left off last, with a solid performance and a key victory.
By the end of the game, it was well after 9pm, and we were ready to just curl up in our chilly tent, and hope that the predicted snow would hold out for the night, at least at our elevation.
Sadly, we were in for an unfortunate first of our trip... A night where camping defeated us :-( We had spent 6 of the previous 7 nights in our tent, with most of those nights bringing some amount of rain. But nearly 12 straight hours of rain would saturate and completely soak through the canvas, dripping clear into the tent and soaking our sleeping bags and everything.
We capitulated at 2:30am. Barely over freezing, we were cold and wet and thus crawled into the Jeep for an uncomfortable night's sleep.
We did manage to snooze a bit, which helped. The sun was out when we got up and started trying to dry things off. That effort was almost entirely in vain. We ended up bagging all of our wet gear (sleeping bags, thermarest pads, the tent, clothes, etc) in plastic garbage bags and stuffing them in the back of the Jeep.
Although we didn't get any snow, all of the peaks around us received a thorough dusting at higher elevations. Winter is just around the corner.
This was pretty interesting... A roadside marker noted that we were at the 45th parallel -- precisely halfway between the equator and the north pole.
There was a bit more of Yellowstone to see, however, we decided we were cold, wet, dirty, and grumpy, and were just ready to move on (and save the remaining fun for some future return trip to Yellowstone, which is a must!).
We exited Yellowstone through the North Gate, which is unmistakably marked by a huge stone arch.
The quote on the arch is simple, but eloquent.
Intrigued by a couple of towns in Montana called Something-something Hot Springs, we started driving north, hoping to find a charming little resort somewhere with nice, outdoor, natural, hot spring fed pools. We made it to two different hot springs "resorts", but neither of them were quite what we had in mind. In both cases, we pulled the rip cord and got the hell out of Dodge. No hot springs for us :-(
But we kept moving in the direction of our next hosts -- Helena, MT where our friends Tim and Linda had promised us warm showers and laundry facilities. Two simple things have never sounded better. On to Helena...
:-Dustin
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