Unveiling Yellowstone: Experiences and Recommendations
Travel is one of the most important things I do for myself. In addition to providing a break from my day job, travel allows me to see things I can’t see in my own backyard. My husband and I want to explore the United States, and we venture by car as much as possible. We have a few favorite spots, but we both really wanted to see Yellowstone National Park, and, in the fall of 2023, we got the opportunity. This wasn’t a road trip, but I think I’d like to incorporate it into a road trip in the future. For now, I’m going to share my experience of the overall trip. I’m going to talk about what we liked, what we didn’t (if I can think of anything), what helped, what worked, what didn’t, some cautions and helps, and the looming government shutdown that threatened to turn it into a very short vacation. Hat tip to Expedia, who didn’t pay me anything to mention them, but they made it easy to book everything, and I mean everything! But, in addition to that, it’s nearly a year later and some of the dates are fuzzy, but I can go back in time on the desktop website and jog my memory.
THE TRAVEL ITSELF
We’re pretty chill when we’re traveling, so there wasn’t going to be much that was going to bring on the stress. We had a bit of a layover in Dallas which turned into about four hours while they worked to cool the temperature in the cabin of the plane we were departing on to Idaho Falls. As a result, it was very late when we got to Idaho Falls, but we had a chance to have a really long conversation with a fellow traveler who turned out to be quite interesting. We picked up our minivan and headed to the hotel. I didn’t like the room they had for us on the property they’d selected when I booked the trip, so I paid about $20 to upgrade to a better room on a different property (it was right next door). The next morning we had breakfast at Smitty’s in Idaho Falls – highly recommend it if you’re there – and took off for Jackson, Wyoming.
The return from Yellowstone to Idaho Falls was uneventful, but we made sure to leave ourselves a whole day to decompress from all the driving to just explore the town, and I’m glad we did. However, that night, my husband’s phone decided it was done charging. I tried several outlets and every cable I had that fit it, to no avail. Our flight was to leave at 6 AM the next day, so I didn’t sleep well. Sometime in the night, I got a burst of inspiration and backed up my husband’s phone to my computer. When he got up, he forwarded his calls to his work phone and I sent a text message to the kids that they’d have to text him on his work phone for a couple of days. During our long scheduled layover in Dallas (again, though we knew this one would be long), I got him a new phone ordered, and two days later he was up and running again. That was truly the most eventful aspect of the travel to and from. The takeaway from that little incident was that we should know what our options are and always do good backups, and do them often. Even if I hadn’t been able to make that backup that night, we do backups pretty often, so he wouldn’t have lost much if I hadn’t been able to do it before the phone died.
THE VIEWS
Oh My Goodness – from the time we pulled out of Idaho Falls to the time we pulled out of West Yellowstone to get back to Idaho Falls, we were greeted with stunningly gorgeous and impressive landscape. We saw a wind farm and took a side trip to go look at it. If you’ve never stepped up close to a wind generator, they’re huge! Just about the time we crossed from Idaho into Wyoming, we found ourselves in mountain country, so we slowed down from “get there” mode into “look around you” mode so that we wouldn’t miss anything. And that was just between Idaho Falls and Jackson, Wyoming. The gorges between the mountains served up rivers of various sizes, depths, and speeds, and they were all worth stopping and look at – so we did!
We’ve seen the Great Smoky Mountains many times, but the land never felt so vast in Tennessee as it did in Wyoming and Montana. When it appeared that the foot of a mountain was a mile or so away, after driving several minutes, that mountain hadn’t gotten any closer. However, on foot, when we were looking at the mountains, in Grand Teton National Park, for example, just walking less than ¼ mile would give a view of the mountain that had a completely different character.
THE WILDLIFE
It’s all there, but we didn’t see it all, unfortunately. There are bison in Grand Teton, but we never saw any. As a matter of fact, the only wildlife we saw in Grand Teton, other than a couple of ducks in the river, was one moose. It was a different story when we drove up into Yellowstone, though. Our first stop coming in from the south was Old Faithful, and we saw a solitary bison close to the parking area. Bison were prolific throughout the park, sometimes in large herds, sometimes in small groups, and sometimes just one or two.
Elk are the next most numerous animal we saw. Up in the Mammoth Springs village at the north end of the park, there’s a herd that hangs out a lot in the village. The park rangers won’t let you get close to any of them, and sometimes they won’t even let you get out of your car to take pictures. It really depends on what’s going to work out best for the animals, because there were a lot of times when we were driving on our way into or out of the park and there was a herd of elk and the rangers would direct cars that wanted to stop into a safe area to get their pictures.
Goats and pronghorn antelopes (although they’re not actually antelopes) were the animals we saw next most often, and we also saw one mountain goat precariously perched on a cliff on the side of a mountain. We saw some rabbits and chipmunks, and one coyote, we heard another coyote but couldn’t see it. We didn’t see any wolves or bears, and no moose in Yellowstone, either. We also saw one fox near the roadside, and he was so unconcerned about the traffic that we figured he was either sick or injured.
The bison in the park are just everywhere, and we got kind of used to seeing them wherever we went, but it was still always a thrill to see them. Big and shaggy on spindly little legs, they don’t seem logically built. It’s almost like God made bison out of spare parts. The highlight of our trip, though, was approaching a 90-degree turn to the right and coming right up to an oncoming bison in the other lane. He stayed in his own lane, and he must have stayed on the road for a while, because there was a guardrail for several miles that was too high for him to have jumped over it. He just strolled casually along, minding his own business. I managed this memorable shot, though, from the side of the road with a zoom lens on my camera. We were very careful to make sure we gave the animals their space.
TIPS FOR SPOTTING WILDLIFE
The most important thing to remember is that Yellowstone isn’t a zoo that was built for people with animals brought in. It’s a preserve for animals that they let people into. I saw a lot of people trying to get close enough to bison with their phones to get that one great shot. If you see a bison with his tail raised, there’s probably a tourist getting way too close. That raised tail is a signal of stress in bison. They seem so calm and placid, but they can get aggressive when they feel threatened.
Check with park rangers for when you’re most likely to see the various animals, and where. We saw the most bison in Lamar Valley, so you really need to go where they will probably be. If you’re visiting during prime vacation time, you’ll be stuck in traffic a lot, so be patient. Sometimes a driver just simply will not pull off the road to take a picture, but will instead stop in the road, oblivious of the mile of cars waiting to move on. The park has plenty of pull-outs to grab your shots, so use them.
GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK
The mountains are the star of the park, but if you go at the time when the animals are more cooperative than they were when we were there, they’ll take a close second. But the place is gorgeous! Somehow we missed Mormon Row, so I’m going to have to take another trip out there just for that. Don’t let yourself miss that, it’s a collection of mid-19th century era buildings.
There’s actually an airport within the park, big enough to accommodate commercial jets, but I don’t know anything about the service schedules. The town of Jackson, also known as Jackson Hole, Wyoming because it’s settled in a circle of mountains, is mainly a tourist and ski town, so it’s kind of expensive. It reminds me a lot of Gatlinburg, on a smaller scale, lots of souvenir shops, and plenty of good food. If you’re not going in summer, you probably won’t find a cooler. Since we flew in, we didn’t have a cooler of our own, but we did find one later in West Yellowstone. Funny story about that later on.
It was in Jackson Hole waiting for breakfast before going into the park that we found a local newspaper that brought our attention to the fact that the government was facing a possible shutdown due to a budget impasse. We’d been hearing bits and pieces about it, but we hadn’t been following the congressional squabbles very closely. My husband and I looked at each other and realized that our vacation might suddenly be dramatically altered. It was the morning of September 29, and, although the fiscal year was going to end at the end of the next day, that “next day” would be a Saturday. Nothing much happens in government on Saturday, it would be Monday before anything significant would start shutting down. We figured we’d go ahead and explore some more around Grand Teton that day and maybe some of the next day, then move on into Yellowstone itself, unless we found a treasure trove of wildlife. We didn’t.
This is something you need to know if you’re planning to visit both Grand Teton and Yellowstone: If you’re coming up from the south from Grand Teton into Yellowstone, you’ll be traveling from one park into the other, and you won’t find accommodations outside the park until you get to the north part of Yellowstone. Not knowing that, I booked us a place for the night that should have been parallel to the dividing line between Grand Teton and Yellowstone, and we had to drive all the way up through Yellowstone in the deepening darkness, then all the way down into a little town called Alta to our stay for the night. It was a really cute little ski lodge, perfect if you’re skiing in Alta, but soooooo far away from everything we were doing. The hubby was extremely annoyed with me over that long drive, but he understood that there was no way I could have known what I was looking at. It was fine the next morning, though, because we found a really great breakfast before we headed back into Grand Teton – going back up into the northwest entrance of Yellowstone and all the way back down through the park – for another half day of exploring Grand Teton, then we moved on to Yellowstone.
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
Although it’s not the largest National Park, it’s huge – and I mean HUGE. Because of that, I recommend that you get a guide book, especially if your time is going to be limited to a few days. You’ll want to hit the iconic spots, of course, but they’re not grouped together at all. I can’t remember how I found this couple, but they go by Matt and Cheryl, and their site is We’re In The Rockies. They had one free guidebook, which was great in and of itself, but it was SO good that I bought a more extensive guide that they offer. It came with a series of audio files that went into great detail about the region, the history of the park, and super interesting stories that I didn’t see or hear anywhere else on the trip. So here’s another hat tip, again, they’re not paying me to talk about them. I’ll go back to their site when we plan another western trip, because they’re extremely knowledgeable about that whole geographic zone.
What made their guidebook so great is that they had a pretty detailed map of the park, and when we teamed that map up with the one that we got at the front gate, we knew pretty much how to navigate the whole park. But besides the map, they know the park so well that they were able to make an educated itinerary based on how much time you have to spend in the park. We could guarantee that we’d have two full days in the park if the government went through with the shutdown, so we followed their two-day plan and hit all the highlights: Old Faithful (which we hit on our way into the part on the afternoon we left Grand Teton), Midway Geyser Basin, Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone Lake, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Upper Falls, the Lower Falls, Mammoth Hot Springs, Roosevelt Arch, and Lamar Valley. If we found that the government averted the shutdown, we’d have the rest of our visit to explore at our leisure.
If you’re planning a Yellowstone visit, I do recommend doing it that way, even though you’re going to do a lot more driving than you would if you just went bottom to top or top to bottom. The reason behind it is, despite being inefficient, it’s effective. Yellowstone is not a resting trip. You’re going to do a lot of walking if you want to see anything. You really cannot see much of anything (other than bison) from your vehicle. All of the attractions will require parking and walking to a viewing point, and a lot of the really interesting spot have you walking on a boardwalk around the attraction to see the whole site. You’re going to get tired, and that’s just the reality of it. We could have probably spent another few days enjoying the park if we had more time, but at the end of each day we were really tired. So I recommend getting a guidebook, spend some time before you go figuring out the Must See items, and get them in within the first couple of days there, and then just explore. It would really be a shame to spend three days extensively and methodically going through the park and miss a whole sector of it because you were just too exhausted or ran out of time. You’ll burn more gas, but you won’t burn yourself out on the park.
Yellowstone is a park of “But Wait! There’s MORE!” Every time we rounded another curve in the road, there was another set of something wonderful to see. There are more waterfalls in Yellowstone than you’ll see in any single trip, and some you probably won’t be able to get to. There was one waterfall on a one-way road that I just couldn’t get a good picture of, because I couldn’t get in a good position to see it. Many of the gorgeous images you see of some of the sites were captured by photographers who had commissions or special permissions to get into area that visitors typically can’t access, for the protection of the park’s flora and fauna. Once we made sure we’d visited the spots we went there to see, we just started driving. When we saw something interesting, we stopped and visited. We drove past the Mud Volcano area several times before we decided to stop and take a look, and when we got there, we spent a couple of hours because we found it fascinating. We pulled up to an overlook and viewed a waterfall, but my husband spotted another overlook that would see the falls from a different side. I really didn’t think they’d be any more magnificent than what we were already seeing, but when got to the other side, I saw that I was completely wrong – Tower Fall is spectacular from both sides!
THE COOLER
One of the recommendations from Matt and Cheryl is that you plan on bringing food with you as you tour the park, because, while there are some places to eat, they’ll be crowded and expensive, and when you get hungry, you may not be near one of them. Also, if you’re visiting in that season before or after tourist season, few of them will be open. Well, we flew in, so we didn’t bring a cooler with us like we always do, so while we were in Jackson, we started looking for a cooler. In late September, nobody in Jackson had a cooler. There wasn’t a Walmart within anything we cold find on a map, so we decided we’d figure it out as we went along. After the first half day in Yellowstone, we headed up to West Yellowstone to our hotel. We stayed three nights at a quaint country hotel that is sorely in need of renovation but fit our needs well enough that we stayed three nights there. The first morning, we went out for breakfast. As we rounded the corner, the town’s only grocery store had an entire window filled with coolers! After breakfast, we went to the store and picked one up, as well as the contents to fill it for a couple of days. It was going to be cool enough to keep stuff in a cooler without worrying about the overnights. The cashier laughed and said, “We just got these in yesterday, and we all laughed because we figured picnic season is over.”
WEST YELLOWSTONE
The town of West Yellowstone is, well, west of Yellowstone. The community’s entire purpose is to service the park in some way. There are quite a few souvenir shops, but not as many as in Jackson Hole, and it’s overall a much smaller and friendlier community. There are several hotels, quite a few restaurants, but we only saw one grocery store and one dollar-type store that carried general household goods. There is a very interesting museum, and the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, which tells about so much more than just wolves and bears. There’s a whole section on the river life, and the living exhibits are animals that have been rescued from the wild, and that’s actually the correct way to put it. They were either unable to provide for themselves or they had become too familiar with humans and were or would eventually become a threat. The staff does as well as possible to ensure that the animals have a life as close as possible to what they’d have in the wild, having to find their food (which is placed but hidden by the staff), and enjoying as natural a habitat as the center can provide. At the other museum, located in the old train depot, we learned about the controversial decision to return wolves to the park, among other things that have been undertaken to nurture the wilderness environment.
There are, as I mentioned, quite a few restaurants, but if you stay there more than several days, you’ll start wanting to move along.
GARDINER, MONTANA
The community at the north end of the park is a small town, but it’s really pretty. We probably should have stayed there a couple of nights, but we didn’t really realize it was there and that it was an option until almost time to go home. The north end of the park is where you’ll find Roosevelt Arch, which was the only place where we got a picture of Tommy and me. We drove around Gardiner for a little bit, which didn’t take long, but for some reason it reminded me of Cicely, Alaska from Northern Exposure, and I can’t really figure out why.
THE WEATHER
You really can’t do anything about weather, other than plan for as much variety of it as possible. We got a lot more overcast weather than I’d have liked, but still, we were in Yellowstone! Although my photos would have been so much prettier with nice sunshine, I had to make do with what I had and hope Lightroom and Photoshop would come to my weather rescue. Fortunately, we didn’t have torrential downpours, but we had a lot of misty rain. A couple of mornings we woke up to hard frost on the car. Because so much of our activity was driving from one place to another, we were able to avoid most of the rainy mist, or misty rain, and only venture out to an attraction when it was lightly misty enough that we wouldn’t really get “wet.”
PREPARE
It can be interesting to pack for mid-fall in a different place. We’re from the deep south, and it was still quite warm when we departed our airport, but some mornings in Wyoming while we were there were 29 degrees! We did pack all our stuff for a one-week stay into one checked bag, which did include a winter coat for each of us. Otherwise, we depended on layering to accommodate the day’s temp changes.
You will want the most comfortable shoes you can find, because, in spite of the immense amount of driving you’re going to be doing, you’ll also be doing a lot of walking. The soles need to be grippy, too, because some of the boardwalks and trails can be slippery if they get a little damp, even from the overnight dew. We found, and we’re in our 60’s, that when we first got out of the car after a drive of an hour or more, that our feet were sore for a couple of minutes, but as we moved about, things normalized and we were able to walk without discomfort. But, your footwear absolutely must be the best you can find, and by best, I mean most comfortable and grippy.
My husband and I decided, as we began gathering the stuff to pack, that $30 was not too much to pay for a checked bag, as long as we limited ourselves to the one bag and optimized our carry-on stuff. As a result. We do a lot of road travel, making as much use of long weekends as we can, so I’ve gotten pretty good at packing, but packing for a road trip is a little different from packing for a flight.
RECOMMENDATIONS
This is a fabulous trip. Know yourself and your travel preferences. Think about what you would hate to have happen (lost luggage, flight delays, etc), and make a plan to deal with it. It’s unlikely that all of your hate-to-happens will happen, but it’s entirely possible that one will, and knowing in advance how you can deal with it will take a lot of the stress out of the situation.
If you have children, consider their level of understanding, maturity, and willingness to follow rules. National parks have a lot of rules that exist for the safety of the guests and the residents (the animals). Failure to follow the rules can result in consequences as simple as a warning, graduate to a fine and banishment from the park. Additionally, keep in mind that “lots of walking and lots of driving” part. There’s no getting around that. Are your kids up for that, or is there a good chance you’ll end up carrying them a lot, and are you up for that? Also, the only thing that actually “performs” is Old Faithful. There are some other geysers that erupt, but you may or may not be around to see them. You need to figure out if your kids are engaged enough to appreciate the beauty and interested enough to appreciate the science. If they’re not able to enjoy either the beauty or the science, but they love an adventure, you may still have a great time. But you want to consider these things.
Know how it feels to walk half a mile with your carry-ons. You may have to do that through the airport.
Pace yourself in the park. If you try to cram everything into the first part of your trip, you’ll be too exhausted to enjoy the whole park. Know what you’re capable of and at what times of the day. We visited the Grand Prismatic Spring late in the afternoon, and there’s an overlook that gives you a better view of it, but you have to hike about 1.5 miles up a slope. We knew we wouldn’t enjoy the view after that hike that late in the afternoon, so we saved that for the first thing next morning. Well rested, we were able to not only do the hike, but enjoy it. Another adventure we saved for a morning after a good rest was the trail to the brink of the Lower Falls. The trail is less than half a mile one way, but it’s a series of switchbacks over 600 feet. It’s well worth doing if your health will allow it, but only if your health will allow it, and if you’re OOO (old, overweight, and out-of-shape) like me, there’s no shame in stopping to rest periodically on the way back up.
That brings me to the next thing: Know your health. Are you able to walk a mile at a time? Are you able to climb a hill? You can still enjoy Yellowstone if you can’t do those things, but there will be some things you will want to pass on.
Finally, get a guide book. Yellowstone is just too big and too beautiful to see all of in one trip, so you’ll be able to decide what things you absolutely must not miss. Besides, the guide book will give you a lot of good information about the park, its history, its relationship with the surrounding areas, and other facts that will enhance your trip, and make it so much more than just seeing pretty stuff.
WRAPPING IT UP
I want to go back to both Yellowstone and Grand Teton. I’ve learned since I came back about several things in Teton that I missed, and I actually want to see Yellowstone in the winter. I hope I’ve given you some good information that will help you decide that it’s a trip worth taking, and I strongly encourage you to go. We live in a wonderful country, and our National Parks are just one of the great things about living here. Go and see!
I also want to know where you highly recommend visiting – drop a comment below!
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Playlist for this writing session: Wait Till We Get Home – Lone Justice; Fire On High – Electric Light Orchestra; Thank You Girl – John Hiatt; You Shook Me All Night Long – AC/DC; Rip Her to Shreds – Blondie; All These Things That I’ve Done – The Killers; The Slime – Frank Zappa; In the Meantime – Spacehog; I’m a Believer – Smashmouth; The Climb – No Doubt; The Rest Of The Dream – John Hiatt; Backwards Down the Number Line – Phish; Sweeter Than Honey – Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes; Don’t Do Me Like That – Tom Petty; Dear Madam Barnum – XTC; Heading for the Light – The Traveling Wilburys; Rain King – Counting Crows; Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves; Candyman – Spacehog; Fade Into You – Mazzy Star; More Than This – Roxy Music; The Fever – Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes; Tonight She Comes – The Cars; Murder or a Heart Attack – Old 97s; Take The Long Way Home – Supertramp; You Never Even Called Me By My Name – David Allan Coe; Come A Long Way – Simple Minds; Drive – Incubus; Little Deuce Coupe – The Beach Boys; Prime Time – Alan Parsons Project; Next to You – Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes; Tragic Kingdom – No Doubt; So Into You – Atlanta Rhythm Section; Lord Is It Mine – Supertramp; Rolling in the Deep – Adele; Hurricane Season – Billy Pilgrim; In City Dreams – Robin Trower; My Best Friend’s Girl – The Cars; Swingin’ – Tom Petty; I Know a Place – Double; Born This Way – Lady Gaga; Song Away – Hockey
