Having seen much of the Yellowstone park by this point in time and having driven a bloody long way to get there, we thought that we should at least spend a day seeing the Grand Teton National Park seeing how close it was relative to our Fort Mac abode.
So once again, we piled the kids in the car and set out to drive. Straight into a traffic jam. Yep, even in the national parks those lovely folks that keep things running need time to repair roads. So we spent the first hour or so of our day alternately stopped and crawling through the traffic, knowing that the end of the day was going to look much the same. Yippee.
It had been hoped (and hyped) that we would get to see a lot more wildlife in the Tetons as the park was expected to be less busy than the better known Yellowstone, but by the time that we’d driven from one end of the park almost to the other end, including a stop for lunch over-looking a gorgeous lake, mountains seeming to rise up from the interface there hadn’t been anything particularly exciting to see (ie nothing we hadn’t managed to spot already).
The big hope for the whole day was to see a moose (or more … meese? I think not). So having reached the end of the park we stopped at the visitor’s centre and Caroline asked about where we should go to see them and what the best time of day was. Of course the best time of day was dusk (by which time we had firm intent of being ensconced around the campfire with a beverage or two) but we hadn’t been through the best part of the park for spotting them yet.
There had also been hopes of fitting in a white water rafting ride, but through the Tetons this was offered more as a ‘drift’. This may have provided a great way of seeing moose, but I wanted the rush of blood that would come with the white water. Add to that the prospect of the exercise taking 3 hours and finishing around dinner time and it just proved too much to consider. After all, we still had to get back through all the construction work.
We buckled ourselves back in the car and took an alternate route back to Yellowstone, stopping for a walk, always hoping for the elusive moose, but by the time we were out of the Tetons, we hadn’t spotted one. We crawled back through the road works, made it to camp and at least managed to enjoy our dinner.
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I thought that it was about time that I managed to finish off the last part of our Yellowstone trip and so once again I find myself sitting around a camp fire with the computer, blogging. This time we’re at Faucet Lake (no, I don’t know if it’s shaped like a tap).
We departed Yellowstone and began the long trek home (well, the destination was actually Drumheller, from where Caroline would deliver me to an airport and I would fly back for work for a week. We passed through the endless trees of the park again, Caroline peering hopefully, desperate for a glimpse of that elusive moose. We only struck one animal-jam on the way out and it wasn’t too bad. There’s a small section of road that is labeled no stopping because it’s a bald eagle reserve. There happened to be some bald eagles present so of course people stopped and took photos.
We drove all the way through Montana and back to the border crossing without anything untoward or worthy of note happening with the intent of trying to camp at Writing on Stone Provincial park. We hadn’t booked or anything, we just though that we’d rock up to a really popular park in the middle of the peak tourist season and stay the night. Well we managed to get as far as the town before Writing on Stone and there was a lovely sign posted saying that their RV park was full. Bugger.
We went to the RV park in the town that we were in, thinking we’d just stop there (after all, it was about 10:30pm at this point in time but they were full as well. We were offered the opportunity to pay $12 for the privilege of setting up in their carpark for the night, but declined such loving hospitality.
Instead, we drove on, hoping to find a park somewhere else. We found the small town of Warner which had a lovely little lions park in it (with all of about 12 sites) and so stopped and set up at 11:30pm, once again glad not to be in the tent trailer. Everything was great until about 7:30am. That was when we were woken by a deep base rumble that seemed to resonate through our very bones. One of those things you don’t notice when its 11:30pm at night is just how close you are to the local rail siding. Two lovely diesel locos, travelling as a light engine had pulled in to the siding and there they sat, idling. Their arrival had seemed to pass about a foot outside the door of the van so loud and close was it, but in reality there was probably a good 200m to the siding. Yippee. We were up fairly soon after that, because those locos were waiting for something and no one was about to shut them down while they waited. At about 10;30 a freight train passed trough and I said to Caroline that they were probably waiting for the cross and would be off soon. Well when we left the park an hour later, they were still there and still idling.
We made it to Drumheller and set up camp, excited that the next day, we’d get to see the dinosaurs.
Ever since last year’s aborted attempt to see the Royal Tyrrell Museum I have been hanging out for a chance to get back there and really not expecting to get the opportunity and so I was insisting that we be there as soon as they opened. Well of course that didn’t happen, but we weren’t too far off and enjoyed getting there before most of the crowd.
Caroline signed everyone up for a fossil casting session which was good fun and then we continued our exploration. I’ll attach some photos because it really was awesome.
And then of course I was dropped off at the airport and abandoned the family in Drumheller as I returned to work. Lucky me.
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