Rick & Carol's Journey (DL)

When I checked the fluid levels in the RV on Monday morning, I discovered a crack in the RV’s coolant reservoir. This caused us to delay our drive to Yellowstone for a day and to detour to Billings, Montana, the site of the nearest Freightliner dealer. While they replaced the reservoir and performed our standard 11,000 mile service, we took the car and back-tracked about 60 miles to the Little Big Horn National Monument. The monument includes a veteran’s cemetery, much of the Little Big Horn battlefield (including last stand hill where there are grave markers for Custer {enlarge the second photo} and the 41 men who died at that site), scattered markers for killed U.S. soldiers and various Indian warriors, a monument to the soldiers, and a monument to the Indians. We over-nighted at the dealer’s parking lot and will leave in the morning for Yellowstone.





Tuesday’s drive to Yellowstone took us into the mountains, from 3300 feet at Billings to a high of about 8600 feet on a mountain pass into the park. En route, we stopped for about three hours at the Buffalo Bill Heritage Center in Cody, Wyoming. The center is actually a collection of five museums under one roof: the Buffalo Bill Museum; a Firearms museum that has a huge collection (1500 on the main floor and 1200 more in the basement) of all types of firearms, including rifles, pistols, blunderbusses, Gatling guns, shotguns, etc.; a Western Art Gallery; a Plains Indian Museum; and a Natural History Museum that explains the Western flora and fauna at various altitudes from mountain top to prairie. Our campground for the next three nights is the Fishing Bridge RV Park in Yellowstone National Park. This is one of the quietest RV parks we have been in – it’s away from both highway and railway noise.

Be sure to enlarge the photo of the pistol - it's apparantly a handgun that Dick Cheney never shot anyone with.





Although we never like to have mechanical problems, the coolant reservoir problem couldn’t have come at a better time – we were reasonably close to a competent dealer and the unexpected side trip allowed us to see both the Little Big Horn National Monument and the museum in Cody, neither of which we would have seen on our original schedule.

Wednesday was a long sightseeing day, from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 this evening. We drove the southern loop in the national park and stopped at just about every turn-out along the route. The first stop was the West Thumb Geyser Basin, where we saw steam vents both along the shoreline and in the lake itself. The next stop was Kepler Cascades, a waterfall located just a short walk from the road. We then crossed the Continental Divide twice within the space of 6 miles.

We arrived to see Old Faithful erupt about 15 minutes after we arrived – our timing is excellent, it erupts about every 90-95 minutes. We then walked a short path through adjacent geyser basin, ate lunch, and then got to see a second eruption which was even higher than the first. En route to the next stop, we saw two elk in the woods by the road,




We continued to the Midway Geyser Basin, a waterfall in Firehole Canyon, and the roadside Gibbon Falls. We stopped and toured the Artist’s Paintpots area, where thermal activity has left spots of colored ground; however, the colors here are not as vivid as the Indian Paintpots which we saw in Canada in 2002. This afternoon we saw a couple of distant bison herds, but took no buffalo photos. About dusk we saw the Upper Yellowstone Falls and visited the Sulfur Cauldron before returning to the RV for dinner.



It was cool again last night, down to the 40s. On Thursday, we drove the upper loop in the park, leaving about 8:30 and returning about 5:00. Our first sight was a small group of ducks riding over rapids in the Yellowstone River, then swimming back to the base of the rapids to dive for fish. We stopped at the “Mud Volcano,” a site with a lot of thermal pools and a couple of bubbling mud pots. We saw some close-up buffalo there – they sneaked up beside us and then walked part of the boardwalk path about 30 feet ahead of us.



On the next driving leg we pulled off the road to see a mama grizzly bear and four cubs in a distant field. They were far enough away that one had to use binoculars to see more than just five small brown blobs. We then visited the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, which is a surprisingly deep canyon and two sets of waterfalls; needless to say, we took a lot of photos. On our way to Mammoth Hot Springs, we photographed a mama moose and calf eating in a roadside pond. Mammoth Hot Springs was disappointing, there is little or no water in the “springs” this year, so we saw some colorful rock, but that is about all.






Tomorrow we will leave for Grand Teton National Park and then on to Santa Fe and Moab, Utah, where our Winnebago Caravan kicks off next Thursday.