Hey there! Kate again, late (as usual) for the next update. Hold onto your butts! This one gets a little dramatic…

When Brian left you at the end of the last post, we’d been in Glacier National Park for a day already. “Spectacular” just doesn’t do it justice. We hiked up to Avalanche Lake and were immediately awestruck by the place. It was super duper crowded, but only if you looked toward the shore! We were accosted for snacks by several chipmunks, but their efforts went unrewarded…at least by us. There were plenty of other people IGNORING THE SIGNS NOT TO FEED THE ANIMALS and giving those chubby chipmunks all sorts of snacks. Tsk tsk tsk…

After the hike, we headed back down and got to chatting to a couple named Jessi and Bill who were also living the good life on the road! They were from Boston originally and had been traveling for several months. We discovered we were headed to a lot of the same places, but we’re definitely not following them……..👀 After that we drove around the park a little more, but decided we were both pretty tired out by our hike. On the way out of the park we saw some cute little fuzzy bear butts in the woods! Adorable! It was back to Blankenship Bridge for a nice quiet night at the campsite!…or so we thought.

When we arrived at Blankenship, we were able to snag the same camping spot as we’d been at before. This time, however, there was a very large family having a very loud time a couple of campsites over. (Please excuse the upcoming expletives…) There were about 3 or 4 adults and maybe the same amount of kids/teens. The mother of the party was very frustrated that her teenage daughter wouldn’t get out of the car, yelling “we’re camping! Get out of the fucking car!” Over and over…and over… The daughter was having none of it, and the mother continued yelling “I’m 49 and I’m drunk, I don’t give a fuck! I’ll drive drunk!!” etc. At this point I was starting to get a tummy ache :c so stressful! Some people left (not surprisingly) and the daughter walked away, claiming that she’d walk to town because she hated the mother and didn’t want to be there anyway. Mom got in the car, followed after her, and picked her up. Yikes! We heard the daughter scream-crying as the car drove away… at this point we contemplated calling the police but they’d left our vicinity, so we felt a little helpless. Several minutes later the mother returned, alone and tearful, but we couldn’t quite hear what she was saying. Several more minutes, a carful of teens returned with the daughter. More screaming, more yelling, and eventually the sound of blows landing, followed by a man shouting “well you hit me first!” and screams of “that’s another felony! You’re going back to jail!” etc. At which point I was like, yup, definitely time to call the cops! I went and hid behind a tree so that the family couldn’t see me, giving all the info I could. During my phone call, we saw a man with a red shirt and a backpack leaving the campsite. The guy on the phone said they were getting several calls from the area so he’d let me go (yay other people also doing their duty and not falling victim to bystander effect!) About 20-30mins went by and a sheriff rolled in with the red-shirted fellow in handcuffs in the back seat. He talked to the mother for a while and ultimately we overheard “well, it seems like you had a little to drink and your lips got loose, so you said things you didn’t mean and maybe did some things you regret. We’ve all been there!” Laughing and joking with the mother… good ol’ small town Montana sheriff. The rest of the party ultimately stayed at the site and only the man in the back of the car was taken in. The rest of the evening was mostly calm. In the morning there was more yelling, but this time it was the mother yelling out the window to the kids at the site while she drove across the bridge. Thankfully that was our last night at Blankenship Bridge! Here’s hoping the situation with that family is better than it was when we last saw them…

Moving on! The next day was spent at Glacier again. This time we drove farther than we had ventured the previous day, all the way to The Loop in the middle of the park to hop on a shuttle into Logan Pass. While here we took a hike to the Hidden Lake Overlook. The trail down to the lake itself was closed as fish were spawning and the grizzlies were out in abundance. On the way to the overlook we saw tons of mountain goats – one of which was a cute little baby! I acquired a pretty bad sunburn up here so we spent a while in the visitor center cooling down and rehydrating. After this, we hopped back on some shuttles and were driven around some other points of interest in the park. By the early evening we were pretty tired so we decided to call it a day. The spacious inside of the shuttle prompted us to discuss potential options for future long-term on-the-road living situations. We were approached by a big horn sheep on our way out of the park because Brian yelled “oi! Out of the road!” at him… and he hasn’t shouted at any wildlife since. (Except for geese, Brian adds…but they deserved it.)

We had a long drive from the park down to Bozeman, Montana, where our sweet friends Dave and Brittany had agreed to let us hang out with them for a few days. They were staying at their grandparents’ house that was lacking permanent residents, hanging out with some family members while they were all in town. We got to meet four generations of Dave’s family and they included us in their games and meals. So kind! Brian even tried his luck on the Slip n’ Slide in the back yard…and left with the scratches and bruises to prove it! They took us along to the Bozeman Hot Springs and the next day we floated down the Madison River with Dave and Brittany – girls in tubes and boys in an inflatable raft that was also equipped with oars, drinking water, and plenty of booze! It was a lovely lazy afternoon and we didn’t even get sunburnt 😊

That evening we went out in pursuit of pizza. We discovered that Bozeman had a Fire Pizza place downtown – the same place we had been treated to in Coeur d’Alene by Cynthia and Dennis! Of course we had to go back. Afterward we wandered the downtown area and stopped in another bar for a couple more brewskis and chit chats. We headed out the next day, our hearts and tummies full from the experience. Onward to Yellowstone!

Yellowstone National Park has been on my list of desired destinations for quite some time now, so I had pretty high hopes for our time there. We weren’t disappointed. It was INCREDIBLE. The diversity of wildlife and terrain was just unbelievable. We weren’t able to go to the park the first night, but we ended up extending our planned stay to 4 days after I read an article about Yellowstone and all the things to do there. We also visited the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, which is a little ways out of the park, learning all about the shameful interactions between man and nature in the Western US over the past couple of centuries… and we saw some super cute bears and wolves! We found a free campground about 45 minutes outside of the park which was immensely convenient.

We spent our first full day in Yellowstone seeing some of the “less impressive” sights, which were of course impressive to us as we hadn’t seen anything like them before. We saw waterfalls, geysers, mud pots, bison and elk. Considering this was the mild stuff of Yellowstone, we had high hopes for the next few days!

I’m not going to go into an itemized list of everything we did during our time there (for those who are interested, we followed the 4-day itinerary linked above ^ minus the Storm Point hike on day 1 [the trail head was closed], Dunraven Pass [a little more strenuous than we were up for!] and the Biscuit/Black Sand Basin on the last day). However, have a fun story from day 4! –

This was the big stuff day. We started at the Midway Geyser basin, home to the Grand Prismatic spring among others. I decided to stop by the restroom before we made our way out to the springs and found a phone that had been left behind by a previous visitor. I quickly gave it to Brian and said he should try to find the kid who had been in the bathroom before me, assuming it was his. He hunted the kid down and…it wasn’t his phone. Oh no! I made it my personal mission to track down the owner of the phone, but what a tricky place to do it out of cell phone range and with no wifi! I suspected it might have belonged to the two women in front of the kid in front of me, and checked some recent photos to confirm. (Good thing for me that she didn’t have a lock on her phone..but bad for her online security!) We identified the group of 4 that she was in, which would hopefully assist in our hunting her down. We decided that, if we didn’t find her by the time we finished our visit to the Upper Geyser Basin (home of Old Faithful), we’d turn it into the rangers at the visitor center there and hope she’d make her way there eventually.

Fast-forward to us finishing our exploration of the Upper Geyser Basin, spotting a male elk with beautiful antlers quietly grazing by the river…and the phone rings! I answer it and identify myself and my location, discovering that the family is on their way to Old Faithful as we speak! We manage to reunite the owner (Mindi) with her phone AT LAST. She was very thankful, giving me a big hug and insisting I take $20 for my troubles. I joked about how I’d been scouring crowds all day for her cactus print shirt, and she told us how relieved she was – she thought her vacation was ruined! It all timed out perfectly as Old Faithful was due to erupt about 20 minutes later. A great, feel-good ending to a magical few days in the park!

We absolutely loved Yellowstone and learned all kinds of things about the landscape and the history of the area. If anyone has the opportunity, please go! And please spend NO LESS than 4 days there – we could have spent longer if we had the time. Each area of the park is unique and worthy of a lengthy visit. But for us, it was off to Grand Teton National Park the next day!

On the drive out of Yellowstone, we realized that Grand Teton National park is…significantly smaller in comparison. We drove through pretty much the whole park on our way down to Jackson, WY where we’d be spending the evening at another free campsite. We stopped in The Bird for dinner, spending the $20 that Mindi had given me as a reward for finding her phone. We don’t have a lot of eating-out money in the budget, but this was non-budget funds! We had a veggie burger and some incredible cheese curds, which bested me in their volume and richness… Thankfully Brian finished them all. They were too good to go to waste! After that it was down to Granite Creek for an evening of camping and recuperation before Grand Teton the next day.

I’m going to end this post here and leave Grand Teton onward for Brian’s post next time. We keep saying we’ll do Sunday updates, but our dinner in Jackson was on Tuesday, 7/30… Oh well! Let’s just say every week-ish, shall we? 😉 stay tuned for more next week…ish!