First things first. Straight up, we toured all over Yellowstone National Park to the best of our abilities. What that means is everything we could do, we did. What we couldn't do was anything that required a long hike to whatever it might be. On a couple of occasions, the parking area was full and we couldn't even explore to see what it would take to see something. Most of the "sights" in Yellowstone are located on the southwest side of the park. I think the only thing we missed that we were looking forward to was the Grand Prismatic Spring located in the midway geyser basin and so popular that the parking area was full.
Yes, Yellowstone is busy, even after the kids have gone back to school. There's about 100 miles of roadway to cover when touring the park. Speed limit is 45 mph except in areas of congestion where it drops to 25 mph. Then of course there are the areas where an Elk or a Bison wanders into view and you slow to a crawl for an hour before you finally get to the spot where it all started and admire the signs explicitly forbidding drivers from stopping, parking, etc that were completely ignored. I could rant on but, nah...
There aren't nearly as many attractions on the north end of the park but taking in the view just for the drive was well worth it. I am amazed by the fact that the background scene changes completely every few miles and sometimes from moment to moment. I'm not entirely sure how many pictures I took but I only selected a few for the blog simply because if you wanted to see Yellowstone in pictures, its all online already including the places we didn't get to see.
There was little to mostly no cell service within the park. The only time we had service of any merit was at West Yellowstone either when we were entering or leaving the park for the day. The rest of the time it was useless. I got a text out of nowhere and responded but my response didn't send until the next day. It rained most of Friday morning so we waited it out before departing the campground. Thunderstorms were forecast for Saturday morning but got pushed back to afternoon and again to Saturday evening so we got out and toured the northern reaches of the park.
Sunday morning and the plan is to get on the road again but when I got started breaking camp it started to rain and even hail. I think it was the thunderstorm that never struck on Saturday. It had swept past us pretty quickly and I got everything ready to go. I don't remember if I mentioned this but, almost all the campsites out here do NOT have water on site. That means you have to fill your water tank before you get to your campsite. We managed to make the water tank (50 gal.) stretch the whole stay at Yellowstone but were virtually empty for the Sunday drive. I could have filled the tank at the water point but it was located at the entrance to the campground and I would have had to drive through the entire campground loop again.
We got about 7 miles north at our next turn and I pulled over to check the ratchet straps on the car. Straps were fine but the car dolly had a flat. 45 minutes later we're back on the road again for another breath taking day of travel. We stopped in Butte, Montana for gas and supplies this afternoon and made our way from there to the campsite at Georgetown Lake. We'll be here for 2 nights but we got an evacuation alert right after we got set up. Turns out there's a wildfire burning about 25 miles away. The alert we received was actually downgrading from a red status to yellow. We'll be watching that closely while we're here.
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