Road Trip, Part VIII

Saturday, May 28: My schedule for the next four mornings was fairly uniform. I’d wake up cold but refreshed around 6.30, hop into my car, drive to the nearest campground with shower facilities (“nearest” meant a five-mile roundtrip the first two days and more than twenty miles the next two but it was absolutely worth it!), pay three dollars for a supremely refreshing hot shower, return to my campsite, have a quick breakfast of coffee and peanut butter & jelly bagels and head out. The rest of the days however could not have been more different. I think of them as journeys of aesthetics, geology and zoology, each day more spectacular and memorable than the last.

Saturday morning over breakfast I had a long conversation with a neighbouring camper, a seventy-year-old man named Miller who had driven all the way from South Carolina and was on his way to Prosser, in Washington to attend his granddaughter’s high-school graduation in three weeks. I was amazed at his enthusiasm and his ability to withstand the rigours of a four-thousand mile road trip at his age but it’s a typically American characteristic that I admire.

After he left I wandered around the campground for a while. All around me other campers had brought gigantic coolers packed with what seemed like enough food to keep an army going for several days, large stoves and grills, camp-chairs and tables, insect repellent torches and so on. In comparison my gear looked quite spartan, although living out of the trunk of a car doesn’t quite qualify as backcountry camping.

The walk around the campground brought me to a trail that led out alongside Yellowstone Lake, a gigantic water body that spans more than a hundred and thirty square miles. On the trail I was followed by an inquisitive pine marten for more than half an hour. He came quite close to me on several occasions and from the determined way that he re-marked his territory on several tree trunks by the path, I gathered that I was trespassing and he was merely making sure that I was passing through and not usurping his land.

Along the trail I also noticed copious quantities of bison dung and deer droppings and many cloven-hoofed tracks, the smaller ones made, I presume, by deer and the larger, deeper ones by bison. The dung was especially abundant in certain patches of dried grass and I could only conclude that those soft patches were their sleeping quarters (evidently with “attached bathrooms”).

On my return to the campsite, I got in my car and drove out north toward Canyon Village and then west to Norris, stopping at several beautifully scenic viewpoints on the way. I took photographs of many waterfalls along the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River at such locations as Artist’s Point and Inspiration Point. I watched bison, Canadian geese, some species of teal and several ravens for many happy hours. I stared at an osprey eyrie perched precariously on a rock spire jutting out of the canyon floor long and hard, inordinately excited at having found one (the brochure said they were very hard to spot) and being able to share an all-too-brief hour in the life of the chick and its mother.

I walked trails that took me to the thundering tops of the Upper and Lower Falls. I wondered at the breathtaking diversity of Yellowstone’s geothermal formations –orchestras of glutinous mud pots playing what sounded like a complicated work by Beethoven to perfection, iridescent springs in a dazzling array of every imaginable colour in the spectrum and gurgling hot springs and geysers, spewing plumes of vapour, hydrogen sulphide and other equally noxious gases. Speaking of colours, it is the sulphur gives Yellowstone National Park its name, although the numerous mineral compounds gave canyon walls a range of colours from a pale yellow to a deep, rich red.

Returning to camp that evening lugging my cameras, camcorder and binoculars, I remember feeling extremely happy with the fact that for the first time on a trip I hadn’t forgotten to pack anything critical. Of course in less than forty-eight hours I was cursing the fact that I hadn’t brought a tripod, but for the moment I was perfectly satisfied.