Leaving Colorado, on to WY & MT

We spent a week near RMNP after saying goodbye to some of our favorite spots. We met up with our friend Judy in Boulder and then she took off with her hiking group and let us stay at her place. We biked around Boulder one day, it’s a very bike friendly city. We then hiked in the Flatirons, an impressive (and popular) mountainous area that overlooks the University of Colorado. It also borders Colorado Chautauqua, one of the three Chautuaquas left. An easy drive down to Denver on Sunday (when the Broncos were not playing) allowed us a visit with my old school chum from Webster, Len Ewald. Len and his fiancé Caroline just bought a house in south Denver and both have been enjoying Colorado living for over thirty years. They enjoy kayaking and camping like we do and were thrilled to hear about our experiences volunteering with the NPS.

We met up with our friends HarunMuf the next day in Estes Park and hung out with them at the Keno Llama Ranch for a couple days. They took the train from NY and arrived in a sleep deprived state. But that matched our condition pretty well, I don’t know why we felt sleep deprived but we did. We all revived well enough after a nap to drive into town and observe a huge elk browsing on the sparse vegetation in the Safeway parking lot. A hike into Wild Basin in RMNP the next day allowed us to see more of the east side of the park. We got great views of Mt. Meeker, the twin to Long’s Peak, with Long’s peeking out behind it. A futile attempt to see some of the elk rut that night only yielded a dim view of a dejected bull elk sulking off after being run off by a larger more experienced bull, who got to keep his harem. That’s the way it goes during the highly competitive rut. We hope HarunMuf got to see more of the rut as they were staying around RMNP for another five days after we left.

We left for Wyoming on Sept. 15, stopping in Laramie for a bike ride tour of the city just to break up the drive. I found it strange though to be standing in line at an Econolodge in Rock Springs later that day to get a room. A drive up the road further to Pinedale might have offered us a better location, if only we had known. A brief stop in Jackson the next day made us glad not to be staying there, it was overrun with you-know-whos. No vacancy signs were on display everywhere and a RV park in town next to the public parking lot where we had lunch was totally packed. Poor Jackson.

We headed towards the west side of the Tetons, into Idaho, also known as Teton Valley. It is the quieter, wilder side of the Tetons. Driggs is the major town there. We were glad to hear at the Targhee USFS ranger station that the Teton Canyon campground was still open, and we stayed there two nights. It was right by a couple of trailheads into the Jedediah Smith Wilderness, and we took one of the trails up to Table Mountain the next day. It was 4,000 feet up to Table, at just over 11,000 feet, a round trip of about twelve miles. Table Mountain looked more like a mushroom to us, but it was a nice scramble up to the top. The neatest part about it was that it was right next to the Grand Teton. We had great views of it, it was about a mile away. This turned out to be a fairly popular hike also, we must have seen about thirty other hikers total, including a toddler and a group of college students from BYU Idaho who were planning to spend the night camping on top of Table. There wasn’t a lot of room on top, so they were going to be packed in tightly.

We drove up to West Yellowstone and only briefly saw Yellowstone. We couldn’t find any lodging in the park or in Gardiner, just outside the northern entrance. Even the USFS campgrounds to the north were either full or had no water, so we kept driving to Livingston, 52 miles north. We could have stayed at a motel 29 miles north of Gardiner, but we didn’t like the price. So we didn’t get to do much at Yellowstone this time, that’s the way it will have to be. We also would have liked staying at Chico Hot Springs, about half way between Yellowstone and Livingston, but they were booked up. After staying the night at an ok motel in Livingston, we headed up to Hot Sulphur Springs under fog that eventually lifted and stayed in the spa motel there. We also went up into the Lewis and Clark Forest just outside of town and found a nice hike up to a high point that gave us great vistas of the Smith River Valley and views in other directions. We never saw anyone else other than a couple and their dog as we came back close to where we left our car. I thoroughly enjoy places like Yellowstone but popular national parks can be overrun with you-know-whos, even in September. Especially in September I guess. Next stop for us will be Glacier, we have only a reservation for one night up there and not-so-great weather will greet us, so we will see how things go there.