We have finally arrived at Yellowstone, which in many ways is sort of the apex of our trip.  We’ll be staying here for four nights, which many have said is not enough (Yellowstone is bigger than Rhode Island), but should give us a good taste of the park.  The road from Cody to Yellowstone was, like all the roads we’ve been driving on lately, beautiful, remote, and hilly.

Yellowstone is amazingly beautiful.  We stopped at a random pullout on our way in to have our lunch, and after a short hike (during which Lanie fell in deep mud, I sank to my calf and dropped my glasses in mud while trying to rescue her, and Bob ended up knee-deep while carrying her out) we arrived on the coast of Yellowstone Lake where it was joined by Pelican Creek, with the mountains towering across the lake and the sun shining on the deep blue waters.  Any other place this would have been an A1 destination, but there’s so much stunning scenery here that this is barely a blip on the Yellowstone map.

Bob has been a little worried about bear encounters, so naturally the first person we met at Yellowstone was this crazy bear-obsessed woman, walking around the beach with bear mace in her hand, who tried to convince us that we immediately needed to buy a can (at $50).  (I’m glad we saved our money, since the bulk of our time at Yellowstone was spent on semi-crowded boardwalks surrounded by other people, with approximately 0% chance of a bear sighting.)

We’re camping at the Canyon Campground, which is fairly crowded but nicely wooded so you don’t feel cramped.  I was initially displeased that we were right next to the bathroom, but this actually turned out to be somewhat of an advantage since not many people seemed to use it and it was nice and close for the two occasions when I had to carry Lanie to the bathroom in the middle of the night through the bear-infested campground (at least according to the crazy bear lady). 

The best thing about this place — we’ve finally escaped the campfire ban!  At last, s’mores can be made and consumed.  In our excitement, we even cooked our dinner over the fire – kielbasa and apples.

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From Bob:

We were only a few minutes into our first Yellowstone experience when we encountered one of the things that sets this place apart from all of the other places we’ve visited.  I sunk into it right up to my knee.  It was thick, thick MUD (thankfully not the boiling, sulfurous, volcanic kind).  I was rescuing Lanie, who had fallen all-fours into it, giving Jen a chance to dislodge her leg.  It was dicey for a few moments about whether she would be able to save her sandal. 

                It’s been so dry everywhere we’ve gone that the only surfaces we’ve seen have been parched grass, ancient volcanic rock (as in the Badlands and Devil’s Tower) or dried-up, hard-packed dirt.  We took it as a good sign, once we got ourselves out of the morass.  Maybe, if it was moist enough to be muddy in places,   we would be able to have our long-awaited campfire.  Close readers of this blog might remember that we haven’t been able to have one of those since Ohio, before we had a chance to stock up on s’mores ingredients.

Aside from giving us a greater appreciation for the fates of all those mammoths in South Dakota, this first hike in Yellowstone, Pelican Creek trail, also gave us our first exposure to another aspect of the Wild West that we had not encountered before: grizzly bears.  Once we made it through the swamp and over to the shore of magnificent Yellowstone Lake, we saw footprints from many different animals (this time mud was our friend), including grizzly bears.   We have entered Bear Country.

We would later find out at a nearby visitors’ center that a grizzly had walked along the shore early that morning, only three hours before we had been there.  Before we got to the visitors’ center, however, we got a crash course on bears from a fellow park visitor who seemed to know a lot about the subject.  A woman from Colorado who was sitting on the beach when we got there was almost giddy when she found out about the bear tracks.  She began to tell us everything she knew about bears.  These tracks were probably black bear because they didn’t have any clawmarks. No, wait, maybe those are clawmarks.  The’re definitely grizzly.  A ranger told her she would definitely see bears on her visit, and she had.  She had run up to a roadside crevasse – against park regulations – to take a picture of a black bear and cub down below.  She made her husband walk in front of her and carry their can of bear mace in his backpack where she could reach it in an emergency.  She tried to make him walk right in front of her on the beach, where visibility was several hundred feet (we’re meant not to get closer than 100 yards to bears).

When you encounter a bear on a trail – and she made it clear that we would encounter a bear on the trail – she told us that we should not run or turn around but walk slowly backward and not make eye contact with the bear.  We should talk calmly, not scream, to the bear.

She was very happy to hike with us back the parking lot  (those guys knew a mud-free way back) because  you’re supposed to hike in parties of three or more and you’re supposed to make lots of different noises on the trail.  This last bit is something we’ve already mastered.

It turns out she may have been a little coocoo for cocoabears.  During the 3/4 –mile walk back to the cars, she prattled on nervously about bears.  It seems, in fact, that she is so concerned about bears that she sent her children to Catholic school.  Actually, by this point I only heard snippets of her conversation with Jen and the girls, so this part might not be 100-percent accurate.  I was walking ahead with her husband, a Red Sox and Patriots fan who was eager talk with someone from New England about these things (and, apparently, to anyone who could talk about anything but bears).  We talked so ardently and walked so far ahead that our friend was out of reach of the bear mace for a while. 

Luckily, we made back to the parking lot without further incident.  Except, once we got to our car, guess what we saw?  You’ll never guess.  A HAWAII license plate.  You can imagine our excitement.  We’ve already seen Alaska on our trip.  We’ll almost certainly get a full set by the time we get home, even if we have to drive through Delaware to do it. 

Delaware, a bear-free state, as far as I know.