Bison and Bears and Rain, Oh My. (July 26-27)

Our day of driving from Custer State Park to Yellowstone was mainly uneventful. I continue to be astounded again this summer by the changes one can see in the landscape over a couple of days of driving. We drove through Bighorn National Forest, which was just beautiful, twisting and turning through a small mountain range.

Finally we arrived at Yellowstone National Park, so ready to get out of the car. We had reservations at Canyon Campground. After leaving the East Entrance to the park, we saw the sign that said “Canyon: 42 miles.” Not quite there yet. But it’s hard to complain about it. Even before we entered the park, we saw two moose next to a river. Inside the park, we drove through the Hayden Valley, where we saw bison and a mama black bear and her cub.

The valley runs along the Yellowstone River, and the beautiful land teeming with birds and animals makes it clear why Yellowstone is called the Serengeti of the U.S.

At Canyon we checked in for our campsites. When making reservations, they warn you that you can’t fit any tent bigger than a 10 X 10 or something like that. The warnings were so serious that we ended up getting two sites for each family. When we drove back to our sites, we found two enormous, gorgeous, wooded sites with plenty of room for two tents on each. So our friends took one of our sites, and the park service graciously refunded most of the money for the other two. After looking around the tent loops of the campground, most of them look pretty good, but a few of them have a structured tent pad that would not allow for more than one smaller tent. I’m not sure how you are supposed to be sure you will have enough room!

Either way, our sites are lovely and they are at the end of the campground, so there is nothing but more lodgepole pine forest behind us. We pitched our tents fairly far back from the road and put up our new screen room, which is the first screen room we’ve had with a rain fly. It’s kind of strange to be mostly enclosed when sitting around the picnic table, but it’s easier to keep the fly on all the time than to quickly rig it when the rain starts to fall.

The woman at the desk when we registered for the campsite gave us a long list of precautions to take to keep ourselves and other campers safe from bears. This included keeping all our food in our vehicles or in the bear-proof box on the site, and doing the same with all our toiletries or anything scented. We were not to dump our dishwater onto the ground at the campsite—we needed to bring our dishwater to the special room at the bathrooms to dump it. Nothing used for food preparation should be left outside.

Needless to say, this list of rules proved to be unsettling for the one among us who tends to be a worrier. Allison was pretty sure that one of us would be bear food by the end of the first night. It didn’t help that her siblings thought this was hilarious and began to tell her stories of what happened to people who ran into bears. Brian mourned the fact that he had splashed a bit of taco sauce on his shirt, for surely they would come for him now. And she was assured that she would not become dinner for a bear, because she wasn’t even close to the slowest runner in our group. She looked at me, knowing that I’m the slowest of the group, with despair in her eyes.

I’d like to point out that the rules don’t make a lot of sense to me. If you have eaten the food, don’t you smell like it? If you have put on a scented deodorant, can the bears not smell it emanating from your armpits? It seems like we could put all that stuff in the bear-proof box, but we are still sitting ducks in our tents.

Our first night there was cold. We had seen a weather forecast that predicted a low of 31 degrees the second night. Kurt and Katy had not, and when we mentioned it, their jaws hit the floor. Their son Jonathan chose that moment to pipe up with “I didn’t bring any pants!” It became apparent to all of us that a) packing is not the Hoffman forte and b) none of us brought enough warm clothing. So it goes.

The next day we took our first foray into the park. We stopped in at the visitor center, where Allison’s fear of bears became secondary to the fact that all of Yellowstone is pretty much one massive supervolcano that is overdue to erupt.

We went to see the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, where the Yellowstone Falls push over the rock with enormous force and grandeur. There are lots of places to drive to or hike to in order to get yet another view of the canyon and the falls, but we just took a quick walking path to get our first look. That first walk rewarded us with a view of an osprey flying out of her nest to find food for the two young birds in her nest.

After that the clouds started to look a bit suspicious, so we went back to the campsite to make sure things were tied down and put away. Then we took our lunch to a picnic area.

Almost as soon as we finished eating it started to sprinkle a bit, so we decided to take a drive north in the park, seeing a few sites along the way. We kept driving east to the Lamar Valley, and though it was raining, it was a truly beautiful place filled with buffalo, elk, and antelope.

After we turned back, however, the dread began to grow in our guts as the rain did not slow down, and we watched the car’s thermometer drop. Upon return, Kurt and Katy made homemade macaroni and cheese with sausage, and we huddled in the new screen room for dinner.

It had felt a little ridiculous to have to buy a rain fly for a screen room, but when the rain was pouring down in the cold night, we were glad for a dry place to sit and to store things. The rain continued after we ate, and we were only getting colder, so in desperation we started a fire. It’s the first time I’ve ever sat through a fire (with s’mores even) in the pouring rain. At a certain point the rain turned a bit slushy, and we had big chunks of snowflakes coming down too.

In the campsite across the road from us, a family from Japan was having struggles of their own and were probably wondering, like many of us, what they had gotten themselves into. They had set up a tent earlier in the day, but while we ate dinner they were packing everything back into their rented Prius. Mom, Dad and son, standing in the rain, each had a rather large hard-sided suitcase that they were trying to cram into the trunk along with their tent and other things. When they somehow got the suitcases in, they had trouble starting the car. After staring intently at the engine, they got it going, and headed out of the campground. I have to admit I was thinking I’d like to squeeze into the car with them.

When the wood was gone and we were too cold to do anything else, we all turned in for the night in blessedly dry tents. Most of us had 3 or 4 layers of clothing, hats, some gloves and a lot of socks on. The temperature dipped into the 20s that night, and we wondered what had possessed us to undertake this insanity.