From Boise, we took the morning to drive to Bend, Oregon. I’ve heard really good things about Bend, so I definitely made it a stop when I saw that it was along our drive path.
When we got there, we first checked out the Pilot Butte scenic viewpoint, which gave an awesome panoramic overlook of the mountains, forests, and buildings that make up the area.
We stopped by Deschutes brewery but missed out on brewery tour reservations, so headed to the next best thing: Bend Brewfest, where lots of local breweries were sampling their specialty beers and a DJ was spinning beats. We tried some interesting ones, including a mango ale and coconut porter.
Right next door were the shops and restaurants of the Old Mill District. Along the Deschutes River, you could see people floating down on tubes. Looked awesome for a warmer day out.
We had dinner in the downtown area, which reminded me a lot of San Mateo actually.
Overall, Bend seemed like a great place to live, with enough some city life but also plenty of nature all around. We didn’t get a chance to do the naturey stuff this time, but next time, for sure!
Leaving Grand Teton, we drove through Jackson Hole, which seemed like it’d be a fun skiing town in the winter.
We made a quick stop at Idaho Falls Greenbelt:
Looking at a map, we realized that we could hit up another cool spot without much extra driving, so we detoured over to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, where huge craters and volcanic rock litter the landscape.
These lava lands stood out from the dry grasslands we drove through to get there. We did a few hikes here, including one of my favorites on the trip: up and down, in and out of the Indian Tunnel caves. Spelunking:
We also ran into a Google Maps guy which was pretty cool. Seems like an awesome job to get paid to explore and map national parks.
After spending the early afternoon here, we headed to our stopping place for the night in Boise, Idaho.
Being in Idaho, we had to eat some regional specialties, so we had bison burgers and fries made from different potato varieties at Boise Fry Company.
Then we explored the Boise Capitol Building downtown and wandered around Boise State University a bit. I tried to step on the famous blue turf football field, but I could only catch a glimpse through locked gates.
At the hotel, we got upgraded to a two-bedroom suite, took a quick dip in the swimming pool, and called it a night.
After six straight days sleeping on the ground, a hotel mattress never felt so good.
Without a lantern, we did a lot of early nights and early mornings this trip, which was pretty refreshing and allowed us to take advantage of sunlight.
This morning, we explored mostly the eastern side of Yellowstone, hitting up Mammoth Hot Springs, which were awesome:
We also saw the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, which was smaller than the one in Arizona, but was beautiful nonetheless with it’s upper and lower waterfalls and winding river in between painted rocks.
There were tons of bison everywhere this day! We saw four or five packs of them in large grasslands and some even mosied on close to the road.
We got some great looks at Yellowstone Lake and Yellowstone River as well. This national park really has it all, but it was very touristy at all the sites, with tour buses and people everywhere. A little too much for me.
In the late afternoon, we drove south right into Grand Teton National Park, often thought of as Yellowstone’s little brother. It’s quite awesome in it’s own right though. No matter where you are in the park, Mt Teton and the mountain range serve as a backdrop.
We did the 44-mile scenic loop and turned off to see the lakes, Snake River, and Oxbow Bend.
We drove up Signal Mountain Summit to get an epic view of the valley and mountains.
At night, we crashed at Gros Ventre campground.
Thought we only spent half a day here and didn’t do much hiking,I was sad to say the Grand Teton was our last national park of the trip, but exploring four of them inspires me to go see more in the near future.
It got me feeling like the kid from the movie Up. Wilderness is out there, explore it!
This morning, we got up really early and headed out off to the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
Since we didn’t have reservations, we hit up first-come first-serve camping and were able to snag a site at Indian Creek campground within the park.
We spent this day exploring the whole western side of the park, which is where most of the geysers and hydrothermal features are located. FYI, Yellowstone is an active supervolcano and these features are present reminders of that volcanic activity.
At Norris Geyser Basin, we were first introduced to the geysers and vents. It was pretty cool to see geysers going off and the brilliant colors in the pools.
Grand Prismatic Spring was stunning:
We also saw some awesome waterfalls and river streams this day.
As we were walking around the surrounding area, we were lucky enough to catch Old Faithful geyser as it was spouting off. It was quite big and shot water quite a ways up in the air.
Among the wildlife we saw were mule deer (they came up right along the roadside) and crows chilling by the geysers.
Due to part accessibility and part laziness, we didn’t shower. Roughin’ it as one might say. A wet wipe “shower” would have to do.
This day was mostly driving, as we went from Badlands to Emigrant, Montana, a little town where we stayed the night before heading into Yellowstone the next morning.
We passed through a lot of the great plains during the drive.
There were big hay bales in farming fields. There were cows.
There were sunflowers (!).
Our airbnb stay was in a tipi that night! When I was researching where to stay, I saw “tipi”, and couldn’t pass it up. Our host let us take his canoe out on the pond by his property so we did that for a bit. It was a relaxing place to be out on the water with nature surrounding us – mountains, trees, big blue sky.
We slept in our sleeping bags in the tipi and it was surprisingly comfortable. The tipi had a hole up top for air and some along the sides, but it still kept the bugs out.
