Day 19: Yellowstone - Beartooth Pass - Billings

Today we executed our “Yellowstone strategy”, which meant to avoid traffic and crowds by going in early. And it pretty much worked well. We rolled through the park gate just before 7am with no wait. We were able to by-pass the Mammoth Hot Springs as we’d seen them last night. That was a big deal, because coming in early only gave us a couple hours advantage. We chose our first stop as the Norris Geyser Field. We walked all the trails, spending 2 hours there. When we got there, 80% of the parking lot was empty. When we left, cars were circling looking for a spot. We were successful going to just the south rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and then backtracked to exit through the Lamar Valley.

The Norris Geyser field was quite a sight. Steam and incredible colors everywhere. Air temps were in the mid 50s at this time, so the steam really showed. There are some tall shooting geysers in here too, but their timing is erratic, and today wasn’t our day. Old Faithful is in another part of the park and too far for us to reach. We used the GyPSy Guide app which works off the GPS in the phone to have a great $6 tour guide with us as we drove.

Hot stuff at the Norris Geyser field.

Tourist seeking info. A ranger suggested the south rim of the canyon over the north. Great advice as there was a line at the turnoff to the north rim, and plenty of parking spots and great views at the south rim. I will leave the landscape shots of the canyon and falls to Ansel Adams, et al., but they were a sight to see.

As I figured we would, we ran into a traffic jam at Mammoth as we passed back by it on our way out. It only took 15 minutes to get through it, so not too bad. Overall, the early strategy worked and we got to see quite a few of the key features of the park.

The Lamar Valley. Since we didn’t really plan Yellowstone I hadn’t realized that our way out was through the Lamar valley. That was lagniappe for us. We saw a lot of wildlife here, including a black bear pretty close by. Good news here is that we were on the right side of this traffic jam! And the landscape of the valley was spectacular.

We left the park and had the Beartooth passes ahead of us. Then things got interesting. It started to rain and as we drove out of the park and into Cooke City - Silvergate, MT. There we saw a construction sign that said the pass was closed from 7pm-7am. It was currently 5:30pm and I had no real idea how long it would take to get over the pass. Another sign said “Roads not Maintained”. This town felt like the Twilight Zone. The passes looked very intimidating on the map. My mind was working against me! But this was our only way out - so we had to “go for it” (again).

The good news was that there wasn’t much traffic, and we did get to past the construction before 7pm, which was only one lane on the side of a mountain! The other (outside) lane wasn’t just closed - it wasn’t there at all! The bad news however was driving into really heavy fog as we climbed over the up side of the pass to almost 11,000 feet. On-coming cars with lights turned on could only be seen just yards ahead. Once up the pass, the road didn’t just go down the other side, first there was about 10 miles of driving along the tundra on top of the mountain. Foggy the whole time. Dreading the switchbacks going back down.

We came to the border of Montana (we’d been in Wyoming after leaving Cooke City). The fog was still thick. The drive back down the mountain was just ahead. But a good thing happened - after about 30 seconds of driving past this point, I was reaching for my sunglasses! We’d crossed to different weather on the other side of the mountain.

View in the bright evening coming down on the Montana side. You can see our recent foggy weather at the top, still hanging on the other side. And as a bonus, the roads were much better on the Montana side.

After that tough drive and the long day, we came off the mountain into the small town of Red Lodge looking for a good meal. And like we’ve found in many other towns up here, half the restaurants aren’t open during the week. Maybe because of July 5th day-off? Can’f find workers? Who knows. The ones that were open had waits too long for us. Like happens from time-to-time on these road trips, we had to settle for a late night Wendy’s meal in the car in Billings.

Love this guy rocking out with the rainbow trout in Red Lodge.

We finished the long and really great day by chasing this unique, vertical rainbow as we drove into Billings, our stop for the night.

(If anyone knows a proper name for a rainbow like this, let me know.)