Jane pauses for a photo opportunity with a sculpture of Wild Bill Cody in his eponymously named Wyoming town following dinner at the Silver Dollar Bar off Sheridan Avenue.
John Grindrod/The Lima News
When many people hear the word “Yellowstone,” the first thing that comes to mind is the wildly popular TV series that has starred Kevin Costner for the first four seasons as John Dutton, the patriarchal figure of a ranch in Montana by the same name, one estimated to be just shy of 800,000 acres.
However, upon our waking at the Comfort Inn just off Sheridan Avenue, the main drag in the Wyoming town named for Buffalo Bill Cody, we both had that other Yellowstone on our minds, a national park so large that it covers parts of three states (Wyoming, Montana and Idaho) and, at 3,472 square miles, is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Cody definitely qualifies as a tourist town, since it’s the closest town to the east entrance of the national park. Visitors certainly swell the number of full-time residents far beyond the 10,406 counted in the last census. The multiple souvenir shops, clothing stores featuring Western wear and saloons and restaurants show how imbued the town is in the tourism industry.
Following our first meal of the day, a delicious hot breakfast served across the hotel parking lot in a saloon complete with bison heads on the wall, we headed out, driving on US Route 16 through Shoshone National Forest, named for the indigenous Native Americans who’ve occupied this area of Wyoming for thousands of years.
Upon entering the park, we were astonished again by what we saw the previous day driving from Grand Teton to Cody through Yellowstone, as in the number of downed trees, mostly tall slender whitebark pine, which have been killed in forest fires, especially the big blaze in 1988, and by the high-elevation howling winds. Park rangers do not remove downed trees unless they fall across roads.
While our primary destination was Old Faithful in the park’s southwest quad, we planned on several overlook stops along the way to admire the massive Lake Yellowstone, which is a constant companion upon driving from east to west. It’s not only the largest body of water in the park but also the largest high-elevation freshwater lake in North America.
Much of the intrigue of the park for me was because of the geothermal anomalies. Several of our stops along the way to get to Old Faithful were to view the hot springs and fumarole basins. Fumaroles are vents in the earth’s surface which emit lots of steam as well as strong sulfurous gases.
Other stops put us in close proximity to view bison herds, with some of the noble beasts ambling with bowed massive heads just off the road. One of the park rangers told us while at one time there were only about two dozen bison at Yellowstone, the current population is now quite healthy, nearly four thousand.
We arrived at the Old Faithful area, with its huge parking lot, large gift shop and restaurant and inn nearby, which made for quite a developed area, as one might expect from a major tourist attraction.
Once at the viewing area several hundred feet from the famous geyser, a wise placement given the fact that the water that spurts hundreds of feet in the air is over 200 degree Fahrenheit with steam reaching over 300 degrees, we were ready to see the natural phenomenon. While the geyser is hardly all that predictable despite its moniker, rangers and scientists can roughly estimate the time between eruptions at anywhere from 50 to 127 minutes.
A half hour later, we were treated to the show. The eruption lasted approximately three minutes and when finished, Jane had an observation. She thought the geyser’s water should have shot higher. I had to laugh, telling her I didn’t recall her having any prior geyser experience while navigating her Mercer County homelands.
Following the marvelous sights that day in Yellowstone, a nice meal and some pints of local draft, Red Lodge IPA, back in Cody at the Silver Dollar Bar and a nice walk around the downtown area, it was time to depart for Montana’s West Glacier.
Unfortunately, I awoke with a raging toothache on a back molar I had recently crowned that added some painful drama to the next 500-plus-mile leg of our national parks sojourn, and there’ll be more about our drive through Montana and Glacier National Park next week.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
