Grand Tetons

Potatoes, Rocks, and Knuckleheads

/ L. Ryan Storms / Leave a comment

Day 15: 6/16/24
From: Boise, ID
To: Grand Teton National Park, WY (Colter Bay Campground) by way of Craters of the Moon National Monument, ID
Distance: 403 miles

Up at 7. Maybe the first time an alarm has actually woken us up. Showers, breakfast, and off we go, leaving exciting Boise behind us. Did breakfast include Idaho potatoes? Yes, of course it did. (They were really good, actually.)

Happy Father’s Day! I take the first 2 1/2 hour drive to Craters of the Moon National Monument. The drive is easy. (No wide loads hauling houses or sheds this time.) and within an hour, we come across an M1A1, the tank Husband used to be a gunner on back in the mid-nineties. We stop so he can touch the tank and reminisce. Then onward once more.

Craters of the Moon certainly announces its presence dramatically, black lava rock spilling onto the grasslands seemingly out of nowhere. We decide to hike the lava tube caves, but before we can do so, the park rangers have to ask questions. Have we been in caves before? (Yes) Are we wearing anything we might have worn in those caves? (Not likely) 

They need to make sure a certain type of fungus doesn’t spread to the bats in their cave system, and mold spores can stay on clothing for years even through the wash.

With that, we head through the park, admiring the lava rock spread out for miles. Then a 1.5 mile walk across the paved trails through the rock and into the caves created by lava. I use two walking sticks to make sure I don’t twist an ankle, a hip, a knee, or whatever else might come out of joint. And everyone is careful about making sure I don’t misstep. I know they mean well, but I feel about 900 years old right now. Just put me in a backpack and call me Yoda.

A quick lunch and a stop for gas and then we’re bound for Grand Teton National Park 4 hours away. Along the way, we pass several mounds that look like they could have once been volcanic, but haven’t been in a very long time. We also pass signs for the free Atomic Museum and for a Radioactive Waste Management Complex. We’ll take a hard pass on those and keep going.

The scenery changes into beautiful picturesque mountains as we pass Palisade Reservoir. Someone once told me not to travel through southern Idaho because it’s terribly boring and all desert, but this trip has been anything but boring. And anyone who thinks this is boring desert hasn’t traveled New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona desert…

We cross into Wyoming and head for Jackson, where we can stop at Target and pick up the extra blankets I ordered yesterday. One more hour to go! But it’s much less than an hour when we see our first view of the Grand Tetons. They are stunning through and through, especially with the setting sun highlighting their peaks. Opposite the mountains, on the other side of the highway is a herd of bison to welcome us.

Shortly after we arrive at the campground, there’s an enormous backup of cars and people on the side of the road. Nate and I know exactly what this means. There’s likely a bear somewhere in the meadow.

And we’re right.

The bear is a good 500 yards or more away and hardly visible in the high meadow grass. We *think* it’s a black bear, but it’s so far away, it’s hard to tell.

We set up camp quickly when we arrive at our site and do our best to avoid mosquitoes. They are plentiful here. Ugh. Husband starts a fire and we douse ourselves in a light covering of DEET to keep them away. We’ll see. At least two in our party are prone to bites. But the repellant works and we don’t get a single bite!

Dinner consists of dehydrated camp meals around the fire. Then it’s an early bed as the temp drops and we climb beneath the (many, new) blankets for warmth. Only it’s not an early bed because at 8:30, a couple of college kids show up to the site across from ours, shout curses at each other, blare their music, sing (badly), drink, and dance on top of their car and the picnic table. Quiet hours begin at 10, which means everyone in this campground has to listen to this nonsense for at least an hour and a half before we can call a ranger. Remember a few days ago when we were discussing how awesome other campers are? These two are the exception.

I am appalled by the behavior. They could behave this way in their basement back home. Why come to a national park? Why come into nature to blare music, get high, and sing and dance like a couple of knuckleheads? At 9:30, someone finally yells “Give it a rest!” which is much nicer than I would have been had I the gall to speak up. But this hasn’t stopped them at all. Families and campers all through the park are having a miserable experience because these two just keep howling tunelessly into the darkness and everything is “f-ing this” or “f-ing that.”

They continue until exactly 10 pm, which means they know exactly what they’re doing. They came with every intention of intruding on the very solitude and the connection with nature that people come here for. They were here to be awful for an hour and a half before quiet hours started so everyone around them had to hear their “epic jam sesh.” That’s really what they called it (loudly). For the record, their vocals sucked and their air guitar needs a tuning. I hope a bear smells beer on their breath tonight and decides to visit.

P.S. I’ve been slaughtered on Threads for my stodgy old-lady attitude towards these fun-loving kids who were clearly *just* having “safe, harmless fun” in a national park. I “must never have camped in my life if I think this is abnormal behavior.”

At this point, I’m just letting the comments and clicks accumulate. <Gives a bow> Thanks for your help with the social media algorithm. I’m guessing most of these folks have never been in a national park and don’t know anything about camp etiquette. There’s certainly a time and a place for partying and having loud fun. I stand by my statement that a national park isn’t it.

The Race

/ L. Ryan Storms / Leave a comment

Original Post: November 30, 2015

Surely you must think that I’ve died since I have sorely neglected this blog for the past month and a half.  At least part of that is due to NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, a frantic November scurry to get 50,000 words written by each participating aspiring novelist.  As with most Novembers, I failed to meet 50,000 words, having been sidetracked by work, holidays, children, and any number of other excuses, but as of this evening, I have four solid chapters of a novel I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time, so I’ll call that a victory regardless of what anyone else says.  A few more months like that and I’ll have (another) finished novel.

And so, without further ado…

When we last left our hero…oh, wait.  Must change internal settings from “novel” to “blog” writing style.

Leaving Yellowstone, Nate and I were up at 6 am and on the road by 7.  Our initial intentions were to visit Old Faithful before leaving, but there wasn’t much point when the fog looked like this:

Forget Gorillas in the Mist.  We’ve got bison and bears.

Besides, we figured it was only two hours away.  We’d come back later in the day when the weather cleared.  You know you’ve crossed into full on travel mode when a two hour drive one way is considered an easy day-trip.

Our second reason for such an early departure had to do with the fact that attaining a camp site at Jenny Lake Campground at the Grand Tetons is rather akin to this:

Yep, that about sums it up.  I have yet to figure out why any campground would run this way as it causes frustration, anxiety, and disappointed campers.  Jenny Lake Campground lies at the base of the Grand Tetons and often fills up by 9 or 10 am.  We arrived by 9:15 am and found this to be true.  The woman who was handing out paper slips said that we must claim our spot by putting our slip on the post next to the site we wanted. We were there with two or three other folks who had also just arrived, so we grabbed our slip and hopped back in the car immediately.  We found a spot with a packed car that looked ready to leave, so I quickly slipped our paper onto the pole.  Much to my embarrassment, they had just arrived, and were not leaving…  However, they had no slip and didn’t even know that they were supposed to get one.  They left the campsite, and I still felt kind of ‘Indiana Jones’…only with considerably less cool and a bit more remorse since I wasn’t tossing Nazis from a blimp.

The good news is that they were still able to get a campsite – the one right next to ours.  I sheepishly visited at some point to apologize since I just don’t have it in me to ignore an uncomfortably awkward situation.  And this says much since so many of my encounters are uncomfortably awkward.  Thankfully, the family was more than happy to let bygones be bygones.

We got our tent set up quickly enough despite the gloomy weather.  And it was gloomy.  This was not the way I had pictured the Tetons at all.  I’m pretty sure there were supposed to be jagged peaks somewhere under there.

I’m pretty sure there’s peaks under there somewhere.

We spent the day waiting in vain for better weather and when we finally got at least a little less rain, we decide to take a hike.  (Why is that supposed to be a derogatory term?  Next time someone tells me to ‘take a hike,’ I swear I will happily oblige.)  We still got caught in pouring rain on our way back to the camp site, and the hike really only served to whet the appetite for additional adventure, preferably with a little less of a damp atmosphere.  The weather being what it was, we opted not to drive back to Yellowstone just to see Old Faithful.  So, yes, we quite possibly could be the only two people on the face of the planet who visited Yellowstone without seeing Old Faithful.

I fervently hoped that the clouds would clear in time for the evening, at the very least.  While rain makes for some good sleep in a tent, I wanted photos of the night sky with Grand Tetons towering above.

Finally, the sky obeyed!  It was too early for night photos as the setting sun still lit the sky, but Nate started a campfire – our first on the entire trip.  Don’t ask how it took 20 days for us to finally get a campfire going, but it did.  This trip was an on-the-go vacation filled with seeing and doing and running and driving and hiking and complete flat-out exhaustion, with no time for anything else.  A rainy day with slowly clearing skies forced us to slow it down for a day.  The fire was nothing less than welcome.

And of course I have a book.  What else would I be doing by a campfire?

Around 10:45, we headed to a lookout point a few miles away.  (Don’t even get me started on the irony of fighting for a camp site directly at the base of the mountains only to get in the car and drive to where the mountains were some distance away.)

The sky cooperated to a point, and only for about 45 minutes, before we were forced to call it quits for the night and head back to camp, but the pictures I did manage to take convey at least a fairly good impression of what it was like to stand in the open wilderness at the base of the Grand Tetons in the middle of the night.  (Dark, by the way.) 

Another site on the map quite happily checked off.  It was hard to imagine that in just a few days, the entire trip would be finished.  How would I ever return to the “real” world again?  Racing for a campsite is one thing.  Getting back into the rat race?  A whole other animal.