Arizona to Alaska and Back through 24 National Parks: The Mother of all RoadTrips!

[Rick Quinn]

Day 52: Thursday, August 13th

We got an early start out of Helena, and made short work of the drive south to West Yellowstone: I-15 to MT-69, MT-69 to MT-2, and MT-2 to US 287, which took us on to our destination, all in just under three hours. That put us at the gateway to the National Park by about 10:30 in the morning, and our first rather urgent order of business was figuring out where we’d be staying the night.


Click here for this RTA Library Map
(This map shows Rick's route between Helena and West Yellowstone, Montana.)

Hotels and campgrounds in and around all popular National Parks are booked solid throughout the peak season of the summer months; that’s especially true at Yellowstone, but we were traveling without a fixed itinerary, so we had NOT planned ahead. We stopped at the West Yellowstone Visitor Information Center, and I asked what had become my standard question: were there any first-come, first-served sites for tent camping available anywhere in the area? They directed us to a National Forest campground called Baker’s Hole, just 3 miles away up US 191, and sure enough, right at that moment, there were at least a dozen people packing away their gear and leaving spaces up for grabs. We snagged a good one, and set up the tent to solidify our claim on it. Then we headed for the park!

Yellowstone N.P. was a bucket list item for me, one of a whole set of “must-see before I die” destinations that were getting checked off, one after another, as the Mother of All Road Trips roared along into the home stretch. I was going to be back in Arizona in less than a week, and I really wanted to make the most of these last few days, to wrap up this epic journey on a high note! The fee station at Yellowstone’s West Entrance had four lanes, and all of them were backed up with long lines of travelers eager to begin their adventures in this one-of-a-kind place. At least half of the vehicles were big RV’s, and it seemed to be taking everyone forever to perform the simple action of paying their fee, collecting their park brochures, and moving along! When my turn finally came, I handed over my Senior Pass, along with my driver’s license. No wasted motion, no idle chit-chat, and we were out of there in less than 30 seconds, with big smiles all around. There are 142 miles of roadway in Yellowstone, and I wanted to drive them all!

Due to seasonal road closures (snow, mud, road construction, etc.) some of the maps displayed in this thread are not displaying properly or you might see pop-up windows reporting errors found with the route. Unfortunately, the map data used to create these maps enforces these "Time-outs" if a particular road segment is closed. In the case of the pop-up windows (alerts), please click the "OK" or "Close" button and the rest of the page will display properly. In the case on some of the maps where the route seems all jammed up -- reloading the page where the map is displaying seems to solve the issue. All of these problems go away once the winter closures of the roads end. So, everything will look fine in the North American summer months.


Click here for this RTA Library Map

On our way into the park along US 20, we pulled over at the overlook for Gibbon Falls, one of many beautiful cascades in this amazing place. The view was well worth the quick stop:


Gibbon Falls! Note the tiny people at the upper left; that's a river down below them, not a babbling brook, so this waterfall is actually quite a big deal

Next, we drove north toward the Norris Geyser basin, stopping at most of the turnouts for attractions like Beryl Spring, a hot spring with clear, translucent water the color of blue sapphire. I’d seen hot springs before, but never anything like this!


Beryl Spring, Gibbon Geyser Basin

The water was bubbling like a pan of boiling water on a hot stove, and there were clouds of steam hissing from natural vents in the earth, like something you might expect to see in the caldera of an active volcano. In truth, that’s exactly what this is: the heart of Yellowstone National Park is the massive crater of a super-volcano that’s blown, catastrophically, on at least three different occasions, the most recent eruption a mere 630,000 years ago. There is still a massive hot-spot comprised of molten rock--magma--which is unusually close to the surface beneath the forty-mile wide caldera, and it’s that huge pocket of magma that generates the heat that boils up the geysers and fuels the hot springs.

Altogether, the park contains almost 10,000 distinct geothermal features, representing half of the known geysers, hot springs, mud volcanoes, and bubbling multi-colored pools in the entire world! Doomsayers have long held the opinion that the ongoing volcanic activity in the aging caldera is a sure indication that another super-eruption is due, if not overdue, and that when it blows, it’s going to take out half the country and put an end to life on earth as we know it. The rest of us don’t worry too much about that sort of thing. We simply enjoy and marvel at all the hissing and bubbling and bursting forth of these amazing geysers, mud volcanoes, and multi-colored pools, most of them surrounded by other-worldly accretions of calcified minerals, unlike anything you’ll ever see, anywhere else on the planet.

From Beryl Spring we drove on to the Artists paint-pots, where we saw, among other things, bubbling vats of superheated mud.


Mudpots, Artists Paintpots trail, Yellowstone N.P.

One of the true crowd-pleasing favorites in the Norris Geyser Basin was a spectacular pool called the Emerald Spring. The rocks lining the pool are colored yellow with a coating of Sulphur. When viewed through the clear blue water of the hot spring, the two colors combine to form a translucent green that’s as bright as any precious gemstone.


Emerald Spring, Norris Geyser Basin


Many of the more exotic color schemes come from heat-loving microbes that make their home in the perpetually warm waters of the thermal springs

We drove the north loop of the park road to Mammoth Hot Spring. That popular area was uncomfortably crowded, so we didn't stop, we just kept going, enjoying the extraordinary scenic views. Two of the overlooks that we dug the most were Tower Falls, which plunges 130 feet straight down into a beautiful gorge, 1,000 yards upstream from a confluence with the Yellowstone River:


Tower Falls

And then there was the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, where we got a stupendous view of the beautiful canyon formed by the Yellowstone River, with lower Yellowstone Falls just visible at the top of the frame.


Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, with Lower Yellowstone Falls at the top

After completing the north loop, we drove back out of the park the same way we’d come in, back to West Yellowstone, where we grabbed a bite to eat, and then headed to our National Forest campground at Baker’s Hole. It was a clear night, only a day away from the new moon, so the pitch-black sky came alive with stars, the Milky Way gleaming like a river of light across the dark expanse. Our timing was flawless: as we watched, there was a shower of meteors arcing across the scene like celestial fireworks, reminding us, in no uncertain terms, exactly how small we really are. When that truly amazing cosmic display petered to a halt, we crawled back into the tent and burrowed into our sleeping bags. Temperatures that night dropped very close to freezing, which was frigidly close to the limit for my old down bag, a relic from my youthful travels that was still serving me reasonably well after almost 45 years!


Dark skies, brightly lit tent, and a memorable evening just outside Yellowstone National Park

Next up: Geyser day in Yellowstone, and on to the Grand Tetons