As I sit here to write this post, I am reminded of how lucky Scott and I are to be on this trip. In just 1 short week, we have seen an amazing amount of the country, and still have so much to see!

On Day 5 of our trip, we work up pretty early in the Walmart parking lot. Neither of us slept very well as there was a lot of noise, but at least we were somewhere safe for the night. We headed out around 6:00 AM (Scott’s doing, not mine 😉 ), to finish our journey to Yellowstone National Park. This would be the first place in our trip where we would be staying a few days instead of having to pack the camper up and move it.

Along the road, we kept seeing all the signs denoting creeks, trails, etc that were around us. A common theme in these places were that many of them had “Crazy Woman” in the title. IE Crazy Woman Creek and Crazy Woman Crossing. I tried looking up the significance of calling everything “crazy woman,” and didn’t find much for why it’s named that. However, I did discover that this area is historic for the Battle of Crazy Woman in 1866. There was a huge battle between the Lakota tribes and settlers, in which the end result was a treaty and the United States pulled out of this territory after 1868.

We took the Cloud Peak Skyway to get through the Bighorn National Forest. This was our first siting of real mountains. The peak of this road was Powder River Pass, which was at 9666 ft in elevation. Here’s our camper looking good on top of the mountain!

 

While through the mountains, we passed through Cody, WY. This was a cute little town, that clearly had some touristy things to do. We kept driving, and saw tons of cool scenery. Rock slides, rivers cutting their way through the mountains, and so much SNOW!

 

We got to Yellowstone National Park through the East entrance. If anyone reading this is planning on visiting Yellowstone later this year, DO NOT go through this entrance. While we eventually saw a lot of cool things and beautiful scenery, there is TONS of construction along this way including being stopped for one lane traffic. Not fun while hauling a camper! The construction is supposed to last for a while.

Once we got into the heart of Yellowstone, we stopped at Yellowstone Lake. This is the largest body of water in Yellowstone. It sits 7,732 feet above sea level, and covers 136 square miles. The greatest depth of the lake is about 400 feet deep. Yellowstone Lake is also the largest freshwater lake above 7,000 feet in North America. The Yellowstone River flows in and out of this lake.

Yellowstone Lake was formed 600,000+ years ago when the magma chamber under the Yellowstone area collapsed and formed a large caldera. Much of this caldera was filled with later lava flows, but part of it is the basin of the lake. Basically, when you are in Yellowstone, you are on top of a volcano!

Scott will make fun of me, but I still cannot get over the amount of devastation from forest fires that we have seen in Yellowstone. I looked it up, and back in the 80s there was a fire that burned 36% of the park. There have also been many fires since then. There are also TONS of white birch trees, which we don’t really see much in Ohio! Scott hates that I keep talking about it 😉 He won’t let go the fact that there is a lot of trees with damage from pronghorn and elk rubbing their antlers. He believes this is caused by bears scratching their behinds against the tree. I guess we both have things we find fascinating about Yellowstone that we can’t let go!

 

After the lake, we visited the Mud Volcano area. We also tried to see the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, but too many people had parked their small vehicles in the oversized parking area, so we couldn’t park. We plan on seeing that later in our trip. We also visited the Norris Geyser Basin, which had views of some pretty cool geysers and hot springs. It’s weird to see so much greenery around you and then come up on something like this.

We headed to our campground, at Henrys Lake State Park in Idaho, about 18 miles outside of Yellowstone. We passed through Montana briefly, so combined with Idaho, we were now at 9 states in 5 days! I will talk more about our campsite in a later post, but anyone coming to this area to camp should definitely check this campground out! We are surrounded by mountains and a huge lake. We could stay here forever!

Check out photos from our first day in Yellowstone, and be on the lookout for our next post where we visit the Grand Tetons and explore more of Yellowstone!