Day 049: Jellystone!

Pic: Perfect place for a pic-a-nic basket. West Thumb, Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone NP, WY. Larger image

The tricky part of Yellowstone, the crown jewel of the national park system, is accommodations. Reservable campsites are booked months in advance. First-come-first-served sites involve getting up super early, waiting in line, and hoping. Motels in the small pockets of civilization surrounding the valley are expensive. Lodges within the park are even more expensive and are booked months in advance.

My secret weapon was backpacking. The requirement to carry everything you need a few miles into the woods is an effective filter for most visitors. With help from the volunteer at the backcountry office and a list I found of easy Yellowstone backpacking trips, I procured Friday and Saturday nights at Grebe Lake

That left me two nights to take care of. I slid over to West Thumb where I enjoyed a mud pot in the parking lot, followed by a quick 2 miles and 400′ to Yellowstone Lake Overlook. There were some minor thermal features, but the big win was the view of Yellowstone Lake — which is enormous! — fringed by distant clumps of mountains. By the time I got back to the car, I had done some math and realized I didn’t have time to do anything but head to the east side and look for camping.

Pic: Puddle of Mudd. Mud pot, West Thumb parking lot, Yellowstone NP, WY

The trip across the park’s absurd breadth left me just enough light to visit every forest road between the east entrance and the town of Wapiti. Result: zero camping. Many roads on the map were so small that I never discovered them (perhaps some turnouts on the highway were listed as “roads”?). More obvious roads were gated off within a half-mile, where camping was not legal or practical. The last road that could reach public land, listed as CR-406 in Google maps but signed CR-4B7 in real life, headed several miles into the hills but ended abruptly at someone’s driveway with clear signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING.

Defeated, I returned to a “developed” campground I’d passed up earlier where I paid $10 for a gravel pad, access to a vault toilet, no sun shelter, and no water. As the moon rose over the highway, forty miles from anything and with a huge park for me to start exploring in the morning, it seemed like a bargain.