Road to Yellowstone

 Pictures only…..description to follow…

This is written in third person. (Sort of) We is used, but not I.

Missoula

It took a bit of research to plan our trip to Yellowstone. Not only trying to figure out what to see in the park and how to navigate the park, but also in figuring out how to get there and where to stay.

Our destination was Gardiner Montana where we booked four nights in the Roosevelt Motel. It was easier to find four consecutive nights in one hotel, than it was to plan different nights in different places within the park. 

We used Google to plan a route from Nelson to Gardiner and had an overnight in Missoula. Then Brent programmed the route, with a number of waypoints, into the GPS in the car. The result was a rather backroad tour. (Coming back we programmed the destination into the GPS only, and it took us on a more direct route home).

We stayed at the C’mon Inn in Missoula. It’s a very log cabin like hotel. The interior and exterior was absolutely beautiful. Lots of hot tubs. They were everywhere.

The bears were very cute.

A waterfall 

Big Sky Country (although the sky is not as big as the prairies of Saskatchewan)

The Roosevelt Motel. A much newer hotel than most in Gardiner.

We had to try the bison bratwurst and the elk bratwurst.

We had a $12 bison bratwurst in the park, this is the $14.95 elk bratwurst in Gardiner….that’s USD

Elk everywhere. This is beside our motel.

The gateway to Yellowstone. One of several entrances to the park. Gardiner is the North Entrance.

The Roosevelt Gate. The original entrance to the park.

The road in Yellowstone Park is laid out as two big loops. A smaller northern loop and a larger souther loop. Depending on which entrance you go through, there is a drive to get to that loop. From the Gardiner entrance it was about 30 minutes.

We arrived in Gardiner with enough time to check into the hotel and head to the park for a few hours. We decided to see Mammoth Hot Springs and the Lamar Valley.

These next few pictures are a little single lane, one way, road that travels for about a km through this rock formation. It is one of many little attractions off the side of the main loops in the park.

This is a petrified tree. We took the picture but didn’t get out to have a closer look.

Mammoth Hot Springs: the word mammoth doesn’t quite do justice to the size of this spot.

We walked along one of the many boardwalks through the hot springs. You could make a day of it and probably not see all of this attraction 

A sample of the boardwalks

More elk. This is in the townsite of Mammoth.

The roads in the park, the ones on the loops and not on the loops are all windy and slow, with lots of pullouts for watching wildlife, and lots of people not using the pullouts to view the wildlife. We put the adaptive cruise control on, and set out attitude to extreme relaxation and just enjoyed every slow motion moment of it all.