Yellowstone Trip Introduction
Yellowstone Trip
Me and my family have always been adventurous. We live in North Carolina so it is never hard to find a park, a beach, or a trail to explore. We have ventured to every nook and cranny of our beloved state, but for a senior trip, we decided to test our luck in the Wild West. That’s right: Yellowstone.
→SOME BACKGROUND ON YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK←
Yellowstone National Park is America’s, and the World’s, first National Park. The very beginning of America’s Greatest Idea. It encompasses some 3500 square miles of the Wyoming wilderness. It is home to a variety of species, most amazing the American Bison. In fact, Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where this amazing species have lived continuously since prehistoric times. Roaming alongside these fluffy giants are elk (AKA wapiti), wolves, moose, and bears. Not only is the megafauna of Yellowstone breathtaking, but so is the habitat in which they live. From geysers formed by North America’s largest supervolcano to Yellowstone Lake, the geography of the park is amazingly diverse. All in all, it is a must see for any wandering soul.
→OUR ROUTE←
The planner that I am, I began mapping out our route months prior to us even setting a date. Our main goal was Yellowstone but knowing that this is a rare trip for us to take, we wanted to see as much as we possibly could. One really helpful tool that I used while planning our trip was our National Parks Passport. The passport comes with a fold out map that lets you see where every national park service site is. This came in handy as our plan was to visit as many passport locations as possible.
As there are very many NPS sites out west, it came down to picking a choosing which one we wanted to see. I made out a list of sites and we sat down as a family to decide which ones were an absolute. There were also additional historical places and attractions that were a must, but I will include those in a later post.
Here is a list of the ones we ultimately decided to go to in no particular order:
Great Smokey Mountains NP, Lincoln Boyhood N MEM, Jefferson Expansion Memorial AKA Gateway Arch, Harry S. Truman NHS, Minuteman Missile NHS, Badlands NP, Mount Rushmore N MEM, Devils Tower NM, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Yellowstone NP, John D Rockefeller Jr. Memorial PKWY, Grand Teton NP, Lewis and Clark NHT, Oregon NHT
While visiting every National Park site is our ultimate goal, we realized that with time and money constraints that these were the sites we wanted to visit above anything else.
This is the route we ultimately decided to take:
We had a very long trip ahead of us!
→ACCOMADATIONS ←
Seeing as we have never taken a cross country trip before, we did not exactly know how to approach accommodations. Also travelling amid the COVID-19 outbreak made things even more uncertain. Ultimately, we decided to wing it. As we travelled, we would estimate about where we would be at the end of the day. Around 6 o’clock in the evening we would then find a hotel within 30 minutes to an hour of where we were at at that moment. Then, we would call the hotels we found nearby and see if that had any vacancies. This unpredictable plan proved to be foolproof. We found accommodations every night that we were travelling. The only rooms we reserved we the ones we stayed at while we were in Yellowstone. For those 5 nights we were there we stayed in a town called Island Park, Idaho. While it is about a 45 minute drive from the Yellowstone West Entrance, we eliminated any wait at the entrance by waking up early to enter the park before the crowding began. I will include pictures and more details about our Yellowstone accommodations in another post.
Thank you for reading, I will continue our Yellowstone adventure in more post so please follow if you would like to hear more!