Greetings from Yellowstone National Park

The longest drive our family ever took was to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in June of 2004. We had driven to Washington, D.C. in 2001 (1,500 miles round trip) and New York City in 2002 (1,650 miles round trip), but this was as long as both of those combined. Bridget was 19, Brendan 16, and Brianna 9. Not that it matters, but I was 50 and Ellen 49.

Instead of the typical minimum wage jobs that teenagers usually do, Bridget continued a baby sitting business well into her college years. One of her clients was the Walker family, who lived half a block away from us in the alley (Howard Street). That summer Kelly, then a professor at Roosevelt University, was teaching a class in Environmental Studies at Yellowstone with another professor, Vickie. She asked if Bridget could go with them to baby sit Kailey, who was seven, and Kelly Jane, who was two. The previous year Bridget had gone to Italy with them to babysit the girls. I had wanted to take the kids to the West in general and Yellowstone in particular, so we came up with the idea of the whole Maki family going. I wanted to drive there while I still could. Between global warming concerns, volatility in the oil market, and the peak oil theory, I didn’t know how much longer Americans would be able to take 3,200 mile drives across the country. Already gas was getting expensive, over $2 a gallon in DuPage County. It got cheaper as we drove west, bottoming out at about $1.90 a gallon in Wyoming.

We had bought our third minivan the previous July, a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan. I asked Ellen if she would rather listen to books on tape from the library or the dozens of tapes I had made of Cartalk, the Saturday morning radio car advice show on NPR. To my surprise, she chose the latter. Tom and Ray were our constant cackling companions all the way there and back.

It was the first two consecutive week vacation we had taken since the last time we had driven out west, in the summer of 1984 to see Therese in Denver.

When Brendan came out of the last final exam of his sophomore year of high school, I was waiting in the 1997 Lumina. We drove back to the loaded up minivan and left about Noon. It was his idea to bring two mountain bikes, which we carried on a rack on the back of the van. We took I-88 to Whiteside County, were we picked up U.S. 30, a lightly traveled two lane highway that crossed the Mississippi at Clinton, Iowa, a scenic old river town that had seen better days. We stopped for dinner at a Fazoli’s (one of Ellen’s favorites) in North Central Iowa.

We entered Minnesota on I-35 and took that to I-90. Minnesota should have a sign at the border: entering niceland. We stopped at an I-90 rest area, where Brianna was able to enjoy the only swing set I’ve ever seen in an expressway rest stop.

We tried to find a motel in the southwest corner of the state. The first town either didn’t have any vacancies or didn’t have any motels, I don’t remember which, but the second town, the last exit before South Dakota, had a Day’s Inn (or was it a Motel Six?). Either way, they didn’t just leave the light on for us, but showed us the kind of hospitality that the state is famous for (the technical term is “Minnesota Nice”)* The five of us were in the lobby checking in, and when the 25 year old room clerk from Minneapolis (yes, she was blonde) saw that we had driven all the way from Chicago, she said that the pool normally closes at Ten, so it would now be closing, but she would leave it open for us so that our children could let off steam from being in the car all day. Brianna and I swam, I don’t think the older two did. We did a little over 550 miles that first day, more of it in Iowa than Illinois or Minnesota.

*People in Kansas are also wonderful, but that’s another story that happened the next year when we drove to Denver to see the Rehmanns.

That was the day Reagan died, and it was ironic that we would be spending the night in the only state that didn’t vote for him in his 1984 reelection. They were just being loyal, going with their own Walter Mondale. This broke Nixon’s 1972 electoral vote record, when he won every state except Massachusetts running against George McGovern, who didn’t even carry his own South Dakota.

How coincidental that in the morning we drive into SD. Much of the time when an interstate highway crosses a state border there will be a tourist information center. To the annoyance of my family, I love to stop at these facilities. We talk to Cathy, a very short older woman. We ask what we should see in South Dakota on our way to Wyoming. She says three things: The falls of the Sioux River, which gave the largest town in the state its name, Badlands National Park, and, of course, Mount Rushmore. She gives us a brochure of motels in the Rapid City area and suggests that, after all that, we spend the night in her fine but lightly populated state (46th of the 50).

Her advice was excellent.

America gets drier and less populated as you head west, and the difference is stark in South Dakota when you cross the Missouri River, which cuts the state in half. To the east are corn fields and greenery, to the west is the occasional ranch and dry badlands. Soon we came to the National Park of that name. This is not a place to stay for a week, but an excellent place to drive through, perhaps a day or two hiking. Like so many places, pictures can’t do it justice. We could have spent more time at the Park’s visitor’ center. Actually we could have spent more time in both the park and the state, but we had people we had to meet the next day, and miles to go before we sleep.

In the summer of 1999 Chicago really started something with the cows. Life size cows were on sidewalks all over downtown Chicago, each painted or decorated differently. In 2001 St. Paul had creatively decorated six foot Peanuts characters on its sidewalks (Charles Schultz was from there). The road to Mt. Rushmore went through downtown Rapid City, where there were larger than life statues of all the presidents. I was surprised how many I recognized, even Martin Van Buren.

When we get to the six story parking garage at Mt. Rushmore and paid the parking attendant the $8 fee, I made a comment, which I meant to be in jest, about how, now that Reagan died we can put him up there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. The man, in his 30’s, shook his head and said, that’s what everyone coming in here has been saying all day, let’s put Reagan on Mt. Rushmore. They don’t understand the geology. They can’t put another face up there, the rock isn’t stable enough.

Mt. Rushmore really was amazing and impressive, and the visitor’s center explained how it came to be.

It doesn’t impress everyone. In the summer of 1968, my Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane brought my grandparents on their drive to California from Green Bay by way of Mt. Rushmore. I asked my grandfather what he thought of it, and he said that it looks just like it does in the pictures. He couldn’t see the point of driving all that way when, for him, the pictures suffices. Some people aren’t travelers.

I needed to call Steve Gabrielson about the car that Brendan had just bought, and thought it would be cool to call him on my cell phone from Mt. Rushmore. The Durey family lived a few blocks away and had a black 1992 Eagle Talon that had been sitting in their garage for years. The brakes were so bad that it couldn’t be driven, and the battery had gone dead. Brendan wanted to buy it, and I agreed with two stipulations. He would bear all costs (he had a job at 360 Skate shop) and Steve, our friend and mechanic, would have to agree that the car would be worth repairing. Steve said that we should buy a new battery. If the car started, then have it towed in and he would take a look at it. Brendan only paid $50 for the car, the battery was more than that. They just wanted the car out of their garage.

Renee, the owner of 360 skate shop, had a friend who operated a tow truck and would give Brendan a deal on the tow to Steve’s shop in Hillside. The problem was that Steve said that the car hadn’t yet been towed in, but it eventually got there by the time we got back.

One of the Cartalk episodes that day was about a woman in Queens, New York who had a kept a Mazda Miata convertible in her garage for years and was wondering what to do with it. Tom and Ray said to give it to the nearest teenager, which was her nephew. They also suggested buying a new battery.

We had a schedule to keep, so we ignored Cathy’s advice about finding a South Dakota motel and drove into Wyoming as the sun was setting. The only other time Ellen and I had been in either SD or WY was the 1984 trip out west, the kids had never driven west of the Twin Cities.

Wyoming is a sparse, desolate land, dead last in population of the 50 states even though it is the 9th largest in land area. We did less than 600 miles that second day, which is pretty good considering all the scenic detours we made. Due to the great distances in the west the Interstate highway speed limit is 75, but people go 85 to 90. I was just keeping up with traffic, what little there was. On I-90 through utter emptiness Brianna wondered whether we would have to sleep in the minivan, as there was no evidence of any towns. We eventually came to Gillette, which had a chain motel like before. The proprietor was from India, and remarked about how rich the state was in natural resources, all it lacked was people, who are outnumbered by the sheep. In the morning we saw a Burlington coal train coming out of the Powder River Basin. If Wyoming was a separate country it would rank fourth in coal reserves, behind Russia, China, and the other 49 states. It is the lower quality sub bituminous and lignite coal, but electric utilities like it for its low sulfur content.

In the morning we left I-90 for a two lane highway that paralleled a river. Due to irrigation from the river, there was green farmland for a quarter mile on either side, then dusty brownness beyond. Eventually we get to Cody, the nearest town worthy of the name east of Yellowstone. West of town we stop at the visitor’s center for the impressive Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshone River. There is so little water out west, they have to dam it up and save every drop.

Yellowstone is huge, the largest national park in the lower 48 states (there are larger ones in Alaska), and is the oldest, set up in 1872 when Ulysses Grant was president. It has a special place in America’s consciousness. Yogi, smarter than the average bear, used to steal picnic baskets in Jellystone Park. I learned how to pronounce geyser from slogan on a brand of potato chips popular during the Kennedy Administration, Be Wiser, Buy Geyser potato chips. There was a bear cub on the top of a water spout holding a bag of the chips. Entering the Park from the East gate, we drive by Yellowstone Lake and meet the Walkers at a restaurant near Mammoth Hot Springs. They had the good sense to fly to Salt Lake City and rent a Chevrolet Venture minivan. They are staying at a cabin inside the Park, but we have reservations at the Wolf Lodge Motel in West Yellowstone, Montana. It is the first time in Big Sky Country* for all five of us. We only do a little over 400 miles that third day, which makes the trip there about 1,550 miles. West Yellowstone reminded me of Mackinaw City, a small town surrounded by woods where the motel rooms outnumber the residents and the big attraction isn’t the town itself but what’s next to it.

*I think of Andy Rooney’s rant, how it has the same sky as the other 49 states.

Yellowstone has national forests, plus Grand Teton, on all four sides, with no fences to get in the way of the animal’s movements. Many have called it America’s Serengeti. In the morning we drive in to the park and soon encounter a bear jam, the generic term when all cars coming to a stop to see animals, with the people getting out to take pictures. It can be a bear (either brown or grizzly), but is more likely to be moose, elk, or buffalo. We saw a mangy coyote along the road that was attracted by the stopped cars. They are suffering from the successful reintroduction of the wolf into the Northern Rockies. Coyotes are solitary animals, smaller than a wolf, and don’t stand a chance against a pack of wolves.

The park didn’t feel crowded. It’s so big that even if there were a lot of people they get spread out pretty thin. The other visitors were unfailingly pleasant. It’s not just that they are on vacation, but for most they are going on a once in lifetime adventure. Even before high gas prices has been keeping people from traveling, attendance at national parks has been going down. We have become a sedentary society, hunkered down in our electronic cocoons.

The National Park system really is a great bargain. I bought an annual family pass at the Badlands for less than $50, and that gets my family into as many parks as I want for the next 12 months. That’s less than $10 per person.

Mid June is a cold time of year in the northern Rockies. The elevation is between 5,000 and 9,000 feet, and it snowed often while we were there. Since these mountains are the West’s water towers, that is a good thing. The continental divide goes right through the park and its environs. The Yellowstone and Shoshone rivers flow into the Missouri, and the Snake into the Columbia. The first white men to see Yellowstone weren’t believed when they made it back to civilization and told stories about the mud pots and geysers. While there are other places, like Siberia’s Kamchetka peninsula, that have some active geologic features, there is nothing like this in the world.

That evening Brendan and I took the mountain bikes out for a ride, but, not being used to the thin mile high air, I got winded sooner than I expected. For supper we found a pizza/Italian food joint a few blocks from our motel that we went to almost every night. I asked the waitress if she was a local, and she said that her and her husband had moved up from Arizona. I asked her if she was inspired by the Frank Zappa song “Moving to Montana soon, going to be a dental floss tycoon”. To my surprise, she said her husband actually was.

With finding lunch inside the park inconvenient that first day (one doesn’t go to Yellowstone for the food), I made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at continental breakfast every morning, and that was my lunch.

The motel had a parking garage under the rooms so you didn’t have to go outside to get into your car. This resulted from the fact that the motel was built for the snowmobile tourist, the summer visitors just helps the place make money.

One day Kelly brings us to listen to Mr. Ranger talk. In the discussion afterwards I ask about the support the park service gets from Washington. He says it’s never very good, they couldn’t survive without private donors. He gestures to the big bowl filling up with donations, and then says that while the Democrats are a little better than the Republicans, the best friend the National Parks ever had in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt was Gerald Ford, who was an Eagle Scout and worked as a park ranger during the summers when he was going to college.

The hot springs, mud pots, geysers, steam vents and boiling lakes are as interesting as the animals. Watching steam come out of the ground was as mesmerizing as a campfire, but the geysers were the drama queens. There is real danger here, people who stay off the designated pathways are asking for trouble. The geologic features change over time and are constantly monitored by the park staff. There was one area that had been closed off due to shifting activity. Over time, geysers die and new ones begin. My favorite, a tough choice to be sure, was the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its spectacular waterfall at the upstream end. I wished I could have walked on the trails and gotten closer to the waterfall, or gotten to the floor of the canyon. The trails left from the parking lot, which was at the edge of the cliff looking down into the canyon. Some people say that 90% of national park visitors don’t go more than 100 yards from their car, others say that 99% don’t go more than a mile from their vehicle. No wonder, you can see a huge amount of the park by staying on the shorter trails, which are built to go to almost all of the attractions that people want to see. One day Bridget, Brendan & I walked on a trail for almost a mile, but that didn’t change the 90%/99% numbers.

All over the greater Yellowstone area I saw a large number of Winnebago/RV vehicles, all of them driven by people who appeared to be retired. I talked to as many as I could, and these were some serious long distance travelers. Many had spent the winter in Florida and were now expressing their wanderlust.

No visit to Yellowstone is complete without a visit to Old Faithful. There are benches in circle a safe distance from the water spout, with a clock ticking down the time to the next eruption. Some people watched it multiple times, but once was enough for most people.

Right by Old Faithful was a lodge (hotel) made out of big, old growth timbers with a huge, two or three story cavernous lobby.

There was much evidence of the great forest fire of 1988, which was finally put out by the September snows. The charred trees are still standing, the rangers don’t touch them at all but are letting nature take its course. It’s going to take decades more for the woods to grow back.

The Idaho border was a little over 10 miles west of our motel, so when we left for Teton Village I drove west down U.S. 20 (even though it was in the exact opposite direction from where we were going) until I came to the Welcome to Idaho sign. I made sure that I had my picture taken standing behind the sign to prove that I was in the Potato State. When anyone asks my about my trip to Idaho, I tell them about their welcoming sign. Even now, of all the states I’ve been in, it is the one I’ve spent the least amount of time in.

We had to drive through Yellowstone again to get to Teton Village. There was an ornate wooden Yellowstone National Park sign at the West Yellowstone entrance, with a constant stream of tourists waiting for their turn to have their picture taken in front of the sign. This last time we got in line, taking the pictures of the group in front of us and having our pictures taken by the group behind us. That night I shaved my beard. It was about a 10 day growth, grey and straggly. As you can see in our picture, I don’t look good in a beard, and it was really starting to bother Brianna.

Even though Grand Teton National Park is just South of Yellowstone (separated by a thin silver of a National Forest), they deserve to be separate parks as Grand Teton is geologically dead, with these massive mountains that suddenly jut out from the high plateau without foothills.

We had reservations at a motel in Teton Village, which is a small cluster of lodging, stores, and condo’s (possibly timeshares) at the bottom of a ski slope, south of the park itself and outside of Jackson Hole, WY. The chairlift is making money bringing Bridget, Brendan, and some of the Walkers to the top, where there was still a lot of snow. The place had an uncrowded off season feel to it. We go into town to have dinner at an authentic western BBQ restaurant. Since our hotel room has a kitchen, we go grocery shopping at Albertson’s, a clone of Jewel.

Brendan said that his favorite part of the trip was the next day, whitewater rafting down the Snake River. Ellen and Dave Walker stay with the three young girls while Kelly, Bridget, Brendan, and me don our helmets and life jackets to brave the cataracts under the tutelage of a trained professional, a twenty something perpetual college student from Massachusetts.

The clear, dark sky and the high elevation make for excellent star viewing. One night most of us drive into the flat part of the Park. I had brought a telescope, but I don’t know how to find anything with it, so naked eye viewing was better.

One morning I ride one of the bikes until I find an old west stage show and cavernous dining hall. Coming back I meet Brendan on his way to going where I had been. That night we all go there for dinner & the show, formulamatic but still enjoyable, with a lot of corny jokes.

On Wednesday morning it is time to leave. Mapquest advised I-90 through South Dakota, but my Rand McNally CD suggested I-94 through North Dakota. I learned from my dad the habit of coming back a different way, so that’s what we did. ND, 48th in population, receives the least visitors of any of the 50 states, and we had a chance to add another state to our list without really going out of our way.

We drive through both parks, leaving at the Eastern entrance where we first came in a week ago. At Cody we turn north to take a two lane highway to join I-94 west of Billings. New Orleans may be the big easy, but Montana is the big empty. Fourth largest of the 50 states, even today with Ted Turner and the California crowd buying ranches it has less than a million people, 44th in population. I should have taken a picture of the no services exit ramps. Every so often out west there will be a dirt road perpendicular to an expressway that has an interchange. At the exit will be the No Services sign. As far as the eye can see down the dirt road in both directions there is nothing. No buildings of any kind, no vehicles, just uncultivated scubland.

Even at 85 MPH Montana seems to go on forever, but late in the afternoon we enter North Dakota. The town of Beach, right on the border, has no vacancies, so we drive to Mendora, the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. There is a pool table in the lobby of our motel, and after dinner Brendan & I play a game, with Brianna the spectator. I thought I would show Brendan how stripes and solids is played, and I do make it down to just the eight ball when Brendan has two or three balls left. Soon, there is just the eight ball left, and Brendan puts it in.

I explore the town by mountain bike and end up having a couple of beers at a uniquely Western bar with exposed wooden timbers. Of course I have a Coors, but the West has an up and coming microbrew industry. My favorite is Fat Tire, brewed in Fort Collins, Colorado. I had it on tap out west, and it tastes better than the bottles you can get in Chicago. While I don’t talk to anyone, there is a welcoming tone to the place, the patrons happy to see another face. There are so few people that live in the West that the locals try to be nice.*

*During our 1984 trip when we cut through Wyoming on our way to Denver, just after one P.M. the road went down from the plateau into a valley, where we find a small town with a buffet table restaurant. Their lunch crowd had left, and the place’s employees seemed genuinely thrilled to see one last group of customers to sample the table they had spent such effort to put together.

In the morning I try to talk my family into visiting the National Park across town. We have season passes, it would cost us nothing, and this would make four parks in one trip. They read the brochure, and determine that it is a clone of Badlands National Park, and outvote me 4 to 1. They just want to get home. This in no way infers that North Dakota is a clone, or twin, of South Dakota. Historically, the two states have never gotten along. While the big Missouri River connects them, the main arteries of the railroad and the highways are east-west. These parallel corridors in each state were a detriment to interaction between the two Dakotas, and they seem to prefer it that way.

Brendan especially wants to get home, eager to take the test for his driving license and, hopefully, drive his repaired Eagle Talon. We hop on I-94 and don’t get off until Fargo. Then we cross the Red River, which separates ND and Minnesota. Other than I-35 from the Twin Cities to Duluth, I had never been this far north in the North Star State. I expected to be going through the North Woods, second or third growth forests where Paul Bunyon and his buddies chopped down the old growth 100 years ago. Instead, it was all agricultural land. Except of course, for the lakes. We saw dozens between the Red River (unusual for a river, it flows north) and the Twin Cities. Their license plates say 10,000 lakes, but there are actually over 13,000. Typical understated Minnesotian modesty. These are not Texas type braggarts.

We stop for dinner at a Big Boy/Denney’s type restaurant in St. Cloud. The waitress exudes warmth, and the manager even stops by to make small talk as we are too early for the supper crowd. More Minnesota nice.

Between July of 1993 and Labor Day 2001 we had gone to Mall of America half a dozen times. Brendan and I went for the hockey equipment, Ellen & the girls had their own agendas. Driving through the Twin Cities metro area as the sun was setting (near the summer solstice, this far north, it’s fairly late in the day) I suggest that we find a motel and do the mall in the morning, but Brendan advocates crossing into Wisconsin, our ninth and final state. Hudson is at the border, where we find a motel with a swimming pool. This is the only day of the entire trip that we drive over 600 miles (not by much), and also the only day that we drive entirely on an expressway.

The final day coming home is about 375 miles, familiar territory through Wisconsin and then the Northwest Tollway through Illinois. We finally run out of Cartalk tapes.

We had left the previous week’s Monday, and it is now Friday. This is the longest we had been gone from our house since April of 1986, when we moved in. Lots of phone messages to listen and reply to, emails to read, and big grocery bags of mail taken in by our neighbor, Charlotte Fitzgibbons a retiree who later moved to Las Vegas, Nevada.

And, of course, the next morning Brendan & I go to the Secretary of State’s office and he gets his drivers license.

Yellowstone National Park is a caldera. Pictures taken from high above show that it is a volcanic crater surrounded by a ring of mountain ridges. It has been erupting about every 600,000 years, and last erupted 640,000 years ago, when it left a pile of ash six feet deep as far away as Chicago. One hopes that the park is gradually migrating away from the hot spot, the source of the magma.

Much has been written about this dormant, if not active supervolcano. The Travel Channel had a program on the top 10 dangers to mankind, things like nuclear war, global warming, asteroids or comets hitting the Earth, pandemics, etc. In their view the number one menace to mankind was the explosion of the Yellowstone caldera. The Earth has not seen a major volcanic eruption since Krakatoa in 1883, and that was nowhere near a supereruption.

About a year later the Discovery Channel produced a fictional miniseries on what happens when the Yellowstone caldera erupts, which I tape. We watch it with the Walkers.

Sincerely,
David