Day 1 – Bozeman, MT to Gros Ventre Campground, Grand Teton National Park, WY

We got a late start on the first day of our trip across the country. After dropping off the leftovers from my fridge that we couldn’t bring ourselves to consume (the half gallon of chocolate milk didn’t make it) we hopped onto I90 and turned east. It always amazes me that from Bozeman I could drive east on I90 and never change highways until I got to Boston. The fact that there is one single, connected ribbon of road that travels all the way across the country from Boston to Seattle, passing through Bozeman, boggles my mind. One road. One long-ass road, but still just one road.

In Livingston, after only a bare half an hour on the road we made our first pit stop. The greasy offerings of Arby’s were too hard to pass up. After dinner, we continued down US89 through the Paradise Valley (click the link for an excellent photo of Paradise Valley on 500px by Jeff Clow) and into Gardiner, MT. We passed through the iconic Roosevelt Arch and into Yellowstone National Park.

Unfortunately, due to high water caused by the insane amounts of snowfall in the high peaks of the Rockies this year, the Boiling River was closed. We continued down the road to Mammoth Hot Springs and checked out the thermal features. There was a small killdeer poking around in a pool of water near one of the springs.

This was also my first chance at really using my new lens I picked up last fall. The 100-200mm reach on the lens really helped to bring wildlife, such as the killdeer above, closer into my shots. The manual focus took a while to get used to but when properly focused the photos are quite sharp and the bokeh is nice. Having to run the camera on full manual mode also took some getting used to and I blew what would have been an awesome set of pictures of a cinnamon black bear a few miles up the road.

From Mammoth Hot Springs we continued south along the park roads, stopping all over the place for wildlife and landscape opportunities. At one point, just as the sun was setting, we drove up on a parking lot on the edge of a meadow with several buffalo grazing. A small low stream was running across the meadow and just as the light from the sunset began to reflect off the water the buffalo slowly made their way through the stream. I’d almost driven right by but all the elements of the scene really came together by chance.

The sun finally went down and we made the rest of the drive through Yellowstone and into Grand Teton National Park in the dark. Huge snowbanks surrounded the road on all sides as we steadily gained elevation and crossed into Tetons. There was no moon and although we could see the shadows of the high peaks of the Tetons off to the left we couldn’t make out any detail. The snow gradually melted away as we lost elevation and finally around 11:30 PM we pulled into Gros Ventre campground, converted the Subaru into chalet mode, and set our alarms for a sunrise at Schwabacher Landing.