Day 2 – Gros Ventre Campground, WY to Cody, WY

There’s something about Grand Teton National Park that just doesn’t like me. I’ve been there in the winter and in early spring and I’ve been totally stonewalled by weather on every single trip. Last March I met Scott Hotaling from Light of the Wild in Jackson for a weekend of skiing and photography. Through a combination of snow, ankles, and clouds, we managed one sunrise shoot and one day of skiing.

Not to be an exception, Samantha and I woke up way too early to shoot the sunrise at the fabled Schwabacher Landing. Morning dawned cold, cloudy, and socked in. Rather than waste our time driving to the turn off, hiking in to the landing, getting set up, and then experiencing a total lack of sunrise, we rolled over and went back to sleep.

Waking up at a much more reasonable hour, I packed up the tent and the car and drove south Jackson, WY for breakfast/lunch. I’m starting to really like Jackson. It’s definitely a fancy ski town, but there are also a large percentage of small, friendly local businesses that won’t charge an arm and a leg and require that you wear a pelt for admittance. After breakfast and gassing up the car, we drove north through the park, keeping an ever watchful eye out for moose (we saw none) and other wildlife. Similarly fabled Oxbow Bend and the Mormon Row were a complete, flatlight bust and we traveled north towards Jackson Lake rather frustrated.

We stopped at the still-frozen lake to take some pictures of each other and the Tetons and then continued north into the forest towards Yellowstone. At the entrance gate the helpful ranger told us of the recently opened East Entrance road, and we drove back through the high forest of southern Yellowstone retracing the previous night’s drive towards Old Faithful.

Old Faithful was faithful, and as we filled the car with gas at the Old Faithful Gas Station Beehive Geyser also started erupting. I am now 2/2 on Beehive Eruptions. While at the Geyser Basin we walked out to Solitary Geyser and were treated to a close up viewing of a buffalo sitting in the grass near the geyser grazing. Pretty neat.

After Old Faithful we drove to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. On the way towards Madison Junction, we were stopped by a buffalo jam. There were two mother buffaloes and a whole herd of calves making their way slowly down the side and middle of the road. I tried to juggle driving and taking pictures and manually focusing a long zoom lens at close range and did fairly well.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is one of the coolest spots in the park, in my opinion. I will forever be floored by sights and views that are invisible until the last minute. Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire is one of these places. The ravine is totally hidden from view until the final turn on the trail up and then the entire bowl is all of a sudden completely filling your eyes. The way the road is designed at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, it’s impossible to see anything but the immediate river as you drive towards the rim. A short hike down to any of the observations points reveals the whole canyon, and it is similarly breathtaking. It’s impossible to comprehend the scale of what you are looking at and it’s impossible to stop looking.

As night fell we left the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and drove south and east along the also-frozen Yellowstone Lake, past the demolished ranger station (collapsed due to heavy snowfall) and out towards the East Entrance. The East Entrance road travels over Sylvan Pass and a couple weeks previous an avalanche had swept over the road, burying it beneath 30 feet of snow. It took National Park Service snowcats and plows just until mere hours before we wanted to drive through to clear the road and we must have been one of the first cars over. It was seriously intimidating. The road was carved through the mass of snow with the sheer walls towering at least fifteen feet over the roof of my car and chunks of rock and debris littering the road. I drove fast.

We left the park and descended through open forest and a tunnel into the plains of Wyoming and the small town of Cody.