ARRIVING YELLOWSTONE PARK
July 2, 1999
Today we moved into the park. It has been quite a time since leaving home on June 9th. Of course, we had a great time with the family in Comanche. Then we were off.
COLRADO SPRINGS. We checked into the campground at the Air Force Academy. Here we had several wonderful visits with Wayne and Mitzi, toured the entire Air Force Academy, spent a day at Royal Gorge, and walked around the Garden of the Gods. It was great to see where our future leaders are being trained at the Air Force Academy. Their sports complex must have the world's biggest field house with hockey ice rink, volley ball court, tennis courts, and football field all under one roof. Wayne and Mitzi had us over for dinner, spent two evenings driving us around the sites near the city. We even got to meet Mitzi's horse, Boots. From a natural point of view, the Royal Gorge was very impressive with its swinging bridge over a thousand feet above the river. Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed our three days in Colorado Springs.
WYOMING AND MONTANA. Since we had never been north of Denver, we really enjoyed the drive north across eastern Wyoming. It looked just as I imagined it would: green hills and low mountains with no trees on them, just wide-open spaces. After entering Montana, we turned west. We spent one day at a campground on the Boulder River south of Big Timbers, Montana. Big Timbers is such a clean, neat town, it looks like a mockup, not real at all. We drove into the national forest to a tremendous waterfall. With the new snow melt filling the river to capacity, the waterfall is the greatest that I have ever seen with the roar of falling water, a rainbow in the mist, and wooded trails with no one on them.
BAD STUFF. At last, we arrived at Gardiner, Montana where we were to stay during our training. Since we arrived early we drove into the park and dry camped in the closest park service campground. At first, it was fun as we drove all the roads of the park and made an overview of the entire park so that we would know what we wanted to see during our three-month stay. However, then things turned to worms. Gina became so sick with a bad cold that she went to bed for three days. Out of sympathy for her, the truck took sick and had to be towed to a shop in Gardiner. They replace a coil and then we had to take it to the next town north, Livingston, Montana to have a relay replaced in the transmission. When they towed the truck, we had them also tow the trailer to a campground in Gardiner. In the mean time, I had rented a car. We became so concerned that I had lots of big dollars FedExed to me. We had planned all along to look in to buying a new truck in Montana since there is no sells tax there. We begin looking at Fords and Chevys, but in Montana, all trucks are four wheel drive and mostly diesel. I can see no reason to buy a four-wheel drive truck and certainly not a diesel. So, we picked up the old truck after it was fixed and quit looking at new ones for now.
TRAINING. Our training was conducted at park headquarters. Besides being issued uniforms, it consisted of two and one-half days of learning the most antiquated software, used to reserve and book campground spots. It was almost as bad as a real estate finance class we took last year. It is not like Big Bend, where we spent two weeks learning the park and running the river canyons with the rangers. Gina became so "down", she said, "Let's just hook onto the trailer and go home". Anyway, training ended yesterday at noon, we picked up the truck, and returned the rental car to Bozman 80 miles away.
WORK. We are now in the Grant Village Campground in the southern part of the park. Grant is on a large lake at 8,000 feet elevation. There is a visitor's center, a nice restaurant, a good store, a service station, and lots of ranger led activities. Our job is to work in a small office where we check-in and checkout campers much like a hotel clerk does in a large hotel. It does not sound like fun, but the people we will be working with are very nice. They have a bar-be-que/potluck scheduled for July 4th where we will meet everyone. If we do not like our jobs we can just leave, keep working, or change to a different job. There are many, many other types of jobs and people often change. Everyone seems to love it here and they come back year after year. Some of them even come from foreign countries.
THE PARK. Yellowstone is so large and so beautiful, it's hard to describe. There are alpine meadows, rugged mountains with snow on them, roads through forest, deep valleys with rushing rivers at the bottom, and, of course, the many geysers. There are wild life everywhere. We have seen lot of elk, buffalo, deer, and coyotes. I saw a grizzly bear the second day in the park. Our campground has sections closed because the bears come through going to the lake to catch fish. In short, the park is overwhelming. The weather is breezy and cool, low of 50 and high of 75 each day.
WILL WE LIKE HERE? We are looking forward to activities that everyone talks about: hiking (groups of 4 are more because of the bears), camping out in the remote sites, canoeing, and "get togethers" on days off. We are only 30 miles from the entrance to Grand Tetons National Park and only 70 miles from Jackson Hole. We just can't leave here without seen the Tetons and Jackson.