Yellowstone Hike - Day 3

Day 3 was loooooong! If you would have told me that I would begin my day on the Bechler River Trail and end it at home with a long, hot shower; I'm certain I would have laughed in your face. Strange enough, that's what happened.

Try to picture a hammock with a blue cocoon inside it strung between those 2 trees. I'm still amazed Clair slept that way each night.

 I had it in my head that Day 3 was going to hurt a whole lot worse than Day 1, but strangely enough it didn't. I still have a hard time believing it too, after seeing the state of my feet when it was all done. I'll spare you the blistery details! I do have my brothers to thank for their help. They each took a couple things from my pack to lighten my load. I'm sure it made all the difference.

The two river crossings from the day before was all it took to fully wake up for the day. So COLD! Even though Clair and I got an earlier start than James and Logan, they easily caught up to us by the time we reached the second crossing. I knew their younger, fitter legs would be able to make it to our last campsite ahead of my pace, and they were also entertaining a return trip to Mr. Bubbles, so Clair and I split up from them for most of the day.

Considering my great love for squirrels I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised that a pair of them are the only ground animals we saw the entire time. We did however see two birds of prey, probably a golden eagle and a hawk. I like to picture the squirrels as those birds' meals. :)

We may not have seen any bears or such, but we did see the signs they left behind.

I wanted to take the opportunity to photograph all the different varieties of wildflowers on the return hike, and ask my brother Eric to help me name them all, but unfortunately my camera quit working. I was happy to get the last few shots that I did, and hopefully I can add some photos later on from the batch James took.

I was able to keep a steady pace, and I had much better control over my breathing on the way back. I enjoyed some great conversation with Clair, and by the time we had reached our campsite from Day 1, we were both thinking the same thing. We had made great time up until then and knew we could probably hike all the way out and skip our last night on the trail. I think the thought of avoiding another day of blistered feet in boots, eating a hot meal, and sleeping on a soft surface in a warm home was all the motivation I needed to keep up the pace.

By the time we reached what was supposed to be our last campsite, we took a break and were about to leave a note for James and Logan when they showed up. They decided to hike out too, and took a break while we got started again.

As we made our way back to the Lone Star Geyser, we saw a large group of people hanging out and knew the geyser was about to go off. We couldn't have had better timing. Clair and I anxiously watched the trail hoping James and Logan would arrive in time before it went off. They made it just in time, and it was a perfect ending to our backpacking trip. It's an impressive geyser, and I enjoyed it more than Old Faithful. After we hiked the rest of the way to trail head, we all drove out of the park via the West Entrance and stopped in West Yellowstone for the popular post backpacking meal of burgers and fries.

I ended the day and started the next with that long, hot shower and hobbled to bed. As nice as it was to wake up warm and comfortable in the morning, I still missed the trail and that incredible forest smell.

My body will heal, I'll forget the hellish first day, get new hiking boots that are kind to my feet, and look forward to next year's hike. Who's in?

Yellowstone Hike - Day 1

Clair and I were both up with the sun and packed up early and headed into Yellowstone National Park. We stopped at a Backcountry Office in Grant Village to obtain our backcountry permit and watched a delightful backcountry video. We made our way to the Lone Star Trailhead which is just south of Kepler Cascades near the Old Faithful area of the park.

James and his brother-in-law, Logan, met us at the trailhead and we started our hike! The first couple miles of the hike felt as though we were cheating. The trail was wide and paved, which was for the benefit of visitors making their way to the Lone Star Geyser. We learned upon arriving to the area of the geyser, that it only goes off every three hours. Since we had just missed the last firing, we kept moving on. There were some interesting thermal features as we gradually moved away from the geyser area, and a couple miles further we reached the site which we had reserved for the third night of our trip.

It's not very clear on my map, but I'm pretty sure our trail changed from the Lone Star Trail to the Shoshone Lake Trail a/k/a the Continental Divide Trail before we reached the trail we spent most of our time on, the Bechler River Trail. We had about 10.5 miles to our first campsite, 9D4. For nearly half that I was in hell! I grossly underestimated how difficult the first day would be, thinking that day 3 was the day to be scared of. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't know ahead of time, otherwise I may have chickened out.

I'll be honest, after I got to our campsite and dropped my pack, I was certain that there was no way I was up to another 2 days of anything remotely similar to what I had just gone through. For several hours I had myself convinced that I'd be returning to the trailhead the following day. After regaining my ability to breathe normally and think somewhat more rationally, I decided that it was wrong to torture myself all day just to give up before getting to the really cool stuff on the trail.

It wasn't long after dinner, cleanup and hoisting our packs up the bear pole that it began to rain, so we all retreated to James' & Logan's tent for a few hands of Pinochle before we were all too tired to play anymore and headed to bed. Clair was extra brave and slept in the hammock we borrowed from Joy. He was in an area pretty well protected from the rain, but had a good scare when he thought a bear was trampling through camp around 4 a.m. Turns out the noise was from other hikers or park rangers checking our permit. Whoever it was, I'm pretty certain one of them went by Gary. Thanks for the scare Gary!