Man, this summer is whipping by.
I love Yellowstone. It’s my first time here and I’m virtually foaming at the mouth watching the weird geysers bubble, seeing how the steaming springs split the light into all the colors of the rainbow. I assume most readers have been here, so I’ll spare you all from flowery descriptions of Depression Spring and Anemone Geyser or the subtle gurglings of sulphuric Paint Pots. However, I’ll bet that most of you readers haven’t traveled Yellowstone entirely by bike. And let me tell you, it’s a different animal. It’s surreal. It’s occasionally very sketchy. Mostly it’s so thrilling my heart seems at risk of shorting out.
The “bison jams” back up the highways literally for miles and, here, you gingerly pass car after RV after trailer after car until you’re at the front of the weird parade. And there they are, the bison, flopped listlessly in the sun, kicking up clouds of dust with lazy flicks of their tails to ward off the swarms of penny-sized horseflies. They seem not to notice that a crowd has gathered, communally filming the phenomenon with iPhones. Unnervingly near them, in a creek, a group of children shrieks and throws water. A young girl in a purple shirt creeps closer and closer to one of the beasts who watches now with a lazy eye and, at the proper distance, she announces that she’s gonna cartwheel with the bison in the background. She prepares herself and vaults. Her grinning mother snaps the shot. Nosily, I lean over and see it; it turned out great. The bison don’t move.
The stretch south, from Old Faithful to the southern park border, sucks. There is no shoulder and little scenery compared to the rest of the park. The highway is chock-full of oversized vehicles who can barely steer between the lines, and you crawl over the Continental Divide not once but three times. I wouldn’t do this stretch again unless I was offered a sizable grip of cash, half up front, half upon completion. I’m sure, if you happened to be driving 191 south on July 25 near 3 p.m., you would’ve hated encountering us on the road almost as much as we hated encountering you.
I don’t have much to write about Teton National Park. It was too hazy for us to really enjoy the mountains and I didn’t go south past Colter Bay. We could see much of the range early in the morning — just enough to make me swear, on my life, that I will backpack the Teton Crest Trail before I croak.
I said adieu to my dad yesterday morning. We sat on a bench in the hazy morning at the Colter Bay campground grocery store. I sat there looking at a map and he produced two coffees. “You’re not going to believe what these cost,” he said. “Guess.” Turned out two black coffees are valued at more than $6.50 in Grand Teton National Park. Before our bench the parking lot was a zoo of moms and dads rushing in the store for morning wares, reluctantly tailed by wandering toddlers. Motorcyclists pulled up and listlessly took off their helmets. And several more folks sat cross-legged at various benches on listening to conference calls or hashing out emails, squeezing in some work before a day of exploration. The place was buzzing.
If you were twenty-five feet tall, or perhaps standing on enormous stilts in this parking lot, you could peer over the roof of the grocery store and glimpse the sheer needles of the Tetons jutting above the expanse of Jackson Lake. An outrageously beautiful place. There we drank our coffees and decided that it was an apt place for our shared journey to end. He would soon hit 500 miles near Jenny Lake en route south, to his last Warm Showers stayover in Jackson. I would hitchhike north back into Yellowstone and head east from there.
“A respectable number,” he said of the mileage. Indeed — the number is largely made up of his full circle from Jackson through the Teton Valley to West Yellowstone and then through Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park back to Jackson. But the figure, 500, is ultimately an undercount. It doesn’t account for the objectively torturous mountain pass of deep gravel east of Hamilton, Montana or the interminable double track stretching through the wilderness southeast of Island Park, Idaho, in grizzly territory, where we encountered a mountain lion. It doesn’t account for the 150 miles we rode in thick smoke, demoralized, with masks on, or the sweltering afternoon we braved Yellowstone traffic and climbed the Continental Divide twice. And he crossed 500 miles having started without his sea legs. In my view those 500 miles truly account for 1000.
We hugged and hugged some more and then I watched him pedal out of the parking lot.
I hung around and talked to people for awhile. Near 10 a.m. I bought a slice of coffee cake and then stood on the highway for an hour trying to get a ride north, back to Yellowstone, where I will continue east en route to the Black Hills of South Dakota. I was quickly offered two rides in the wrong direction and then nothing at all. After an hour I decided that the spot was too far from Yellowstone, so I rode 20 miles to the south park border. On the way, I enjoyed a brief, steep descent until a bee somehow caught me at 30 miles per hour and stung me in the leg. I pulled out the stinger and did not stop. At the Yellowstone south entrance I stood with my thumb out no more than 15 feet from the national park entrance sign where, at a given moment, a dozen ecstatic people from India or China bunched in for a photo. After 45 minutes someone picked me up and took me to Old Faithful. I ate a surprisingly well-priced cheeseburger from the grab-and-go and then played tourist for a while, hitting the Grand Prismatic Spring at the bottom boardwalk and watching bison doze. Then I turned into the backcountry at an undisclosed location where I discovered a hot spring bubbling into a cool river. I was briefly alone before I shared the spring with a down-to-earth, middle-aged couple and no one else. We laid at the confluence of the boiling stream and the cool one and floated, watching the frantic mating rituals of hundreds of crimson dragon flies. When the sunset painted the sky we finally left and, to our fascination, the man pulled a three-inch-long leech from his leg. It writhed, black and ribbed, on dry land. I had my new friends check my back for any parasites. He slapped my shoulder and sent me on my way. There were none.
Before he left, my dad thanked me for “letting him do this.” The thing is, I never saw this portion of my trip, our journey together, in those terms. It is true that I would have ridden faster without him. But speed is a useless metric. And the bigger picture here is that bike touring would not be a part of my life unless he rode across the continent in 1983, alone, with a goofy mustache and short-shorts. Because of his legacy, and my mom’s, I never grew up not knowing that something like this was possible; it was always possible, and it was always waiting for when I was ready. This, like everything in life, I owe to my parents.
Cycling
Yellowstone is awesome. If you’re doing the TransAm and you don’t stop to enjoy the park, you’re an idiot. I can’t stress this enough. I’ve been to my fair share of national parks and this one is the mothership.
Cycling itself here is a major tradeoff.
Pros: passing bison jams and avoiding parking, which is absurd. Where everyone else booked their campsite a year ago, the two sites I stayed at — Madison and Grant Village — have colossal hiker-biker sites for ten bucks. And people are very stoked for you, as always, but I’ve found this especially true here. A group of drunk women in a bison jam passed me a beer one evening when I found myself pacing their car. We had a whole conversation.
Cons: Occasionally feeling like I’m cheating death. Shoulders are slim-to-nonexistent in the southern and northern areas of the park. It’s an adrenaline rush at best and terrifying at worse.
Another pro: When the fear of death is in you, you bike really fast.
The shoulder is excellent from the west entrance to Old Faithful. After that to the southern border there is none, and it’s awful. Ride really early in the morning — I mean, really early — or hitchhike. I especially recommend hitchhiking because there are apparently one million cars at each trailhead and that way you don’t have to attempt rushing through the park without enjoying its odd geysers, hot springs, wildlife watching and general grandeur.
I’ll update the shoulder report for the rest of the park while I make my around.
Encounters
Plenty to write here but, alas, I’m sitting down to write some postcards. TBA
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