Dated: Saturday, May 27, 2006
Given how dead tired we all were after our 500 mile overnight drive, we woke up later than we should have and ended up leaving Missoula only at 11:30 or so. The drive through Montana was absolutely beautiful through green meadows, silken mountains and a long straight stretch along I-90. The weather was also a little worse today with the sun trying hard to peer through the low clouds.
We had a reservation for a cabin at the Howlin’ Mad Moon Resort outside of Cameron, Montana. We stopped at a small town named Ennis on the way where the waitress was shocked that people could survive without eating Meat.
We reached the cabin at 3 or 4pm (I was all confused by the timezone change and decided to stick to PST for all my time calculations from there on…), checked in, unloaded all our stuff into the cabin and headed out to Yellowstone.
(view from our cabin porch)
Our plan was to cover Old Faithful and, if possible, Yellowstone Lake today. Once we entered the park and headed over to the first set of geysers, the fountain pot.
Our drive within the park was punctuated with Bison sightings… while we were excited by the first few herds we saw, we soon got bored of seeing bison and longed to see some other, more exciting animal. The only other animal we say today were the mule deer which we affectionately referred to as the white-butt deer due to the color of its… posterior.
The geysers were totally out-of-the-world… like the Martian landscape you’d see in some cheesy science fiction movie. The whole area smelt of sulfur, but the view made it totally worth it. The weather sucked – the temperate was close to freezing and there were random bursts of rain and gusts of wind… in the end of May!
We reached Old Faithful at around 7pm CST and hung around at the Visitors center till its 8:10pm eruption. I came away rather unimpressed by the size of the eruption but the punctuality was definitely cool.
