West Yellowstone, Montana
319 Miles, 10 hours total travel, 7 hours in the Saddle
I started my day at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.
One of the coolest dinosaur exhibits I’ve ever seen. A super friendly staff and I get the feeling a good number of them work the actual dig the museum sits nearby. I asked one of the women behind the counter if they ever got any, “Nuts,” there.
“Plenty,” She said. “They pay their money and check us out and then leave their tracts at the counter. You’d like to think it must be very hard for people like that to hold onto their belief systems about the origin of the species when confronted with the cold hard facts of evolution staring them in the face. Alas this is not usually the case. You fan them with gentle reason and they scream and yell and nail you to a tree (and then set the tree on fire).
So I worked my way over to the Grand Teton Range because it looked like a good idea on the map. I could hit the bottom of the Tetons and ride my way up through the national park to Yellowstone. The Tetons have always been one range I’ve wanted to see and to tackle. And yeah, they’re spectacular. So I headed South on US20 down through the Wind River Canyon which turned into another great ride.
I hit Riverton and headed up US26, through the Wind River Range proper. I have to say though it was a pretty cold and overcast day which does tend to get a bit weary. I was sort of between storm cells the whole way. I could hear thunder and occasionally see lightning in the distance but none of it ever seemed to get to me other than an intermittent drizzle that kept my rain gear on.
It turned out they were ripping up and repaving US26 through Grand Teton National Park. So a bunch of the ride ended up on dirt, which the bike handled pretty well even with the Pilot Roads. I even got to stand up on the pegs a couple of times.
Of course the real saga began when I got to Yelowstone’s South Entrance. It was getting on in the day and the temperature was dropping. It even tried to hail at one point! Once in the park, you’re dwarfed by its scale. It turns out the accommodations in the park are really expensive and seeing as I was on a budget, and I had a number of days set aside to explore the park, that wasn’t in the cards for me. It was all to rich for my bank account, so I was off to West Yellowstone in Montana. About 60 miles from where I was. Pretty demoralizing but there it was. At least I was able to get gas in the park. Did I mention it was bloody cold?
So I ride and I ride, and I ride some more. One of the neat things about the park is the wildlife is everywhere. It’s also one of the more dangerous aspects as your risk of a creature encounter goes up exponentially and some of he creatures here, outweigh me and my bike by a good 1300lbs. Which means that whenever there’s wildlife on the roadside, everybody either stops or pulls over. They mostly just stop.
So I’m five miles from a warm hotel, my ass is sore, I can’t feel my balls and this guy in front of me is stopped in his SUV in front of me. He moves to the left and there’s a Bison Bull fifteen feet in front of me. SUV guy stops again, blocking my escape route, should Mr. Bison decide to have a go at me. Mr. Bison is 2000lbs if he’s an ounce and he’s got really sharp looking horns and I’m thinking about how much I’m Bison shaped on my bike in my black rain gear… and how bad Bison eyesight is. Anyway the Twat in front of me decides he’s seen enough of the big shaggy and maybe he’s causing me some amount of distress and takes off down the road again. I creep past Mr. Bison and as the sting of a horn in the ass never occurs, I breathe a big sigh of relief.
Twenty minutes later I was checked in to the Westward Ho Motel. $66 a night and no phone. Once the sun goes down, they roll up the streets of this place and put it away. If the clouds would go away, I could get in some good star gazing but no such luck.
Downtown is a strange mix of huge Casino’s, Pawnshops (or as we called them, the stores of broken dreams), Souvenir shops (tacky, tacky, tacky) and very run down motels. All surrounded by the desperate, the dispossessed, and the semi mad. After touring the pawnshops (always interesting), we decided to hit Circus Circus a surreal experience at best. Three dollars apiece lighter and a serious buffet meal heavier (there must always be one every trip), we waddled slowly back to the hotel. Tomorrow, Carson City.
