May 20, 2010 – An Aging Geyzer – Yellowstone

We spent mother’s day at the lovely but quiet Flaming Gorge Recreation Area on the Utah/Wyoming border. Florence treated herself to three uninterrupted hours knitting peacefully in the sun on the bank of the Green River while I reluctantly occupied myself casting flies at trout hungry for the spring blue-winged olive hatch.

The clear waters of the gorgeous Green are world-renowned as a fly-fisherman’s paradise. While drift boats contently floated by in the morning sun we watched the trout slowly rise for hit after hit at even my poorly guided line. Later we stopped for a roadside café brunch of biscuits and eggs generously covered in pork gravy.

There’s nothing quite like the quintessential American breakfast of biscuits and gravy to reward a tough morning of knitting (or forced-labor fly-fishing). Florence taught the staff how to poach an egg. My day’s poaching had ended when we left the Green River.

We arrived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home to Grand Teton National Park and adjacent to Yellowstone, by suppertime. Dick Cheney owns a home and hunts here. We made a mental note to keep our heads down.

The Virginian Lodge RV Resort earns distinction as the most expensive campsite in the twenty-five states we have traversed in our journeys: $57.24/night plus a $2 surcharge for internet access.

This is twice what we have paid on average at a hundred other RV spots. I expressed shock to the reception clerk. “This is Jackson,” he explained with the haughtiness of a Parisian waiter. His defiant observation would have been easier to accept with aplomb had he not been lacking an upper right incisor and a lower canine.

We auto-toured Grand Teton. The weather was not conducive to hiking as most trails were still packed deep in snow even though cinco de Mayo had come and gone. We were informed that the southern access into Yellowstone was still closed for winter so we had to detour through an 8300 ft pass west of Jackson — man the passes are high in the western US — and into Idaho to access Yellowstone from the west. Old Faithful was… predictable.

We filmed aging geezers videoing an aging geyser. We were fortunate to safely encounter a grizzly bear recently emerged from winter hibernation with her two young cubs.

This was a special “nature” moment for us enjoyed by just we two, the bears and a hundred and fifty or so of our newest, dearest roadside friends, the vast majority of whom — in fatigues to fool the wildlife — somehow instantaneously extracted DSLR cameras with 200mm lenses, tri-pods, spotting scopes and back-lighting fixtures from their Subarus.

It was a grizzly form of paparazzi. Had it not been cute little ursus ursus but a shoe-toting terrorist that had appeared on that Yellowstone obsidian cliff-face, I suspect the same folk would have just as efficiently unloaded turret-mounted semi-automatic weaponry from the trunks of their Japanese imports.

It was a long day and we still had a two hour drive to Bozeman, Montana where we had a date with that most luxurious of RV destinations: the Wal-Mart parking lot. We had cleverly cost-averaged tonight’s stay and that of the Virginian in Jackson down to our $30 running average. Back on budget!

Gerry & Florence