Day 10: Colorado –> Wyoming

Hello all! It has been a WHIRLWIND of a past few days with no time or ability to get the next post up! So bear with me as this may be a very long post. I’ll do my best to cut back a bit.

So on Day 10, we woke up a second day in Breckenridge, Colorado on Maddie and Nick’s couches. We were able to get breakfast with Nick and Maddie before heading out for the day. We went to this cute place called Daylight Donuts which was hopping and had great breakfast and an awesome Cinnamon Bun.

After breakfast, we took our obligatory photos and said our tearful good-byes (while also realizing that Colorado is only a 15 hour drive away from California!!). It was time to be off to Wyoming – and Yellowstone National Park!!

The drive up to Yellowstone was long (9+ hours), but it was very beautiful. Wyoming was a bit what I expected in terms of its beauty and geographical structures, but a the same time, it blew me away (as has most states on this trip).

Those are just a few of the highlights from the drive. The rocks all had these amazing stripes and I couldn’t help but think about how amazing it is to think about each layer being part of the billions of years of Earth being molded into the planet we see today. I kept expecting to see a coyote step onto the plateaus and start howling, but alas, none came out.

We arrived in Yellowstone around 9 or so at night, well actually Grand Teton National Park (which is essentially attached to Yellowstone). If you don’t know much about camping in Yellowstone, you need a reservation for a campsite pretty far in advance (at least for the summer) OR you can try to get one of the first come, first serve sites which fill up around 8:30am. We decided to try and get into one of the first come, first serve sites in Grand Teton, assuming that it would be pretty easy to get one since their site said “they fill up mid-afternoon or later, if at all.” Of course, we take that to mean “we have 350+ sites that are all first come, first serve and they hardly ever fill up.” We show up at 9pm and find out that every campsite in Grand Teton is completely full. The man at the park entrance also can’t tell us if Yellowstone is full, but encourages us to take the hour and a half drive through the Tetons up to Yellowstone to see if they have any availability.

We began what feels like the longest few hours of the trip. As we drive up to Yellowstone, the sun quickly sets over the mountains and by the time we reach the front gate of the park, it is pitch black and there are no people in the booth. We do, however, see the sign that tells us that every campsite in Yellowstone is full. So here we are in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. I also forgot to mention earlier, as part of our trip through Wyoming, we pretty much had no cell service once we crossed into the border. So we are in Yellowstone, without phone service, no park rangers in sight, and the GPS is saying that the nearest towns are about 2.5 hours away (which could or could not be true since that GPS is pretty old).

We decide to drive back down through the Tetons and pull into one of the lodges to ask for suggestions on where to rest our heads. The woman suggested driving down a dirt road found off their parking lot for about an hour and we’d come across some free camp sites. Well, if that happened during the day and/or when we had firewood,we may have taken up her suggestion. However, it was dark, sans service and we hadn’t eaten yet and needed wood to make our dinner. We decided to try our luck driving the hour and a half to Jackson, Wyoming to try and get a hotel room.

Long story short, we drove to Jackson which seems to be a town full of super expensive hotels ($600+) and only bars open at 11 at night when we were looking for food. After a lot of frustration and tears on my part, we made the decision (difficult as I could hear my mom in my head with all her fears around this) to sleep in our car in one of the pull-offs from the road. We headed back towards Grand Teton, found a pull-off that already had a few cars, an RV and a tractor trailer in it, and tried to get comfortable in the front seats of our very full car. We dined on protein bars and a gas station sandwich and went to sleep.

I have to say, I was pretty freaked out (mostly cause the middle of nowhere Wyoming sans service was the last place I wanted to be sleeping in my car), but it all turned out just fine. The only major issue we ran into was that it was REALLY REALLY cold. I woke up the next day at 5am because I simply couldn’t sleep anymore and needed to get the car and heat running.

Overall, day 10 was a LONG day and really the first time where something didn’t go right (at all). And we learned that I don’t handle that well at all, but it all turned out to be just as it was supposed to be. We had the opportunity to rough it in the car and sleep under the stars in Wyoming, which was pretty cool.

This turned into a long post so I shall put days 11 and 12 on a different post!