Yellowstone: Day four (Thursday)

We woke up and killed some time around camp, but we did put our sleeping bags and pads away pretty quickly. We almost had a breakdown over the tent--Shawn kept insisting I was folding it wrong when I was folding it the exact same way I'd been folding it ever since we got it. That was not one of our shining moments, though we managed to get through with just hissing at each other under our breath. I might have thought about smacking him with the tent pole, but I didn't because he had gone and somehow managed to slam the car door into his hip. hard. I don't know how he did it...skill and finesse I guess because I sure can't figure out how you can put a ton of force into slamming a car door when you're standing between the door and the car...but what can I say, the man must have skillz.



Anyhoo...we eat, we pack, we start driving south and then proceed to stop at every geologically marked feature we come across. The Paint Pots, the lower, mid, and upper geyser basins, etc. We get to the Old Faithful area around 430 and go into their general store to look for some oatmeal (which they were selling for $8 a box), and to pick up all the other stuff we needed to get--magnets, huckleberry syrup, Christmas tree ornament, etc. We leave the store and walk over to the most well known geyser in Yellowstone about 10 minutes before it's supposed to erupt, so talk about good timing. Though honestly I was a little sad, if only because if we had gotten there right after an eruption, then we would have walked the geyser loop, but because we hit it just right, Shawn said he didn't care to walk the loop and we'd just watch Old Faithful and then be on our way. I guess I was okay with the decision to not walk around because I had managed to get 2 big blisters on my ring toes. I don't know how I did that...I mean the ring toes, what random toes to get blisters on.

Well, that and the fact that I had managed to hike 12 miles without any problems, and then we get to the day that we're driving around and only doing a half mile there, a quarter mile here and I get blisters. Weird--but I did moleskin them right up and I was good as new. So instead we went and waited for the geyser.

It erupted.

It was geyser-like.



We went to the diner and had dinner there instead of having our last backpacking meal. Then we drove south without stopping until we reached Colter Bay in the Grand Tetons again. We got our camp assignment at loop F and so we went and set up the tent just as it started sprinkling. I decided that I should go wash my unmentionables because after three days straight of wearing the same pair of underwear, they start to feel really grimy and icky, and since we weren't going to be taking showers before getting on the planes, I wanted to try to clean up some. Unfortunately, I forgot that the Grand Teton Park bathrooms do not have the hot air blowers like the Yellowstone Park does. Cold, wet underwear...now that's a hoot.

We tried to burn through the rest of our fuel by having hot chocolate and hot tea, and even once just burning the fuel to warm our fingers. We still ended up with about 3 ounces left afterwards. We went to bed around sundown, and I found out that I must have been acclimating to the cold because I was too hot wearing my normal clothes and being in the sleeping bag, so it was the first and last night that I slept with the zipper open and no cinching.