#adevntures

National Parks 2017 Trip Day 5 Wednesday, July 12th, 2017 Mount Washburn Yellowstone National Park

Up Mount Washburn. This was our big hike of the day, 6.2 miles and 2,000 feet of elevation gain. The wildflowers on the way up were incredible, and so were the views from the sides of the switchbacks. About halfway up we encountered a mountain goat, just standing in the middle of the trail. It would NOT go away no matter what we did. We tried yelling at it. We tried slowly walking toward it. I don’t know much about mountain goats, and I know they aren’t normally aggressive, but you never know. So, Drew started throwing rocks at it. Not directly at it, but in it’s general direction to scare it off. (Which I researched later, and turned out to actually be what you are supposed to do, if yelling at it doesn’t work! I knew I remembered reading that somewhere…) It worked, kind of. The goat would run about 20 feet and then just stand in the middle of the trail again. So Drew threw rocks at it for like ten straight minutes until it finally moved far enough that we could go up a switchback. That was an adventure. This entire time, no one else was on the trail, coming up or down. This was a pretty deserted trail, which for Yellowstone, is quite a feat.

Here you can see the Fire tower we already climbed 1,000 vertical feet to see and have another 1,000 feet to go to get to. 

There it finally is.

Geological marker.

Top of Mount Washburn.

Mountain top views.

We signed the guest book at the top and befriended a nice woman from New Zealand on the way back who asked if she could adopt us since she did not have bear mace and we did, although we never saw a bear the whole trip. 

We ended the West side of the Grand Loop up at Tower-Roosevelt and visited Tower Falls (which was weird and you couldn’t see much of) and then Wraith Falls which is pictured here that I climbed over a fence to get to.

And it wouldn’t be Yellowstone without another wild bison.

“It’s 3AM, I got held up. 
I tried to call, I’m on my way. Will I see you? 
I got lost in foreign lands, 
trying to make it back. 
Oh, I hoped you’d understand.“

This was the first afternoon back on the road after breaking down in Idaho and dealing with the recourse of that for the following week during my 4-week excursion to California.

For the last week, I had been stuck in a completely unfamiliar place, in a state where I knew nobody, and was pretty well the farthest I could have been from home. I was out of time, out of resources, and out of patience for myself but was able to pull together through the help of family and so many new friends to keep myself going through that time. I’ll never forget the hospitality I was blessed with in that time of doubt and struggling.

Now, however, I was back on the road and the only thing I was interested in was getting home. My first fuel stop in the massive U-Haul put me roughly 60 miles outside of Snowville, Idaho at the time that the sun was finally losing prominence in the dull western sky. The air was becoming cool and thin as I worked my way back into the Rockies, but I kept pushing on until the soft yellow glow had been fully usurped by the vast nighttime sky.

Soon enough, I was through Ogden and well past Salt Lake City, UT., and set up for what I didn’t know would be my final sleep before the long haul home.