The past week has been pretty crazy. From visiting COSTCO, to going to the Red Dragon, to driving halfway across the country, it really can’t get much nuttier. I’m actually not kidding, COSTCO was so overwhelming. But that’s not the point of me typing right now. This post is about the three day road trip I took with my friend from college, Auburn. He is now attending the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne for graduate school and he needed to drive his car there from LA. Naturally I jumped at the chance to have a mini adventure and to visit a bunch of the national parks that I’ve never been to before! We started our trip at 6am California time on Monday, the 23rd. One thing I kind of forgot while creating the itinerary is that when you drive across the States you have to cross the timezone lines, and when east is the direction you’re moving in, you lose an hour each time. It just gets later and later. So, if I was to do it again I’d go the other way so that we gain an hour instead! Anyway, we took a pit-stop in Vegas for lunch before heading on to our first official stop, Zion National Park! When we pulled up to the gate, the lady working the admission booth asked us if we wanted a national parks pass. If you’re visiting more than 2 parks on one trip, it’s definitely worth it. It’s $80 for a year long pass, and it was going to cost us $90 just to get into Zion, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton, plus we were going to more places, so it made total sense. And now I have a year long pass! I definitely want to go back to all the places we visited. Ultimately we didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but they were still amazing to see! Day 1: Zion National Park Before I tell you about our few hours in Zion, I’ll give you a little history on the park. Zion was Utah’s very first national park. It was originally discovered by the native tribes for its farming capabilities. Zion is a rare place to find in the desert: wide and level, a river for irrigation and a long enough growing season. When the Mormon pioneers settled in Utah in the 1860’s, John Wesley Powell visited Zion on the first scientific exploration of southern Utah. And here we are now, enjoying its beauty over 150 years later. We didn’t really have any particular plans or things to see in Zion, so we hopped on the bus that takes you around the park. At every stop they let you know what there is to see and the length of the hikes there are. We decided to ride all the way to the final stop to see what there was. The final stop drops you off at a trail which leads to and follows The Narrows. It’s one of the more popular hikes in Zion because it showcases the narrowest section of Zion Canyon. In this area, the gorge walls are a thousand feet high, with the river only being up to thirty feet in width. Pretty crazy! You’re usually allowed to hike up The Narrows through the Virgin River, but it was closed the day we got there due to the water speed being too high (above 120 cubic feet per second). But it was still really neat to see! The other hike we would have wanted to do was the hike to Angel’s Landing, which requires a lot of switchback style movements to climb up the canyon wall. Ultimately, it would have taken too long to do that hike, since we had more driving to do that day, and we were going to see my brother at Utah Valley University. We did hop off the bus to snap some photos at the look out point of Angel’s Landing. Zion was gorgeous. The red rocks contrasted with the white ones at higher elevations and it was so cool to be able to see. Also, on the bus there was this advertisement for tourists not to feed the squirrels, but it was set up like a weight loss add (“Stop eating people food: the best diet!”). And it even had a before and after picture of a squirrel. The before picture was hilarious, this squirrel was massive. The photos were captioned “I lost three pounds and feel great!”. Pretty hilarious. We hit the road after a very short, but rewarding three hours in Zion. We had another 4 hours to drive up to meet Rhys, and we went to eat Japanese at a restaurant he’d never tried before. It was so good, and really good to see him! I’d never been to his school before, so after dinner he gave us a driving tour of his campus, which looked different to what I'd pictured it in my head. We didn’t stay too late because he had a flight the next morning (he’s in school to be a pilot!) and we wanted to get to Salt Lake City before we crashed for the night. I called a bunch of places on the way up to find a cheap room. We almost went to a Motel 6, but that looked incredibly sketchy so we went to a cheap family run one instead. We wanted to be on the road early the next morning, so we went right to bed once we were in the room. The next day we finished our drive through the entirety of Utah and had a few hours of driving to do in Idaho before heading into Wyoming, where Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks are located. During those three hours in Idaho, I’m fairly positive we saw more police cars then we did on the rest of the trip combined. And Auburn got into the habit of blowing by them going 10mph over the speed limit, but that’s fine. We did not see any potatoes, but we did see signs to exit the highway for the Potato Museum. So I wasn’t entirely incorrect in the live video when I associated Idaho with potatoes! Once we had crossed into Wyoming, we saw a large sign that said “Warning to Tourists: Don’t Laugh at the Natives”. We’re not sure what that means, but we had a decent chuckle about it. Day 2: Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park We entered at the south end of Grand Teton National Park. The plan was to drive through to the northern most exit and then follow along that road to the southern entrance of Yellowstone National Park, finding somewhere to eat lunch while also hopping out of the car and checking out the sites. Grand Teton National Park is a beautiful, and was Auburn’s favorite stop of the trip. I think it was tied for my favorite with the Badlands. I loved the badlands. But we’ll get to that later. We stopped at quite a few places, one where you could get a great panorama view of the Teton Range and could see the 13,770 foot summit of Grand Teton. Sort of, there was a little cloud cover. And by that I mean one cloud hugging the summit. Still very, very neat. And breath taking! We stopped for lunch at a stop with picnic tables overlooking Jackson Lake, the largest lake in the park. Auburn loved that lake. Such a Californian. He also touched the water, which he then regretted because it was freezing cold. It was such a pretty spot to take a break from the car, I loved it. We continued on into Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park, established in 1872. This place is massive. Which we could tell because Auburn was navigating and said “the turn should be in about 5 miles” when the next thing I saw was a sign that said our turn was in 19 miles! It would take hours just driving along all the roads within the park itself, and we really only had about 3 or 4 hours to enjoy it. We decided we wanted to go see Old Faithful, so we made that a top priority. The weather also turned a little bit bad on us while there; it started raining, hailing and the wind picked up. Doesn’t make for great walking about outside. We stuck it out though, to see Old Faithful erupt in person. The National Park Service has a livestream of Old Faithful available online most days, so if you want to check it out, you can look at it here! I’ll tell you a little about Old Faithful too, which is a pretty neat geologic feature. It is one of the 10,000 geothermal features in the park, and that number is half of the total in the entire world. In fact, the Yellowstone Caldera is an active super volcano, and if it was to erupt it could cover half the US in volcanic ash! Don’t worry, that’s unlikely for a very long time. Old Faithful is a cone geyser, the first one in Yellowstone to be named when it was discovered in 1870. Every eruption, there can be 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water shot up between 106 and 185 feet into the air. It is very well documented and studied, to the point that the eruptions are predicted very well, within 10 minutes either side of the prediction time. And now for some statistics! The eruption times follows a bimodal distribution, which is basically a combination of two different normal distributions (a normal distribution is a symmetrical bell shaped graph, with the mean being the peak, or highest point in the bell). For Old Faithful, these two peaks have means of 65 minutes and 91 minutes. So, basically, if the geyser goes off for a certain amount of time, then the park can make their prediction based on that and the distribution. Neat stuff, yay math! Even though the weather wasn’t great, we got to see it erupt, which was cool! After that, we headed out on the east side of the park, stopping to see some overlooks on the way. One included a little lake that still had a partially frozen surface, even at the end of May. 3 hours in Yellowstone is definitely not enough time, but I’m excited to see it again. And then, it happened. I didn’t think it was going to, and it did. Right as we had driven outside of the Yellowstone east gates, I saw a bison! So obviously I stopped the car to take photos, but it was less than 50 degrees out and I can’t drive with shoes on (thanks, Florida and forever wearing flip flops) so I was running across the road in my socks to take some photos before he decided to walk away. This biker gang that rolled by probably thought I was crazy, but that’s okay. Because I saw a bison. Originally we were going to try and camp a couple hours outside of Yellowstone, but our next day was going to be a crazy driving experience already, and I felt fine driving so we decided to drive another two hours to shave off some time on our journey the next day. Which would have been great, except that I had to drive through Bighorn Canyon (a national recreation area) in the dark. Going up was the easy part, going back down was not. We hit the peak and all of a sudden, I swear, we had been transported into Narnia. Everything was white! There was snow on the road, the trees were coated in white and there was no green or brown ground to be seen. Which was also not so bad, until we had to head downhill. And then throw in some fog. But it’s okay mom, I made it alive. We went to sleep as soon as we got to the motel, to prepare for our third and final day of driving. We started pretty early the next morning, but since we’d driven more the previous day, we had a little more leeway with time. The end goal of the day: Saint Paul, Minnesota. But we had a few stops to make as well. Day 3: Devils Tower National Monument, Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Badlands National Park The first spot we visited was Devils Tower National Monument. It’s in the easternmost part of Wyoming a little ways off the highway. Driving out to it is pretty neat; everything seems flat but then you come around a curve and you can see it, standing there all on it’s own. It doesn’t look as though it fits into the terrain, which is kind of accurate. But only kind of. Devils Tower was formed over years and years of erosion. About 50 million years ago, ground level had been above the height of the Tower, and where the Tower now stands was right on the edge of the active magma chambers. Lava was pushed up into the crust, but did not break the surface. It cooled there, in a massive clump and over the next 50 million years, as the ground around it eroded, the now hardened lava tower remained in place. And that’s what you can see today! It was labeled a national monument in 1906 and is still considered an important landmark in tribal narratives. It was very overcast when we got there, but this led to some dramatic photos as well as some that are poorly exposed. But oh well! It was really neat to see and attempt to imagine the scale that was present 50 million years ago. It’s not an easy feat. We got back in the car, and on the way out stopped to take a look at a colony of prairie dogs. Their burrow area can also be called a town, which I think is so cute! They looked adorable. And they were even cuddling with each other. I was dying of cuteness. But we had to leave, and then I was a little sad. The next stop was Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The sun came out too, which was good! The sky was nice and blue and bright for our photos. I will say that Mount Rushmore is a little underwhelming; it’s not as big as you think it’s going to be, kind of like The Mona Lisa. But with each head being 60 feet tall, it’s still very impressive to have completed. The sculpture was suggested in December of 1923 and by October of 1927 , carving had begun. It wasn’t completed until October of 1941, 7 months after the creator had died. His name was Gutzon Borglum and, with the help of nearly 400 men and women, was able to carve four famous faces into the side of a cliff. It wasn’t without its dangers, as just about 90% was carved using dynamite, but not a single fatality occurred in the 14 years of construction (the creator did not die while at the construction site, that was natural causes). Borglum selected the four presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln) because he believed that they represented the most important events in the history of the US. It makes me curious though, which presidents would be selected by an artist if it was commissioned in this day and age. Or even a different artist at the time that Borglum took on the project. It’s an interesting thought, especially since it could make the memorial completely different. We had one more stop before reaching our final destination: Badlands National Park! We did see some stuff on the way there, like multiple signs and exits for the Corn Palace which, based on the advertising, is exactly what you think it would be. Everything is made of corn. And we hit some weird, snow/rain/ice on the road weather before it turned bright and sunny again as we drove into the Badlands. The geologic deposits in the Badlands contain one of the world’s richest fossil beds. The geologic formations found there were created from continual deposition and then subsequent erosion. Sediment was first deposited 69 million years when an ancient sea stretched over what we now call the Great Plains. As the sea retreated, the sediment continued to deposit as different land environments were cultured in the same area. Most deposition ended around 28 million years ago, but erosion didn’t start to be significant until only about half a million years ago. The impressive features we see today are slowly disappearing; eventually, everything will erode away. But that sounds extremely depressing and it won’t happen for a very very long time (like on the millions of years scale). It’s very impressive what the forces of nature can create, given enough time. I thought the Badlands were stunning. We did not spend a ton of time in the Badlands, but we did stop at a couple overlooks for some photos and a brief lunch break before surging forward with about 7 hours more driving to do. Nothing too exciting happened on that drive. I ended up driving the whole way, which was fine by me, I felt pretty good. Oh, I guess nothing exciting happened besides driving for about 5 miles being barely able to see due to the insane amount of splattered bugs on the windshield. I swear, we must have flown through a cloud of them. It was disgusting; we had to stop to clean it off. Luckily, we needed gas too so we killed two birds with one stone. Two birds, or 2 million bugs...with one car. Not sure which is the best phrase to use, but there it is. We made it back to Saint Paul at midnight on Wednesday, so in a less than 72 hours, we had driven through 8 states, been to 4 national parks and 2 national monuments and visited 1 family member. And we’d listened to all of our music about 5 times through. But we made it and it was awesome and it makes me more excited to do something like that again! I’ve got another adventure planned for this weekend, but I’ll tell you all about that next time! In the meantime, check out the photo gallery page and my Instagram account for some more photos. Thanks for reading!
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Meet AnyaHi, Hola, Bonjour, Ciao!
I’m Anya Phillips, a data analyst and travel enthusiast who is always on the lookout for the next adventure! Categories
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