Travels Revisited: USA Roadtrip 2017-Badlands & Yellowstone NP

We went to the Badlands on the 5th and it was our first night of camping. It were pretty impressive, I hadn't really seen too many pictures of the Badlands before but it's definitely a place to see. I wouldn't suggest camping in there though. There was a very bad storm that rolled in after we had set up our tent in the 90 degree weather and we had to pack everything up in the rain and sleep in the car! We really just drove through and stopped at the lookout spot, the Badlands aren't really a hiking park. The next morning we were awakened by the sun at 5am, the sun rises very early up here, and we left for Mount Rushmore around 6:30. Mount Rushmore was much much cooler in person. We didn't stay long though because we had an 8 hour drive to Yellowstone.

The drive through Wyoming was awesome, we took the scenic way through the Rocky Mountains and stopped at a bunch of pulloffs. The mountains were so pretty, some of them were snow covered too. This was a long drive though and we ended up stopping to camp in Cody, Wyoming because our reservation at Yellowstone was messed up. The campsite in Cody was just right off the road and it was just a tent field, but we finally had good weather!

The next morning we headed to Yellowstone and when we got there we went to Canyon Village. Yellowstone has its own Grand Canyon, so we took a hike down a windy and steep trail to an overlook of the gigantic waterfall and canyon. Somehow we got back up that trail but it was tough. Our next stop was Old Faithful. On the way to that side of the park we saw hoards of people walking down a side road so we parked and followed. It turns out that we were about to drive by the very very pretty prismatic pool. It was basically a rainbow hot spring but it was one of our favorite things we saw in the park.

Old Faithful erupted at 6:02pm, to be honest, we weren't expecting it to go higher than 30 ft or last longer than 10 seconds. Boy we were wrong. That geyser shot water 60 feet in the air for at least 5 minutes! I'm glad we stayed to see it because it was awesome. After that we went back to Bridge Bay to set up camp. Unfortunately the skies were cloudy so we still didn't get to see stars.

On the 8th we drove a couple hours up to Mammoth Hot Springs and hiked the boardwalks there. That day we saw elk, a grizzly bear, two black bears, and lots of bison! You can tell there's an animal because 100 people are outside taking pictures on the side of the road and park rangers are out there yelling at them to move back. We went back to camp early that day so we would have more daylight to cook and make smores.

The biggest thing I've realized from this trip is how small the world is, everyone has some connection to North Carolina or NC State it seems. The park ranger who I checked in with at the campground had a son that went to State, two older couples saw my tire cover and told us they went to UNC or had a family member that lived in NC. It's so strange because you wouldn't expect to find that in the middle of Wyoming and South Dakota. Pretty cool though.

We stayed in Idaho with some relatives and ended up going to see a Rodeo, which is actually a pretty interesting thing to watch. We also went skeet shooting, that was quite different because I've never done that. We had a couple days to relax so that was nice.

Today(11th) we're driving through Montana(!!!) up to Glacier! Montana is beautiful too. All of these states are so underrated but I love it out here.