Day's 9 and 10 (july 9th and 10th) "The Spot"

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Day 9

We left there in the morning taking bear tooth pass up to Red Lodge. The drive was incredible, and what should have been an hour and a half drive took 5 on the way there because we would stop every 500 feet and take pictures. We turned around at Red Lodge and then headed back.

We had “lunch” at around 3 at Beartooth Lake, and were going to eat there again on the way back. We stopped, Kyle got out and went swimming for some time in the freezing snowmelt lake and I took some pictures. There were too many mosquitoes there so we decided to make it to Yellowstone and eat there. We did, and ended up in Gardiner for the night.

Day 10

We woke up in Gardiner and went back into the Northern entrance. We stopped to take pictures of Mammoth Hot Springs and stopped for gas. The guy in the gas station told us about a place to bathe in the hot springs just past the 45 latitude marker 2 miles North of Mammoth Hot Springs. We drove past the entrance to the place a few times, looking for a building with hot springs inside, like the one we went in at Thermopolis. What we eventually found was a small parking lot and a half-mile trail up the Gardiner River. They called it the boiling river because at the end of the trail was an area where underground hot springs flowed into the river. The hot springs were too hot to get in themselves, but the mixture of ice water and the hot springs made for a perfect place to relax. If you got too hot, you’d move toward the river, if you got too cold, you’d move toward the springs. This easily made my top 3 spots of the trip so far.

After we bathed for an hour and a half we got out and I chatted up a park ranger named Sean. He was testing the water for chlorides if I remember correctly. I asked him what he did for the park, whether he was a typical park ranger or something special. He worked for the head geologist and was himself a hydrologist. I asked a few questions about the attractions in Yellowstone and he recommended the Black Sand Basin as a great place to visit. We had planned on visiting the petrified tree that day so we asked about it. He told us that it was a Redwood and that it was by far the larger than any tree currently growing in the park. It formed from silica being absorbed shortly after the tree died, protecting it from rot and bugs. He mentioned a whole forest of petrified trees a mile and a half hike from the road and after we expressed interest in it, told us to go to the information center back at Mammoth Hot Springs to get a map and more information. We did. I went in and heard great things from the woman working there in a special office for hikers. She said she’d heard awesome things and she almost made it up but had to turn back due to a lightening storm. So we left to find the trailhead.

It was virtually unmarked, with no reference to the petrified trees, just a sign that said trailhead. We started up with 6 apples, our cameras, and 7 bottles of water. To make a very long and painful story short, the hike was marked “Extremely Strenuous” for a reason.

I went ahead of kyle with the water and apples and took a wrong path almost immediately, getting lost, and on the wrong trail, leaving a water bottle for Kyle. He didn’t get it. The whole thing was up about a 20% grade and for non-hikers, we were not prepared for that much cardio. I, after wandering through a huge field of densely packed sage, climbed a large hill and spotted a dot of a person on a path getting to the path sometime later, about halfway up the hike. Kyle met up with me at that point about a half hour later. He was dying of thirst.

Oh, and we never found the petrified trees.

After four hours of this, we could think of nothing better than that hot spring we found in the morning. We got there and spent a full 3 and a half hours soaking, accidentally leaving a half-hour after it closed. We went back to Gardiner, went to a restaurant next to a hotel so I could use Internet and Kyle could eat. Kyle ate and left to go to sleep and I chatted up a local girl working there, and she generously let me stay till she locked up, about an hour after it closed.