Salt Lake City, UT to Worland, WY
Wow today we drove in four different states. We passed north out of Salt Lake City out of Utah and into Idaho. Idaho, at least the part we drove through, is pretty much like you’d expect, lots of farmland and grassland. After Idaho we drove through Montana for a grand total of 30 minutes. Montana has this peninsula that sticks out between Idaho and Wyoming, it seems like it’s only existence is for Montana to claim that it has a part of Yellowstone in its boundary. It looks big on the map below, but that stretch of highway 20 in Montana is only 10 miles. After we crossed over the border into Wyoming we were in Yellowstone.
Yellowstone is an amazing National Park. Although in my opinion Yosemite has more amazing scenery, Yellowstone has a lot of cool unique features that makes it a must visit. First off there are the many geothermal features– the geysers, the fumaroles, the mud pots, and the crazy looking mammoth hot springs. Then there’s the wildlife. I came within a couple hundred feet of a bald eagles’ nest. Luckily I had my telephoto lens so I was able to get a decent shot of a bald eagle chilling in a tree.
On our way out of Yellowstone we saw a bison crossing the road, he was literally a few feet away from my window, lumbering across the road. Finally Yellowstone has an amazing variety of scenery. Like I said, the scenery may be more amazing in Yosemite, the mountains and waterfalls have a bigger “wow factor” there, but Yellowstone has amazing variety and almost everything you can ask for. There are canyons, mountains, huge forests, beautiful streams and rivers, wide open meadows, waterfalls, lakes, basically all sorts of scenery packed into one area. The eastward drive out of Yellowstone was pretty amazing, the beauty of Yellowstone Lake rivals Lake Tahoe in my opinion. Probably the best memory of the day for me was mammoth hot springs. When you go there you feel like you’re on another planet. It’s a landscape different from anything else in this world.
The amazing thing about Wyoming is it feels so empty. We didn’t pass any really major cities, and we actually had no cell phone reception for most of our time in Wyoming. If you want to get back to nature, Wyoming is probably one of the best places in America. We spent the night in a tiny town called Worland in the middle of the state. Amazingly our room had free wi-fi and it was pretty fast. That was pretty unexpected considering we couldn’t even get a cellphone signal for most of the day.
