Day 30: Under Construction

I’m from Tennessee, where we often joke the that orange and white traffic barrel is our state flower.

Welcome to beautiful Montana, where, when they go to fix a road, they fix a road. Like, pull the whole sucker up, make you drive single file on dirt for miles escorted by a pilot car, and redo the whole road.

At least, that’s what it seems.

We drove out of Glacier into road work. Slept in Great Falls and started out again in road work. Drive, road work, drive, road work.

To El Jefe who constantly encourages me to keep my car washed: It is pointless in Montana, for there will always be more dirt. I’m doing good to keep the windshield clean enough to see.

The first time was truly disconcerting. I was driving down a state highway, no slouch of a road, and the pavement just ended. There had been road work signs, sure, but nothing that told the lowly Southern girl, “HI! Here in Montana, we dig up the whole road when we do roadwork. The next 10 miles will be more rutted than Aunt Imogene’s driveway in the 80’s.”

Good times.

Anyhoo…

I’m starting to prefer driving the highways of America to the interstates of America. You find cooler stuff off the beaten path, especially up here where interstates are far fewer and the highways come with faster speed limits. Randomly, you’ll stumble across enormous statues or road placards or street names that are fascinating. Like Thunder Jack there in Shields Valley near Wilsall, MT, which seems home to little more than Thunder Jack, a plethora of roads named after Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, and a post office.

Wait! A post office! We finally found a place with enough postcard stamps to send the 52 postcards I’d been accumulating in my purse since the Hoover Dam!

Because, let’s be honest, I don’t have the patience to put quarters in a postcard stamp machine to get five stamps at a time when the post office will sell them to me in rolls of 100.

We had reservations to stay in Bozeman, MT, but Earl and I decided we’d run on down real quick to see a bit of Yellowstone and scout it out for the next day.

Have you ever been to Yellowstone? Then you get the joke.

There were elk cows lazing around in the middle of everything in Mammoth Hot Springs, which was thrilling for both Earl and myself. Wildlife! Up close and personal! In a parking lot! Where nobody will fuss if I park to take a picture!

Don’t get close to the cows, though. They’re huge, and they pack a mean punch. So we were told numerous times by various park rangers.

Our first stop at any National Park is the Visitor Center to get Earl a Junior Ranger booklet. The VC at Yellowstone was also where I got my first clue of the true scope of Yellowstone. This was not going to be a “drive around the loop road once and you’ve basically seen it” National Park. Yellowstone is enormous. It was going to take time to see even a small part of it.

But on this trip, taking the time is the name of the game.

Storms were looming not far from the VC, but that didn’t stop us from running up to the first of many geothermal basins in the park. Hot springs abound in the northern end of the park—the geysers are mostly down south—and I was excited to show Earl their spectacular colors.

On that first stop, she (and I, if I’m being honest) was more worried about not getting hit by lightning. I’m not sure she saw much. I saw it, though. And I have plenty of pictures to help her remember in a couple of years when she’s forgotten.

Yellowstone showed us that first day how fickle its weather can be. Part of that is due to its sheer size. Part, I’m sure, its geography and geology. And part, well, it’s summer. Five miles down the road, it was glorious.

Yellowstone, like Montana, has a lot of road work going on this summer. Like Montana, they also completely demolish roads to rebuild them. We spent a lot of time parked and waiting, then driving for long stretches behind pilot cars.

We stopped once to go peek at the Norris Geyser Basin, but a slip of the foot earned us our first injury of this trip—a skinned knee—instead.

Park Rangers are wonderful people with bandaids in their backpacks who are willing to help out even if they’re off duty.

Unfortunately, they don’t carry Junior Ranger badges in their backpacks, and Earl was starting to get antsy about making it to another Visitor Center before they closed for the day. We’d attended a Ranger talk on wildlife at the first Visitor Center, and she’d finished the rest of her booklet while we were stuck in construction traffic. The Park Ranger with the bandaid assured us that the Old Faithful Visitor Center was open until 8, and if we left then, we should have just enough time to get there; it was only an hour away.

Did I mention that Yellowstone is HUGE?

“You mean Old Faithful is here? In this park?” Earl asked, hobbling back to the car.

“In Yellowstone? Yeah. I thought you knew that.”

“I didn’t! I’m just a kid! You have to tell me these things! I get to see Old Faithful!!”

(Proof that somebody tunes me out. I’d woken her up that morning with a made up song about seeing the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone, and had mentioned it no fewer than four times since we’d been in the park.)

We arrived at Yellowstone at 4:00 in the afternoon. By the time we got down to Old Faithful, it was knocking on 8.

Earl merrily handed over her sixth Junior Ranger booklet of this trip and was sworn in. She also asked about the Young Scientist program and proclaimed we would be back tomorrow to do that!

We had just enough time to snag dinner in the cafeteria before Old Faithful’s next eruption at 8:26. And, boy, was it ever worth the wait.

With storms rolling in and sunset sneaking beneath them, it was a sight that my little iPhone just isn’t capable of capturing. We sat on the bench surrounded by hundreds of other people, all in near silence as we watched water jettison from the earth.

“This is amazing,” Earl whispered.

It was also freezing and Bozeman was a two and a half hour drive from Old Faithful (I can sleep when we get home), so we followed the herd of departing tourists back to our car.

Yet again, the mere act of the sun going down was a sight to behold, only it wasn’t because of the boldness of colors but because of the steaming landscape.

My mother complains about our late nights on this trip. I understand her concerns. But sometimes God’s work is even more incredible when you wait for it to develop over the right canvas.

Even if it means driving through more road construction at 11:00 at night.