Grand Teton and Yellowstone – Sun 28 to Tue 30 June

We had a lazy day driving to Salt Lake City. Northern Utah was very different to what we expected – we had kind of pictured it being dry and desert-y, but it is actually a lot like parts of New Zealand – rolling green hills and pine forests surrounded by snow-capped mountains. We lazed around in the Koa pool and spa (with a bunch of excited little kids!) after arriving in Salt Lake City.




We had a few contacts in Salt Lake City, but after trying to call them all Saturday evening and Sunday morning we couldn’t get in touch with anybody, so we eventually drove straight on to Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson is a really cute little town, lots of arty shops (and lots of touristy ones too of course!) and nice cafes and restaurants. After some scrumptious pizza for dinner (real pizza with actual toppings on it rather than typical North American style with cheese and pepperoni!) we drove into Grand Teton National Park for sunset.

The mountains of the park are beautiful, a line of really spectacular mountains that rise straight out of the surrounding plains. We watched the sunset at Oxbow Bend, accompanied by an extremely friendly group of oversized mosquitoes! I honestly don’t think I have ever seen swarms of mosquitoes quite like this. Within a few minutes I was pretty much lumpy all over – even when I was completely covered from head to toe I managed to get about 4 bites on my face within a few minutes!

We dragged ourselves out of bed for sunrise the next morning at Snake River Overlook. After an early morning drive around the park and some wildlife watching, our lack of sleep and too many early mornings was catching up with us so we went back to sleep for a while! We checked out Jenny Lake and Jackson Lake, then headed on to Yellowstone National Park.

People rave about Yellowstone and it is one of the most famous parks in the US, but some of the most popular parts are really very similar to Rotorua in New Zealand, so we didn’t find it as exciting as other parks. The park is HUGE, to even just drive each of the main roads would take several hours (most of the main spots are about 50km apart), so there is a lot of driving in between the sightseeing. Everything is on a huge scale, with lots of geysers, bubbling mud pools, thermal springs and so on. We were hoping to see some wildlife, which is the other thing the park is famous for. We saw hundreds of bison, hundreds of elk and truckloads of deer, but no bears or wolves like we had really hoped.

After a night sleeping in a carpark in Yellowstone, we did another early morning drive in the (unfounded) hope of wildlife spotting, then rocked up to Old Faithful Geyser with perfect timing, just a few minutes before it was due to erupt. We did some more hot springs and geyser watching, then backtracked back to Rexburg where we were guaranteed to see some bears – at the bear park there!

We had picked up a brochure for the bear park on our way to Grand Teton, and figured we would visit if we didn`t manage to see anymore bears in the meantime. So after driving miles and miles out of our way, we did the drive through the park. The bears roam around one section of the park which you can slowly drive through. We did pick a bad time of day (actually given how lazy bears are probably most of the day is a bad time!), so we saw lots of lazy, sleepy bears – a bit like we were feeling really! We had a couple come right up to the car though.

The highlight of the park though was definitely the six little bear cubs in the petting zoo. They were the cutest little things I have ever seen!! They were so funny, wrestling with each other, chasing flies, swimming and just generally being gorgeous! It was soooo worth the long drive to get there for the sake of seeing them.

More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/GrandTetonYellowstone?authkey=Gv1sRgCND6kZHq-NKq2AE#