West Yellowstone to
Flagg Ranch
Today was a long but
very fund day on Das Bike – 75 miles, 4,000 ft. of climbing and over the
Continental Divide three times. We
are staying at Flagg Ranch, which is a small but very nice outpost about 3
miles south of the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park. We took a few detours from the route shown above based on advice from locals.
We were glad to leave
West Yellowstone early, at 6:00 a.m.
The sky was gray and there had been some rain overnight, but nothing was
coming down. It was just twilight and
with our tail light and head light flashing, off we went. There was no traffic but the park
entrance gate was open already. We
showed our pass and were on our way.
The first stop on our
list was the Fountain Paint Pots geyser basin. A few miles before we got there, we came over a hill and
there was a large cow elk in the road.
She just looked at us as we rode by, and as we passed her we saw her
calves just over the edge of the road.
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| Cow elk in Yellowstone; her calves are just over the hill |
Then, about ¼ mile
down the road Lorie spotted a big bison just off the road, snoozing in a
pasture. We turned around for the
photo op as we rode slowly by. He
twitched his ears a bit at us, but didn’t seem to mind our riding by.
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| Bison waking up |
Just as we arrived at
the Fountain Paint Pots the rain started to fall. We parked the bike and locked it, and geared up in rain gear
to walk the boardwalk around the geyser basin.
Here’s a few photos.
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| Celistine pool, Yellowstone |
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| Paint pots (the color is from a variety of unique bacteria) |
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| Mud pots |
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| Random pool at Paint Pots |
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| A different view of Celestine Pool |
There are a lot of
warning signs to stay on the boardwalks because, among other things, the area
is fragile and the hot pools are close to boiling. It looks like some of them are actually boiling. Despite the warnings we saw folks climbing onto the native ground to get a better view.
After leisurely
walking the loop and avoiding being in too many people’s selfies, we straddled
the bike again and headed towards Old Faithful, the next stop on our list and
about 12 miles up the road. The
ex-Ranger that we’d met the other day told us a trick to get to the lodge and
geyser easy while avoiding the crowds.
We followed his instructions and it worked perfectly; we arrived at the
lodge and were right in front of the geyser, which unfortunately, had just
erupted 10 minutes earlier (it erupts about every 90 minutes, give or take 10
minutes). No matter, we were cold
from the rain and wanted to explore the lodge. Coffee first and it warmed us up quickly.
The lodge is pretty
cool and has woodwork that reminds of Timberline but with lodge pole pine
rather than massive Douglas fir.
Here are some photos of the interior. There was some significant damage in a big 1989 earthquake,
but it appears to remain in good shape.
It has a huge dining hall that was pretty full, and the hotel is full
every night.
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| Old Faithful Lodge |
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| Great Hall in the lodge |
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| Unique structural components |
We had leftover
bagels and hummus with our coffee and that was our lunch. After we’d had our fill we strolled out
to the boardwalk that surrounds the geyser. There were thousands of people; no kidding. It looked like most had arrived by bus
and cars, and all eagerly awaited Old Faithfull’s show! There is a phone hotline that you can
call to get predicted eruption times.
We had mis-predicted the prior eruption, but we didn’t have to wait long
this time as the geyser performed its magic right on queue. It is pretty impressive and the crowd
enjoyed it very much. We, did too!
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| Old Faithful |
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| Right on time! |
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| Old Faithful |
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| Old Faithful winding down for another 90 minutes |
From Old Faithful our
route continued in an easterly direction but the road turned decidedly upward. We had three passes to climb today,
each going over the Continental Divide.
The hills started right off and the first pass climbed to about 8,300
feet. The gradient was not super
steep, typically about 6 to 8 percent with a few ramps to 9, but it went for a
long way.
Here’s the
Continental Divide sign at our first pass crossing; the sign says that the
elevation was 8,262 but our GPS said it was about 25 feet higher:
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| Our first pass over the Continental Divide |
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| Shoshone Lake |
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| Near the top of the first pass; 1 down, 2 to go... |
From the top of the
first we dropped sharply about 2,000 feet and started the process again. Here’s the second pass. According to the sign the elevation is
8,391, but we had actually topped out at 8,540 about 1 mile prior to the divide:
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| 2 down, 1 to go...(and the third is a bit lower) |
From the second pass
we dropped down to the “West Thumb” of Yellowstone lake, which showed itself to
be quite huge. There is a geyser
basin that we wanted to look at and so we took the short side road – it was
easy to find since there were scads of busses and cars. The hot pools and fumaroles are amazing
and I’m not sure that the photos do them justice. Beautiful!
Yellowstone is not terribly beautiful in terms of mountains and forests. It’s beauty lies instead in the unique
geology.
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| West Thumb geyser basin; Blue Bell pool |
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| West Thumb Pool |
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| West Thumb pool |
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| Abyss Pool |
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| Abyss pool |
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| Black Pool |
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| Black Pool |
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| Black Pool |
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| Black Pool one last time (it is amazing!) |
One more pass to
cross and the third one was only about 8,011 ft., but according to the sign,
7,988:
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| Third of three. It is all downhill from here! |
From the top of the
pass it was 23 miles to our stop for the night, just outside of the southern
park boundary at Flagg Ranch. It
was mostly downhill with some rollers and it was mostly fast the rest of the
way. The Yellowstone Nat’l Park
information had warnings about the road from West Thumb to the south
entrance. They say that the road
is not good for cycling because it is narrow and rough. We agree with them that the road was
super narrow with no shoulder, but the surface was very good. I think that the concern is over
car/bike conflict. Traffic was
light and it came in bunches. I
could comfortably maintain 30 to 35 plus mph downhill, but the cars usually wanted to go
faster. The speed limit is
45. Whenever there was an oncoming
car I would just take the lane until it was safe for the overtaking car to pass
us. Most of the drivers were super
courteous; occasionally there was the driver that just couldn’t slow down but it was never a bother (and I trust that I didn't spoil their day, too!).
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| A fast downhill run out of the park |
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| Passing Lewis Falls |
We had to have a photo of us with Das Bike at the south entrance. If we look tired, we were.
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| The weather had improved a lot in the past 7 hours |
But we had a great day. We got checked into the cabin we rented for the night, ran
over to the grocery and bought peanuts, and beer.
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| Beer |
Cheers!
