Episode 12 - Yellowstone - Travertine Terraces & Roosevelt Old West Cookout

Visiting the Travertine Terraces, lunch at Mammoth Lodge, Tower Falls, and an Old West Stagecoach cookout in the Roosevelt area!  Sorry for a brief stint of my dog shaking in the background while I was talking towards the end. :)

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome to another episode of Travel Time. We're continuing discussing Yellowstone today with some discussions about Mammoth Springs, the travertine terraces there, as well as the Roosevelt section of the park, Lamar Valley, and over to Tower Fall. So we did that section of the park on the next day we are there. We took off as usual from the Snow Lodge down at Old Faithful where we were kind of basing our trip, it took about an hour and a half ish to get up there, there was some construction along the road. So basically an hour and a half up the west side of the park to get there. Other than the construction, it wasn't terribly bad, there's a little traffic backed up through there because of that, that we made our first stop travertine terraces, and the travertine terraces, all I have to say is they're like nothing I've ever seen before! they looked like something that was of another planet. Basically, compared to things I've seen in the past. The they're fed by water from the Norris Geyser Basin. And there's like a fault line that runs from Norris to mammoth and covered with limestone. And the limestone causes the water to carry and calcium carbonate. So as the water cools, it forms these amazing terraces, that, honestly, you have to see to believe the pictures are gorgeous, but in person is far more beautiful than the pictures are. They as the water cools, quote, unquote, they form the amazing Travertine Terraces, as I say cool in quotes, because cool is 170 degrees. Apparently, their frame of reference is obviously a lot different. The algae that's all throughout the water, also color causes a bunch of coloration differences, they're really give a lot of really cool depth to the formations. There are over two tons of calcium carbonate flowing today in the solution, which is just so hard to it's so unfathomable to me. The terraces are formed over thousands of years, but they continue to evolve and change daily. So basically, if you go there two different times, so if I go one month, and then I go the next month, they're different. It's even more true right now. Because apparently the spring that feeds the Mammoth Spring, as dried up recently. So I guess in July, everything was just like it was when we were there the year before, then in August, this spring had dried up. And I've seen some pictures of before and after. And the difference from July 2020 to August 2020 is just like night and day. It's definitely lost a lot of the kind of awe value with it. So I'm really glad we went when we did. Apparently it's pretty common for them to stop. And so they don't know if they'll turn back on or not. But it has in the past. This one was caused to some earthquake activity. So probably there's some kind of disruption in what Yellowstone they often call the the plumbing, which is the underground flow of the water. But in the past, they've gone kind of offline, so to speak for anywhere from a couple days to one time, they dried up for 10 years. 10 straight years, which is another reason why I'm glad I saw it when I did. in case, this is another one that was a 10 year disruptions. But in the past, they've always come back. So it's a wait and see thing. But we went into the upper terraces first. And because that's when we were coming in that was the first place to turn off of that was no big strategy move. My favorite was Canary Spring, it was huge. And I honestly could have stood there for much longer than we did just looking at the springs and the different views around it and the way it played off of the mountains around surrounding it and the valley was gorgeous. So we wanted to do the lower terraces next. But honestly, we were hungry. And when we got to the parking lot of lower terraces, there were no spots. So rather than kind of circle around and try to get a spot, we decided to go ahead and do lunch, we headed over to have lunch at the Mammoth Springs Hotel. And there's a place that's kind of detached from the hotel called the Mammoth Hotel Dining Room. It was really nice, we walked in and we were kind of like, This place seems too fancy. It's gonna be a really kind of hoity toity kind of lunch. But we went in and the atmosphere is really nice. We are some of the only people there because it was an early lunch. It was like 11 o'clock. And they're only I think like two other families in the entire place. And it's big. It's a really big kind of old style style dining room like something you'd imagine from back in the 1900s, things like that. But with all of it inside, it's modern, but obviously the architecture is kind of along those lines. And they have this really nice lunch menu and it's pretty reasonably priced. So I had like the pork sliders and they were about 11 or $12 for the pork sliders and some fries which for a National Park is a pretty reasonable price point. In my opinion. Everything we had was great. Every single person or table liked what they got, although some people were jealous of the things other people got. And it was just a really nice place to relax. Eat Have a nice meal. And right as we were leaving, it was starting to get busy. But when we were there, we had our waiter like all to ourselves because like I said, there were only a couple people there. And this is in the middle of the summer, so it wasn't like it was beginning of July. So it's not like that's normally a downtime for Yellowstone. We also took a few minutes to kind of walk around the lobby of the hotel, which is also really beautiful. And kind of explored that a little bit. All in all, I would eat there again, in a heartbeat. The food was good, the variety on the menu is great. If you have people that are picky, someone will probably be able to find something to eat on that menu. The views are great because the windows are humongous. And you can look out over Yellowstone while you're eating, which is nice. We went over to try to do lower terraces, but the parking lot was still backed up, so we didn't get to see them. So it's on my list for next time. We have a couple people in our group that have knee issues. And so if you're in upper terraces, and you can park there's actually a staircase right by Canary Springs, that goes all the way down to lower the lower terraces. So you can then go down, look around and come back up. But on that particular day, neither of them - my knees and my husband's knees, neither of them were doing very great. So it wasn't really a good day to go down a huge flight of stairs. So we we decided to hold those off till next time, it's definitely on my list for next time. So we drove through kind of Fort area, we didn't tour it, because we were a little pressed on time, because we did have a few things today that can be time dependent. So we headed over to Tower Falls, we did see a coyote on the way over so it was our first wildlife sighting of the day. And we took the short trail to see the Tower Falls, you kind of Park in this sort of big bigger than the terraces parking lot, but not very big parking lot that has kind of a gas station and gift shop and you walk on this little trail that goes over to the right of it, it almost just looks like part of the rest area that's kind of station there. But you go back it's very short, I want to say it's less than a half mile. And then at the end of it you can see tower falls in the distance. So it's not right up close. It's basically across the valley. And you can see it, but it was very beautiful. And for short as the trail was and as easy as it was to go across there. Definitely worth it. And the added benefit is there's amenities there. So if you're passing by and want to take a look at it, it's short and easy to do. And you can get ice cream or a souvenir or use the restroom or whatever you want to do there. We went ahead and left there and then went back towards Roosevelt. So we had passed Roosevelt Hotel in that area to get to Tower Falls and kind of backtracked. We came back and went into Lamar Valley. But as we pulled into the road that runs through Lamar Valley, we saw a giant crowd, which in Yellowstone usually means some kind of unusual animal or in some cases and not unusual animal. For example, it's impossible to go into Yellowstone and not see a bison. I don't know how you could possibly do it. They're everywhere. But we saw a big crowd, we stopped and there was a huge black bear in a berry bush that we when we first got there, you couldn't even really see the bear, you'd see little flashes of black and the bush would rattle. And it was kind of watching and there was a ranger that had come out and was kind of making sure no one got closer than a certain amount of space. And then the bear started to exit the bush and the Ranger kind of let us know. Here's what we're gonna do. If he goes towards the creek, which was away from us, we can keep watching. If he turns around and starts coming this way, everyone's going to immediately go to their cars and is not going to run. Because if you run, the bear wants to run obviously. So he basically gave everybody in the crowd instructions if the bear turns this way walk back to your cars don't run. And the bear did not- the bear came out. And it was probably the biggest black bear I've ever seen, actually WAS definitely the biggest black bear I've ever seen. And I lived in the Smoky Mountains and the black bears there do not get as big generally. But very large black bear came out and he went straight for the creek. So we did get to stay and kind of watch him amble away, which is pretty cool. So we watched him kind of wander off and then we got back in our car to go through the valley. As we drove in, we almost immediately saw a wolf, which is not that normal to see you I guess in the middle of the afternoon. But we did see him and accordingly saw all the prey kind of scattering and his path. But we're kind of happy to see that because we had kind of thought since we weren't willing to get up at like 3am to drive to Lamar Valley to see the wolves. We probably weren't going to get to see them but we were happy to see that. We then just kind of enjoyed lots of views of animals. Lamar Valley is full of animals, lots of pronghorn, lots of bison, and we saw a couple elk we just kind of went to a couple of the different overview spots and watch the animals through binoculars and in some cases fairly up close and enjoyed that for a while a couple hours and then headed back to Roosevelt Lodge which was back at the beginning of the street. We had to meet at Roosevelt Lodge because there's a stables right in front of there where we're going to take off for our dinner excursion. So in the meantime, we went in and kind of looked at the lobby of Roosevelt Lodge, and I think we got a little ice cream or something to kind of pass the time. And then it was time to head down to the stables. Our dinner tonight was going to be a adventure to do an old west cook out, I'm sorry, old West cookout. And they do it two ways they have you can get on horseback and you can ride out to the cookout with a with a Wrangler that leads you, or you can do a stagecoach type thing to ride out. So we've been to dude ranches a couple of times, I will do an episode on one of those later. So we've we've had kind of the experience where you ride your horse out into the wilderness or the woods and have a meal out in the woods. And while we like it, we thought we would try the wagon this time. So we did and it was a lot of fun. They took us out, they kind of told us stories on the way out. We had a brief problem with part of the functionality on our cart, and they had to run us out a piece that we weren't very far from the stables so it didn't take very long. And just generally fine, we got a lot of good views. And we met up with the very courageous cooks who had been out in the valley cooking all day among the bears and everything without getting attacked or anything. So when we got there, we kind of all waited for all the different wagons to get there. And for the people on horseback to arrive and had a really good dinner of steaks, ranch beans, corn, cobbler, I think like there may have been a salad. And then some drinks. I can remember all the things we had. The ranch beans were really good. And the steaks were good too. So we we really enjoyed that you basically sit at long picnic tables. And you go through a buffet line for the food and enjoy your food. And as the food's kind of wrapping up. I will mention too, if you really like like the ranch beans, they have recipes for it, some of those things there. So as the food's kind of wrapping up, everyone kind of gathers. They tell some stories, they may have some some songs, I can't remember, I'm not much of a singer. And during one of the stories, all of a sudden, like no one was paying attention to the story because on the hill, another giant black bear was just wandering along the ridge. And the hill was like, it was exciting to see it but not terrifying, because the hill was pretty decent pace away. So the bear wasn't going to get very close to us very quickly. So we were all watching them through the binoculars walking, just walking along the ridge right around there. And just a really nice evening, very worth the time and the effort to do it, I would definitely do it again. And our kids both enjoyed a lot. There were a lot of kids of all sorts of different ages on this trip. And they all really liked it. I will say if you have very young kids, you don't get back until pretty late. So unless you're staying at Mammoth Springs or Roosevelt, you're going to get back to your room probably close to 10. So wherever you're staying, and so just keep in mind that the dinner might end at like 830. But if you're not staying on the north end of the park, you've still got about an hour to your hotel, probably no matter where you are, we had about an hour and a half back to our hotel. So we headed back, we actually went down the east side of the park because there was still that whole upper northeast corner that we hadn't seen yet. And it was only from the car but we we wanted you to kind of drive through and see it, we ended up going through part of the park that had a lot of fire damage for a few years back. And I think in total was about an hour and 45 minutes back. And part of that is because we took kind of the long way by going on the east side, if we'd gone down the west side, it probably would have been more like an hour 30. But we were happy we did because we get we wouldn't have gotten to see that part, even from the car with what we were doing the next day. So all in all, I would definitely recommend it. A lot of people I think skip the travertine terraces, and they don't perceive them as interesting as other parts of the park. I think it's a huge mistake because it's so different. I mean, in granted when you get to the geysers and everything, those are so different for anything you see in your day to day lives, but these are different in an entirely different way. And really visiting Yellowstone is like visiting almost like four separate parks in one because each section is so different than the other sections that if you just totally skip one, you're really missing a lot. That's why when I'm recommending to friends now I generally recommend spend at least four full days in the park really, if you can spend more, you won't run out of stuff to do. But if you can do four days, like we we had about five days, and with the four full days we had it was nice because we picked a section of the park each day and that's the section we did and we kind of stayed in that section it allowed us to see a lot more stuff. And even with that I came away with a lot of stuff like the lower terraces that we didn't have time for and I really want to go back for, so I very much recommend it and would definitely do something like the cookout again. I will say the cookout is really hard to book. So go on the site. Find out when they're going to start booking and start trying to book it as soon as it opens because it filled up really quickly. I believe I booked it on the first day it was open. And by about the second day it was it was completely full. So just kind of be ready to do that. And if you have four days, we ended up just trying to be flexible. Like we decided to go to the section of the park that was in based on the day I was able to get the reservation, because there were a couple of days that were full. And that was the day I could get a reservation. So that's the day we went to that part of the park. It's much harder to get than reservations for other places like even Old Faithful Inn Dining Room, which is pretty hard to get. But just a word of warning on that one. And our next episode will be the last section of the park that we visited, which was Lake Yellowstone. And we actually took one of the yellow bus tours one of the old timey kind of Van type trucks that used to go around and give tours to Yellowstone back in the 1900s. I think even the late 1800s possibly. And so I'll wrap up with that as we wrap up our trip to Yellowstone and we'll have an episode also on Grand Teton after that separate one. So still lots to come for this trip. Thanks for joining me again and until then, Happy trails!