Day 103 – 8/3/13 – 2.0 mi (1825.4)

We started the day with the best of intentions. By 7:30, LoveNote, Burly Whites (Stryder has officially change his name) and I were hitching and scored a great ride with a local artist who does block carving prints on paper he makes himself…out of bison poop. I am not making this up. Daniel was on his way to a gift shop at Old Faithful where he sells his artwork about 10 days a year. He answered lots of our questions about the area, and even took us on a scenic detour to see some more of the park. We got to see his artwork and he generously gave us each a notecard of his work. The prints are actually really cool, and LoveNote and I each ended up buying some larger ones to mail home. You can check out his work at www.dunganddunger.com.

We met up with Ninja and Sweetfish and ended up at the AYCE breakfast buffet at the Old Faithful Inn. I should’ve known then we were in trouble. We went to the post office to mail our bison poop prints only to discover today is Saturday, and the PO is closed. Last night as we were leaving Old Faithful, a ranger stopped to say hello. Dawn reads my blog and recognized us! We had chatted for a while and she asked if there was anything she could help us with. At the time, we didn’t need anything, but remembered her when we ran into our mailing dilemma. So we dropped off a bag with the prints and a note for her at the visitor center.

We finally got moving around 11am. The next few miles of trail out of Old Faithful are on a boardwalk, passing tons of geysers. Of course these miles went slowly with much oooing and ahhing and photo taking.

We had to cross the main road to continue on the trail, passing some more geysers and many tourists. At this point, it was almost noon. We didn’t have a permit for camping in the park tonight, so we needed to walk another ~16 miles to get out of park boundaries. Then I did it. I suggested we take a tourist day and hike out tomorrow. Most of the others have never been to Yellowstone before, and we really saw very little of it on the CDT. To stay on schedule, we decided we could take the Mack’s Inn cutoff instead of the official trail, saving us 40 miles on the route between here and our next town, Lima, MT. This also meant we could drop 2 of the 6 days of food from our packs. Everyone hopped on board with this idea.

We spent the next few hours hitch hiking around the geyser basins and being tourists.

The best ride was in the back of a U-Haul with a motorcycle.

We went back to Old Faithful for ice cream and checked in with Dawn, who was now on duty. She was super cool about us dumping our chores on her. She also gave us a special ranger program talk to fulfill our Junior Ranger program requirements and shared lots of info about the geysers. It was great to talk to someone so excited about the park and gave us a lot of insight.

We planned to hitch to Grant Village, 16 miles away, to camp in a walk-in hiker site. While trying to hitch, an employee of the park’s consessioner pulled over. We figured we were gonna get yelled at for hitching. Instead, the man offered to let us camp in the employee RV park, just a half mile away! It was perfect for us, and it was neat to get to talk to the park employee and learn about working in Jellystone.

I am at the point in the hike where I’m just exhausted. I was falling asleep sitting up by 8pm. Good thing we took a “rest” day!