Two 50+ women, one hot car, six national parks
How we traveled through Utah and Wyoming in June 2017
Jodi says we’ve been trying to make this trip for 17 years. I say we started planning it three years ago, but whatever. We finally sat down in October 2016 and booked flights, a rental car, and five nights in Yellowstone. I was set on visiting Yellowstone, at last, for the first time. Jodi added a stipulation: We should also visit Zion NP in southern Utah.
Things we learned: (1) Much of Yellowstone is already booked in October. (2) Basic motel-like rooms there are crazy expensive. (3) The booking website sucks, but with a lot of patience, you can use it.
We flew into Salt Lake City from our separate home states, picked up our surprisingly cool rental car (“standard, Toyota Corolla or similar”—Rugged Rental—they were nice!) and hit the interstate south to our first cheap motel (about 3.5 hours; speed limit 80 MPH).
We slept that first night about an hour’s drive northwest of Zion National Park, where we had scored a room in one of the few independent motels left in the adjacent town, Springdale (one night there). Luckily we had fairly cool weather (70s and 80s, Fahrenheit) for the two days we spent exploring in Zion — the following week, they had a bad heat wave, 100-plus. We met a nice couple who told us about a great hike they’d done in a slot canyon east of Bryce Canyon, our next destination. We made a note of it. So nice to get tips from other travelers!
Leaving Zion on breathtaking Highway 9 (with tunnels!), we made our way past Bryce Canyon National Park to the tiny town of Tropic, Utah (about two hours from Zion), where we stayed two nights in a cute log cabin on the main road.
While Zion requires you to leave your car behind and ride a shuttle through the park to reach the various sights and trails, in Bryce the shuttle is optional and only goes a short way into the northern part of the park, where the “hoodoo” rock formations are plentiful. We opted to skip the shuttle and drive out to the far south end and then try a walk down into the amphitheater among the hoodoos. The walk was too steep for my vertigo, and I was having a reaction to the altitude (8,000-plus feet!), but Jodi ventured farther down.
We really enjoyed the visitor’s center in Bryce Canyon NP, where we learned about how the tall, often skinny hoodoos are formed by a combination of erosion and pressure from ice in the winter. We also saw a model of the whole land area from the Grand Canyon in Arizona up to Bryce, where numerous different rock layers tilted up and were exposed by geologic activity—in other words, we learned why the rocks and cliffs throughout southern Utah look the way they do. It’s called the Grand Staircase—it covers an area 100 miles by 200 miles, and it makes 600 million years of Earth’s history visible.
We spent the full day in Bryce, and the next day we set out to do the slot canyon walk in Willis Creek, which our motel neighbors back in Springdale had told us about. It was south of Tropic and on our way to our next motel. The creek was very shallow, but we did get our feet wet! It was a great walk.
After the slot canyon walk, we needed to drive east and north to Torrey, Utah (about three hours). The road from Escalante to Torrey took our breath away! We stopped at a visitor center in Escalante, and the volunteer there asked us which way we were headed. When we said we’d come from Bryce, she said we ain’t seen nothing yet. What could she mean? We’d seen hoodoos! Canyons! Red rock cliffs! Striped and twisted rocks pushed out from the belly of the Earth!
Shorty afterward, we stopped at this lookout (below) and saw our future road winding out below us.
That drive on Highway 12 was filled with wonder. We could barely blink, the terrain was so beautiful. The afternoon sun made the reds and yellows glow, and the newly repaved two-lane road wound like a snake around the hills, mountains, and cliffs. A sign told us that this area was the very last part of the United States to be explored and mapped, in 1872.
Toward Torrey, the land grew greener. We saw herds of cattle grazing, and startling stands of white-trunked aspens marching up steep mountainsides between the pines. Jodi said they looked like Japanese ink drawings on a long, tall scroll. (We did not get a photo.)
We didn’t know much about Capitol Reef National Park, but we certainly loved it. The narrow north-south park encloses a 90-mile-long “wrinkle” in the Earth’s crust called the Waterpocket Fold, red and white undulating cliffs often topped with white dome shapes. A scenic drive took us south into the park and provided different awesome views both going and coming back (about two hours). We ate fresh berry pie at a picnic ground (all the rangers promote the yummy park-made pies, and they’re not wrong) and continued east across the park, seeing more stunning views, and out toward Moab and our next motel.
From Capitol Reef to Moab, Utah, the land is fairly desolate. We stopped in a tiny town called Hanksville, where they have a market, and Jodi miraculously got cell phone service and sent some texts. I was able to navigate with Google Maps even without service because I had downloaded several territories to use offline. This was a big help, even though Jodi had picked up a paper map of Utah—which we also used—at the car rental place.
If you’re wondering how we ate out there in the middle of nowhere—we had established a routine early on that suited our travel style, which includes not getting up at the crack of dawn. At breakfast we’d load up on protein, eggs and meat, maybe even some carbs. We bought bananas and apples at local markets. We carried salted nuts and some dried fruit too, along with multiple gallons of water. This gave us maximum flexibility in the middle of the day, when we often didn’t know if we would have other access to food. In the parks, we often saw families munching on homemade sandwiches, so carrying your own lunch makes sense for most people.
Tip: We filled a small Styrofoam cooler with ice and water bottles every morning, which we really appreciated after some of our hottest walks!
Moab is a great little tourist town next to Arches National Park. We arrived around 8 p.m. and managed to get dinner at a nice Mexican place even though the town was packed with people. Earlier, in another park, a man had told us the Arches road was closed for repairs, but it turned out that for the one day we were there, the whole road was open because it was the weekend. We were lucky! The woman running our motel said summer is the slow season at Arches because of the intense heat. We got lucky—high temperatures were in the low 90s.
In the morning, we stocked up on food and water at a local market and then drove the road around Arches, with side trips out to Delicate Arch and the Windows Section and the Double Arch. We had hoped to also visit Canyonlands National Park (45 minutes west of Arches), but we looked at our schedule and decided to skip it. Another time!
For our seventh night, we had no motel reservation. It was our only non-reserved night—we would be driving north toward Wyoming and Yellowstone and splitting an eight-hour drive into two parts, sleeping in between.
Tip: Even the small, family-owned motels fill up early around the national parks. The days of traveling with no reservations might be over!
One or both of us often had no cell phone service, so searching for a motel while en route was a bit of a challenge. We drove north of Provo, Utah, took a detour through Park City (misjudging how far it was from the highway), and finally drove on to Evanston, Wyoming, on Interstate 80, where we finally found a nice non-chain motel for the night. All turned out fine—we washed all our clothes in the motel’s laundry room and found both a good dinner and a good breakfast nearby!
We were able to avoid eating at chain restaurants most of the time on this trip, although we did fail at least twice.
Our next motel would be in Alpine, Wyoming, about one hour from the entrance to Grand Teton National Park. We drove through Alpine without stopping and went straight to the park, where we did a short walk partway around Jenny Lake and took in great views of the Teton Range, where the snowy peaks are 11,303 to 13,775 feet high (no, we did not climb them).
Later that week, a woman traveling with her daughter told us about a cool aerial tram ride to the top of the Tetons. We hoped to do that on our last day, but we did not manage to fit it in.
On our way to Grand Teton we drove through Jackson, Wyoming, with some horror—the town was packed with people and cars. Traffic crawled until we got out on the north end. In spite of that, we decided to eat dinner there on our way back down to Alpine for the night. As it turned out, we parked easily and had a nice plate of barbecue pulled pork in Jackson. I had looked for motels there but was put off by the high prices, which is why we were sleeping in Alpine.
On our eighth day, our Yellowstone National Park adventure was about to begin! We stocked up on food and water at a market in Alpine and drove through Grand Teton again, this time taking the outer (eastern) road that skirts the park. North of the park, we took some time at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, which was much cooler and more fascinating than we had expected. After that, I saw my first herd of bison!
We checked in at our Grant Village room in Yellowstone—which was surprisingly much nicer than we had expected from reading reviews online (albeit overpriced)—and had dinner at the Grant Village Dining Room, with a great view of the lake. Later some elk came by to graze there, just outside the window, but by that time the light had gone.
With four full days in Yellowstone, we decided to visit the Old Faithful area (day one), Mammoth Hot Springs (day two), the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (day three), and the Roosevelt and Lamar Valley areas (day four). This worked out pretty well. We often stopped along the way to see unplanned sights, viewed lots of bison in many locations, saw four black bears and two coyotes, numerous elk (only one with antlers), and no grizzlies (boo!). The park is 63 miles by 54 miles, or almost 3,500 square miles, and the maximum speed limit is 45 MPH.
The maps and “newspaper” you get when you enter a national park are invaluable (and free). Even though I had bought a guidebook, we relied mostly on the trail and road maps supplied by the park. (Check out the maps on the park’s own website before you go.)
The area around Old Faithful is called Upper Geyser Basin; farther up the road are the Midway and Lower geyser basins. We thought we could see them all in one day, but when we tried to park at the Midway basin, it was a madhouse—cars parked on both sides up along the road, and a huge parking lots with no spaces. (We got to see it the next day.) So we continued on to the Lower Geyser Basin and Firehole Lake Drive, which we really loved—and it wasn’t crowded! Several pullouts allowed viewing of different geothermals. We saw a lot of marmots running around on the shore of the steaming lake (too far and too active for photos).
The next day we decided to drive up (about 68 miles) to the northwest section of the park: Mammoth Hot Springs. On the way we saw that the Midway Geyser Basin wasn’t too crowded (although still crowded), so we went in and walked out to see the Grand Prismatic Spring, which is pretty amazing. It’s the only geothermal we saw that threw off colored steam.
The Mammoth Hot Springs area is known for brightly colored terraces and pools built up by limestone deposits left by the dripping or flowing water. The shapes and terraces change over time as the water moves into other parts of the area and starts spurting out in new places.
I was tipped off by a friend to bring a bathing suit and go to the Boiling River for a safe soak in warm or hot pools, but when I asked a park ranger, she said the Boiling River was still closed because of high water and fast currents. The spring snow melt was really heavy this year. When river levels drop, they’ll open it for tourists. This was not hard to believe, because Jodi and I had repeatedly commented on how high and fast all the rivers seemed to be.
We were somewhat underwhelmed by Mammoth Hot Springs because many of the existing boardwalk paths lead to now-dry springs. We saw some impressive new ones that we could not get very close to.
We had a dinner reservation that night at the Old Faithful Inn Dining Room, but we got stuck in a “bear jam” and missed it. The line of traffic hardly moved for an hour—we gave up, made a U-turn, and returned to Grant Village on another road.
On our third day in Yellowstone, we drove up the west side of Yellowstone Lake (“roughly 20 miles long and 14 miles wide”) to visit the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. First, we stopped at the West Thumb area, just north of where we were staying. There we saw more geothermals—this time, they were right beside the lakeshore! It was a beautiful way to spend the morning.
We also made another unplanned stop at the Mud Volcano area, which has a long boardwalk loop around less colorful geothermal pools that are bubbling and popping with hot liquid mud. My favorite there was the Dragon’s Mouth Spring, which wouldn’t have looked like much in a photo—it was a cave opening that roared and spat out water because of the geothermal activity inside it. Loved it!
When we finally made it to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, it did not disappoint. We took a short walk to Artist’s Point (horribly crowded in the afternoon) and got a distant view of the lower falls of the Yellowstone River, as well as the colorful canyon walls.
We had another piece of good luck as a result of chatting with other park visitors: A couple suggested that we not go to the North Rim Drive to view the upper falls but instead go to a viewing point just north of where we were. We loved what we saw there—the roar of the water penetrated our bones!
That night we had a reservation at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel Dining Room (a bit fancier and more expensive than the Grant Village Dining Room).
On our fourth and final day, we resolved to drive to the northeast section of the park: Tower-Roosevelt (about 56 miles). We planned to see Tower Fall and drive east on the Lamar Valley road to try to see some wildlife. Funnily enough, we didn’t see much on that road, but we did see black bears, coyotes, plenty of elk, several deer (in the evening), swans, swallows in cute mud nests under a toilet roof, and (of course) several herds of bison.
A lot of people with camp chairs and high-powered scopes had set up on the roadside pullouts when we were returning along the Lamar Valley road in the early evening. I guess those are the serious wildlife spotters! It appeared that many of them had brought their coolers with them. Nice spot to have dinner while waiting for the wolves and bears to emerge from the trees.
I almost forgot: Shoutout to the Grant Village visitor’s center for the excellent displays about fires in Yellowstone. We learned about the massive 1988 fires as well as how the native lodgepole pines are adapted to regular fires (they produce resin-sealed pinecones that only open and release seeds after being in a high-temperature fire!). In fact, we found answers there to all the many questions we had asked about Yellowstone’s trees over the past three days.
We had some trouble finding the path to Tower Fall, which was ridiculous, because it was right beside the Tower Fall General Store. Well, in our defense, it was just past the store, and the signs were not obvious! We decided to reward ourselves with ice cream after the short walk. (We learned that a locally made Montana brand of ice cream, Wilcoxson’s, is served throughout the park. It is yummy.)
Farther north on the main road, we were impressed by an overhanging cliff face and a fine view of the snaking Yellowstone River, with several tall, pointed lava formations that precede the waterfall. There’s a fairly large pullout on an otherwise dangerous curve in the road.
We slept one more night in Yellowstone and set out the following day for Salt Lake City and our airport motel. On the way we planned to spend some more time in Grand Teton, and we found a short walk that would get us out into Jackson Lake on a little knob of land. Our drive after that would be about five hours. Google Maps found us a great route that took us through Idaho to Interstate 15.
Altogether we had 15 days for this trip, including the flight days at start and end. We felt that the four days/five nights in Yellowstone were enough, but we could easily have spent more time there—so much to see! Flying in/out of Salt Lake City is probably more expensive than some other options, but it worked for our itinerary, since we wanted to combine southern Utah and western Wyoming.
Expenses: The biggest expense was the room in Yellowstone. Camping in the park is an option, but you would need to reserve early. Eating in restaurants there is also not cheap, but you can get around that with groceries and a cooler. Our motels elsewhere ranged from $65 to $122 per night. We always had two queen beds. The rental car was under $700, with mileage included. We also had a national parks Annual Pass, thanks to Jodi’s husband, which covered admission to all the parks we visited.
This was an awesome, wonderful trip. We felt very fortunate to have great weather, no car trouble, comfortable beds and hot showers! The gorgeous scenery was the main attraction everywhere we went. We are so grateful for these parks and so proud that our country protects them.
