After resting a bit from our very stressful day yesterday, we made our way into Yellowstone NP, or tried to. Shortly after getting to the city limits of West Yellowstone, a town right outside of the park, we came to almost a complete standstill. We moved one car length every minute, obviously midday is not the time to try to enter Yellowstone. Talk about anticipation!
Once we got into the park, we marveled at the change in flow and immediately were relieved to be able to regain speed. The park itself is massive, the size of 3 Rhode Islands! You could easily spend an entire day in the car driving the roads. Most sights are 30 minutes to an hour apart. There is a lot to do that is less than a mile round trip to see from a parking lot. So many people do just that: drive, park, go to one of the sights, go back to the car, repeat. We wanted a more complete experience so our trip was going to be a mixture of "must do"s and "few do"s.
After a few easier hikes and seeing Old Faithful, we decided to use the sunset hour to view the Grand Prismatic and check out some hot springs. As dusk was setting in, we set forth to go back to the hotel 45 minutes outside the park. Except instead of it taking 30 minutes to get to West Yellowstone from where we were in the park, it took 60. We were met again with a parade of brakelights, an experience not dissimilar to our time entering the park hours before. Note to self: do not stay for sunset in the park, as it seems like everyone does that. After getting through West Yellowstone, we thought the remaining 45 minutes would be unencumbered. Boy were we wrong.
We saw an alert that 18 miles ahead there was an accident and we may have traffic because of it. We figured by the time we drove the 18 miles, there was a chance it could be cleared. It wasn't, it was at a full standstill. Luckily, with Alex driving, that left me free to use my map skills to find another route. So there we were driving down a very poorly kept gravel road in pitch black with no other car or house in sight, which promised it would lead us to a road closer to our hotel. The important thing was: we were moving. We did make it home, 3 hours after we left the park and an hour and half after the time we should have been home. Once back at the hotel, I looked again at the traffic on my phone from that accident to see if the adventure we went on to avoid the standstill was worth it. It looked like there was still a standstill and later heard at our accomodations that some of the guests got in much later than us because of it.
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