Home Sweet Home

We made it back from our trip. It seems like it took me a few days to recover and get caught up on sleep. No sooner had I gotten home than I had to spend all day Saturday at Lake Pleasant working on my rescue diver certification. We had to perform many skills including rescuing a non-responsive, unconcious diver at the bottom of the lake, bringing him to the surface, towing him in to shore while giving him rescue breaths and removing his dive gear. All simultaneously. It's a lot to think about. I guess that's why they have us go through this training.

Yellowstone Trip Day 5

We pretty much rode all day today. I slept great last night thanks not only to my ambien, but to the fact that I didn't share a room with Dad. We rode from Henry's Fork (which looks like a cool place to fish) and rode down the Eastern border of Idaho. The road from Ashon, ID to Driggs, ID was awesome. It was nothing but rolling hills of farmland with the Tetons off in the distance. We rode through Victor, ID which is where Jen's family's ranch is. She grew up most of her life going there and has lots of memories there. So in memory of her and her family, we stopped in Victor and had shakes at the Victor emporium where she's had so many shakes in years past. We rode a total of about 320 miles today and ended up in Evantston, WY. I love Wyoming. The country here is so beautiful. The whole area from here up to Yellowstone in Wyoming and Idaho is cool country. We spent a bit of time Jackon, WY too. After leaving the Emporium in Victor and enjoying a great ride through the mountain pass between Victor and Jackson, we got to the town square in Jackson and Dad realized he had left his phone at the Emporium back in Victor. So Jon and I hung out in Jackson while Dad rode back to Victor to get his phone. It's a beautiful ride and he was lucky enough (depending on how you look at it) to get to make that ride 3 times.

We ended up in Evanston, WY where I'm writing this now. Luckly for those we're coming home to tomorrow they have coin laundry here at the hotel. This is the first chance we've had to do laundry.

Well, I'm off to take my ambien. I hope I have some left. I can't wait to talk to many of you once I get home. I haven't had my cell phone this whole time since I forgot my charger. It's been kind of nice.

The inside of our cabin at the fishing lodge

Yellowstone Trip Day 4

So I heard there were some complaints about the blog not being detailed enough. So I'll try to catch up tonight. I'm actually writing this at the end of day 5 not day 4, but I didn't have internet at the end of day 4 so I'm going to do two updates at the same time. So I'm writing this particular update as if I wrote it at the end of the 4th day.

We woke up to some freaking cold weather in Cooke City, MT. Which if you don't know where it is, it's just outside the Northeast entrance to the park. I'm posting some pictures I took of our bikes as we woke up. I heard it was 24 degrees. Needless to say we got pretty dressed up to ride. Cooke City isn't very big so we just grabbed a quick (pre-prepared) breakfast burrito at a coffee shop. It was actually pretty good. Despite the fact that it was cold, it was crystal clear outside. It was beautiful. Today was pretty much the day where we toured the majority of the park. As we entered the park, we rode through Lamar Valley and saw lots of wildlife. Everytime there's any wildlife ANYWHERE every car on the road pulls over to pull out binoculars, cameras, telescopes or whatever. The first time I saw the congestion of cars, I thought there had been a wreck or something. We saw a bear, coyotes, tons of buffalo, moose, elk, deer...you name it. We did a lot of riding along rivers. One time, as we were riding along a river, we saw a buck in the middle of the river running upstream right through the middle of the river. I'll post a picture of that too.

We almost ran out of gas today. Apparently Jon and I's bikes don't have as big of gas tank as my Dad's. We were heading down to Canyon Village when my gas light went on. I figured I better pull over to make sure that there was going to be gas at the village we were going to. We pulled over to look a the map and it did not show gas there. So we turned around to go back to Roosevelt where the map showed a gas station. (this meant we turned around and returned about 15 miles to a location we had just come from) When we got back there, we found the gas station closed for the season. So we decided to go across the north part of the park and head to Mammoth Hot Springs where we knew for sure there would be gas. I swear Jon and I had to be riding on fumes as we pulled in. We had lunch and continued touring the park. It got pretty warm and we started shedding clothes. We ended up making our way back to Canyon Village and decided to go ahead and check out the cayon. The highlight of our day was probably when we decided to hike down to Uncle Tom's Lookout. As the Park literature states, it's "328 steps down and 2000 up". that's because you have to hike down this huge decline of steel steps (photo included). Becuase of the altitude, it's quite a chore to get back out. But we made it. And it was worth it. the view from the lookout was awesome.

After the falls, we decided to head West and end our day in the city of West Yellowstone (just outside the park) We had ridden quite a bit and were getting into West Yellowstone a bit later than we had in previous days. We figured we would just grab any available hotel since there are like 25 of them. Unfortunatley, every single hotel in West Yellowstone was booked and at about 7:30pm, we found ourselves without a place to stay. Luckily at the advice of someone working at a hotel front desk, we called a fishing lodge in Henry's Fork, ID and they had one room left. We grabbed dinner in West Yellowstone since we figured there probably wouldn't be anywhere to eat in "Henry's Fork" Idaho. We ended up at the fishing lodge around 8:30 or 9. The ride there was our first at night. It was a short ride, but it was fun riding under the clear starry night. Believe or not, the fishing lodge was really really nice. It was right on the banks of a river and we actually had a small cabin with three queen beds. Luckily one of the beds was in it's own room. That was welcome news for me since I literally had only gotten 2 and half hours of sleep the night before on account of the snoring I endured all night. Yeah, that's right.....Last night, I was fortunate enough to sleep on a cot in between the two queen beds Jon and Dad were on. The ONE night I didn't take an ambien, and I ended up being up all night. At one point last night I got about (somewhere around 3 a.m.) and tried carrying my cot into the bathroom to see if I could fit it in there and close the door so I wouldn't hear the snoring. At any rate, it was exciting to see that I would probably get a good night sleep this time.

the park was awesome, the wildlife was awesome, the and riding was awesome. In fact, I've enjoyed the riding much more than I thought I would. Not that I didn't think I'd enjoy the riding. I think I was looking forward to the photography equal to or just slightly more than the riding. But the reality has been that I've been super stoked on the riding.

So enough with the commentary, here's a few pics:

Yellowstone Trip Day 3

Cold. That's the best way to describe today. We rode through both rain AND snow. We rode from Old Faithful around the East side of Yellowstone and up to Cody, Wyoming. We went to the Cody Firearms museum there. We had to go up over a mountain pass to get there and it started snowing on us towards the top. Once we were done with the museum, we were trying to decide whether we should just get a hotel in Cody or brave the cold and weather and try to make it closer back towards the Park. We decided to go for it. I'm including a picture from the trip we made after leaving Cody. We took a different route than the one we came. We are now in Cooke City, MT. I'm tired, sore, and cold. I'm going to bed. But by the way, you can see that I ended up putting a few pictures on my flickr page. Here's a few more from today.

Our first stop this morning was at this location where there were tons of Elk grazing around the geyser fields.

Inside the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, WY

At the top of the second mountain pass on our way to Cooke City

Do you see that windy road down in the valley? We had miles and miles of that on our way to Cook City. It was 34 degrees and raining.

Yellowstone Trip Day 2

UPDATE! - I was able to get my pictures uploaded to Flickr so you can see them there. Go to www.flickr.com/photos/deltanner/sets My internet connection is too slow to upload pictures tonight. And it's too bad because I've got some great ones. I will try to start an upload to flickr before I go to bed and let it run all night. But let me just say today was AWESOME. The weather was great, the scenery was great, and we saw really amazing stuff. We started out of Jackson and drove up through Teton National Park. It was so spectacular. We rode down by a lake called Jenny lake. It seemed like we were stopping every few minutes to take pictures because we kept seeing so many amazing views. We thought we'd never get to Yellowstone. But we finally made it and checked into the Old Faithful Inn right next to Old Faithful. I'm tired and I'm going to get up at 4 am to go take some pictures at Black Basin, so I'm gonna head off to bed. We'll see if these pictures will upload. If not, I'll try to upload them tomorrow night.

Yellowstone Trip Day 1

Today was a perfect day. My brother and I flew into Salt Lake City early this morning, took a cab to Salt Lake Harley Davidson and picked up our bikes. We headed north on I-15 up through Logan and to Bear Lake. From Bear Lake we stopped in Paris, ID to meet up with my Dad who had been visiting his friend for the last few days. We stopped in Alpine, WY and had dinner at this place called Brenthoven at the Nordic Inn. From Alpine we drove along the Snake river up to Jackson, WY which is where we're staying the first night. The scenery and weather was beautiful the whole way. It was a great day to be outdoors. Below are a couple pictures from the day. You can click on a picture to see a larger version.

We stopped in Afton Wyoming to get a drink. This antler arch was huge.

We stopped atop the Salt River Pass and took in the view. It was so amazing. Pictures could never do it justice.



This was the place in Alpine Wyoming we stopped for dinner. We had to wait for about 45 minutes before we could get in the restaurant. While waiting, I decided to open my laptop and download some pictures off the camera. I was shocked to find that I had a wireless signal out in the grassy area in the front.




We rode along the Snake River from Alpine to Jackson. We stopped for a few minutes to snap off a few pictures.

Live to Ride

I'm leaving in the morning to go ride motorcycles from Salt Lake City to Yellowstone National Park. We'll be riding through Jackson, WY on the way. We'll be taking a bunch of camera gear and hopefully getting lots of good shots while we're there. I'll be posting pictures and commentary here assuming I have internet access. Comments are welcome.