Rocky Mountains National Park

We started our visit to Rocky Mountains National Park at the Beaver Meadows Visitor Centre where the kids collected their Junior Rangers Activity Books.

The Junior Rangers Program operates at all of the National Parks and by completing the activities, kids take away a little bit of extra knowledge from each visit.

The 'reward' for completing the activities is usually a badge and sometimes a patch and though it's usually for ages 5 and up (with the number of activities to complete dependent on the age) most rangers have been pretty cool about including Dash in the 'reward' when he's done his best to complete the activities in his book (particularly the drawing and colouring in)!

So we set off in Bessie along the Trail Ridge Road, the highest major highway in North America. And as it happens, so did about fifty thousand other people.

It's easy to see why the drive attracts so many tourists. The upper part of the road, along with the viewpoints and trails, takes you straight into the alpine zone and allows you to commune with elements of nature normally inaccessible to everyone but hikers. (Though you have to share your communing with those fifty thousand people I mentioned).

The road is so busy that at the Alpine Visitor Centre, close to the highest point on the road, the already large parking lot had cars double parked and waiting for a spot.

The boys played with some other kids chopping away at and making snowballs from a large remnant of an ice hill outside the visitor centre.

I took a walk along the Tundra Communities Trail and the Alpine Ridge Trail, both very short walks, but at 12,000 feet, I felt like that was enough.

We were lucky enough to see a couple of bull elk not far from a herd of their female companions.

After Dash and Indy completed their Junior Ranger activities, we descended west, encountering a moose in the Colorado River Valley.

At the Kawuneeche Visitor Center, the kids were appointed as Junior Rangers (and made their pledges to protect the park).

We found a fantastic campsite at Stillwater Campground, overlooking Lake Granby.

Medicine Bow Mountains

In the South East corner of Wyoming, the 130 is a scenic road cutting through the Medicine Bow Mountains.

The mountains themselves are predominantly quartzite which gives them a distinctive greyish-white glow.

The area close to the Snowy Range Pass (at 10,847 feet) is dotted with alpine lakes and streams, a couple of which we explored on foot.

Continuing east, the sub-alpine forests were replaced shockingly quickly by less interesting territory, however as we headed across the border into Colorado along the 287, the landscape became scenic in a completely different way, with cool red rock formations starting to grace either side of the road.

We parked ourselves in an RV park at Estes Park for the night, and enjoyed all the fun of the place, including a playground and free rides on a little "train" the park runs every night during summer.

World's Stinkiest Fun

Having spent most of the 4th of July driving (and detouring town parades), we awoke in Thermopolis, Wyoming on the fifth and decided to check out the World's Largest Mineral Hot Spring.

But wait, it's not just the world's largest mineral hot spring..... It also has a collection of waterslide businesses that could claim the title for the world's stinkiest fun.

We spent the morning at one of these, overlooking the massive thermal terraces that were drip, drip, dripping their boiling hot load straight into the Wind River that winds its way past the State Park they sit within.

We must have walked up the outside slide structure about 100 times and the kids were showing no signs of slowing down when a thunderstorm rolled through and we were ordered into the inner structure.

Well, the slide housed within the building itself MUST be the world's stinkiest slide. To beat this one for the title, a waterslide would have to make its riders actually throw up instead of just making them gag.

The sulphur stench was intense. IN-TENSE!!!

In fact, the air inside the steam room was even worse. Nath had suggested it was nice and I should go check it out. I came close to throwing up and I'm the one with the iron guts in this operation.

Once the thunderstorm had passed, we went on the outside slide about a hundred times more. Dash and Indy took to going down together with Indy sitting behind Dash and holding on to him. Nath or I would wait at the bottom to catch Dash. It was very cute and at the same time disturbing. The boys kept collaborating to stop mid-slide, trying to create slide jams and other mischief.

Allowing the stinky sulphur water to sit on our skin and work its 'magic', we set off in Bessie to explore the Bison corrals which are also in the State Park area, before heading south through the Wind River Canyon to Boysen State Park, where we camped for the night.

The next day, cutting from Riverton to Sweetwater Station along the 135 with no expectations for the drive whatsoever, we encountered the most unexpectedly beautiful arid landscape.

Beartooth

Grrrrr!!! Beartooth sounds pretty fearsome right?

We didn't know what to expect when we exited Yellowstone to the North East and took the Beartooth Scenic Drive up between the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges and then over the Beartooth Pass itself.

We had read a comment that it was America's most beautiful drive but didn't want to raise our expectations too high.

What we found was a gloriously undeveloped section of road that rises to just shy of 11,000 feet and offers up multiple small and large alpine lakes amidst very beautiful mountain peaks.

We were so enamoured with the section over the Beartooth Pass that we contemplated driving back up it from the other side but Bessie deserved a break after the long steep haul she'd already completed.

It's hard to sum up expansive mountain scenery with words alone but suffice to say this particular mountain pass had us commenting that usually you have to hike really long trails to get to such beautiful and (relatively) untouched places.

We found a campsite in a National Forest campground not far from Red Lodge and awoke to find a deer grazing beside Bessie.

Yellowstone National Park

Ahhhh Yellowstone!

No place sums up how amazing and precarious life is on our ever-changing planet better than this place.

Here, spectacular waterfalls, amazing scenery and abundant wildlife combine with the most intense collection of thermal features on Earth.

In the moments that you pause and think about the giant (and I mean GIANT) caldera you're inside of, or the earthquakes that hit here more than anywhere else in the lower 48, or the mammoth bulges of magma that give the area its elevation, it really does scare the utter doody out of you.

But every tourist is walking around smiling and pretending they haven't thought about the fact that when this thing blows its top again one day it will be nighty-nite planet-wide.

But for now at least Yellowstone is gorgeous and if you can get past the fact that you almost have to have a crack-of-dawn fist fight to secure a camp site (if you're not the plan-ahead type) there is a LOT to see.

We took the boys to the Old Faithful area and the Grand Prismatic set, along with the Norris Geyser Basin for a bit of thermal action.

We walked a bit of the south rim trail to watch water descend over the Yellowstone Falls and to admire the colours from Artists Point.

We mainly concentrated on the northern area which we hadn't seen previously, including the travertines at Mammoth Hot Springs, and after three nights camping (at Madison, Norris and Indian Camp) we took the North Eastern exit out of the park.

The bison herds were impressive and boasted lots of spring-born calves and the Lamar Valley was where they were mostly concentrated.

The kids' two favourite things from the park were:

1) using the two tubes we now have to float across mini water falls and along a meandering section of Firehole Creek (well above Firehole Falls), and the next day again at the stream near our campsite at Norris.

2) watching a goose battling against all odds to take off from amidst the water racing towards the precipice of the massive yellowstone falls and 'surfing' the rapids to the cliff's edge where it found momentary refuge.

The kids loved watching the 'cool surfing goose' so much that they even drew pictures about it back at our campsite that night.

(Just don't mention the fact the goose had no way to get up the cliff to safety and the only way out for the poor thing was going to be down over those falls).