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Yellowstone Vacation — Calgary to Yellowstone

I’ve wanted to visit Yellowstone National Park for years (as long as I can remember really) and Louise and I have often talked about going there. Every time it came up we ended up deciding that it was a little bit too far away and too ambitious a trip. But when we had some unplanned vacation time to use up this summer, and when Louise kept telling me that she wanted to do more camping this year, the conversations kept returning to Yellowstone. We finally decided to just do it. Uncharacteristically for us, we made the decision little more than a week in advance, so the planning time was very short. We Googled, we got books from the library, and we ordered more books online. We booked campsites and planned our route. In less than 24 hours we had our trip almost completely organized!

We would be leaving on a Monday, and returning the following Sunday, so we had 7 days in total
The trip from Calgary to Yellowstone is around 1000 km in each direction, if you travel in the most direct route. We reasoned that traveling all the way in one day would be pretty tough on the kids, and therefore pretty tough on us too! We decided to camp somewhere in between in both directions.
Doing the math, we had 2 days to get to Yellowstone, 3 full days in the park, and 2 days to come home.

This post tells the story of the first segment of the trip, from Calgary to Yellowstone (via Glacier National Park), and the first full day in the park. It’s really long, so feel free to jump straight to the bottom to see the photos. Don’t forget to come back later to read the story!

The first leg was through Glacier National Park in Montana, which was about a 4 hour drive (including the border crossing). Glacier is a very beautiful park but we really had no time to enjoy it; mostly we treated it as a bedroom. We spent the first night in a campground at the edge of the park and then hit the highway early on Tuesday morning. We did manage to take in a very interesting interpretive talk about Wolverines on Monday night, but the rest of Glacier is going to have to wait for another visit…

Glacier to Yellowstone was another 8 hours of driving; however, what we hadn’t fully understood was that it takes a long time to get anywhere in the park. We had a campsite reserved at the Canyon Campground which is very near the center of the park. From the northern entrance it took us well over an hour to get to Canyon, and we still had to set up camp once we got there. All in all it made for a very long day of travel.

Fortunately the drive through rural Montana is surprisingly beautiful and we saw lots of Pronghorn (Antelope) in the fields beside the highway. Yellowstone is also everything that it’s cracked up to be, and we saw deer, Bison, and a Grizzly Bear while driving to Canyon. That set the stage for a wonderful vacation in one of the most fantastic places I’ve ever been!

We woke up reasonably early on the Wednesday, our first full day in the park, and had breakfast before setting out. We had decided to spend the morning exploring the Canyon area. Canyon is named for a massive canyon that was formed by the waters of the Yellowstone River. It splits the northeastern section of the park diagonally in half and is referred to as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Walking and hiking trails span both the north and south rims of the canyon and there are many famous viewpoints from which you can view scenic landscapes and the rock formations below.

Our first destination of the day was Artist Point for grand views of the canyon, and particularly the Lower Falls. I was hoping to make some images of the Lower Falls with a rainbow in the mist created by the falls. The rainbow only forms if you’re there at just the right time of day, and if the sky is clear. I stood there waiting for it for over an hour (with dozens of other photographers); the rainbow eventually formed and I got my shot! Louise took the kids to hear an interpretive talk from one the Park Rangers while we waited.

We spent the rest of the morning hiking in the Canyon area and had a nice picnic near the river. We went for a long drive in the afternoon to try to encourage Andrew to fall asleep. It didn’t really work, but we got a very nice drive out of it. We saw some spectacular views, hundreds of bison, and an elk. We ended the day with dinner back at the campground with marshmallows on the campfire. It was a great day in Yellowstone! Here are a few pictures from the day.