Days 27-29: The 44th State

The fall colors are blowing up in Estes Park, Colorado.

Estes Park is a town northwest of Denver surrounded by Rocky Mountain National Park. I'm writing you now from a Starbucks on a river with yellow aspens and crimson-leaved trees on its banks.

Here's how I decided to come to Estes Park.

Walking out of a yoga class in Jackson Hole a week ago, one woman said to another, "See you next week!"

"Actually, I won't be here," said her friend. "I'm going to Estes Park next weekend."

"Oh, I love it there!"

"Me too!"

So, assuming the yoga ladies would have good taste, I came. And they did. But before I jump to Colorado, let's linger in WYOMING.

If you breeze through Wyoming on I-80, heading between California and the northern Midwest, you will believe that Wyoming is a barren wasteland of dead brown golden hills, punctuated only by Burger Kings and industrial sites.

Not so!

Promise me that the next time you go through Wyoming, you will do your best to get off I-80 and take a two lane highway.

South of Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park, there are some lesser known (but lovely) national forests. The area between Jackson and Pinedale has rushing rivers and abundant cheap campsites. Wide open spaces!

What appears ugly and barren from the interstate seems vast and colorful on a highway. It is so ungoverned. There is an undercurrent of fear (especially in a 16 year old motorhome) because breaking down in an area with no cell reception or services would be a major bummer. But the fear turns the beauty sublime.

The landscape here is more like a palette than a collection of distinct objects like mountains, trees, etc. As I drove, my mind was racing to name and remember all the colors so I could remember them the next time I have a room to paint! Moody stormcloud purple-gray. Parched sagebrush. Faded yellow grass. Washed-out sky blue.

In Saratoga, Wyoming, I saw the first road requiring river-fording that I've seen north of the Rio Grande:

Houses on the North Platte River in Saratoga.

A cattle ranch on the scenic Highway 130 through Medicine-Bow National Forest.

More details on Colorado to come. But first, I had to give Wyoming its due.

Days 24-26: Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole, WY

After a week of sunny, smoky days, rain has come to western Wyoming and Montana.

The shops in Jackson Hole have handmade signs in the windows: "Thank you, firefighters!" I'm sure most people here will be glad for a few days of rain and cooler temperatures.

I am not one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not fan of forest fires - but when your life revolves around hiking, cooking outside, and parking your home on dirt patches, rain is kind of a bummer. Oh - and don't get me started on the roof I still need to re-caulk and my miserable windshield wiper blades.

Speaking of life outdoors, I'm getting a little burned out on it.

Grand Teton National Park is gorgeous right now - brilliant yellow and orange aspens in front of steep mountain peaks - but I could hardly be bothered to take photos, let alone hike. Instead, I raced to the gravel patch of an RV park to read Harry Potter by the pool on the last day of summer sunshine. That was Day 24.

Yesterday I had an urban day in Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson is a little island of chichi in a sea of national parks, where you can find $40 elk tartare and interior design shops selling Pendleton-covered Eames chairs (if you have to ask, you can't afford it).

You can also find over-the-top Western kitsch like the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, which has saddles for bar stools.

I took a pass on the chichi, though I did succumb to the temptation to buy moccasins AND a plaid shirt.

The smoke and then clouds wrecked my Jackson pictures - everything looks gray and moody, like the world through Eeyore's eyes - but here are a few photos for you.

Southwest Yellowstone in a nutshell: fly fishing alongside geysers. (Can't see the fisherman? He's that speck in the center of the river.

Obligatory Old Faithful shot:

And just one photo from Jackson. I went for a run on the Jackson Hole Community Pathways - a really great network of trails that wind through the city and out into the surrounding community along the Snake River. Along the way, I spotted these ducks enjoying their little single-serve rock perches. I like to imagine them crossing the rocks stone by stone, like the path to a Zen temple:

Hitting the road to continue south through Wyoming, destination still TBD. Arches National Park, in southeast Utah? Estes Park, near Rocky Mountain NP just north of Denver? The original plan was Aspen, but I have since learned that Aspen is way too cool for RV parks. Arches and Santa Fe are definitely in my future - still trying to figure out what, if anything, will lie between. If you have suggestions, please let me know!!

xoxo, RV Girl

Days 18-23: Yellowstone, Take One

It's a sunny morning in West Yellowstone, Montana. Forest fires have covered the area from Calgary to Yellowstone - and considerably further south as well - with a blanket of smoke. The sunsets are gorgeous; the air quality is not.

The first day at Yellowstone, I felt lazy and just enjoyed nature through the window as I read all day. The second day, I pushed myself to do a moderate six mile hike but felt pretty wiped. That night, I couldn't seem to catch my breath.

Texting my mom that night, I described the breathing to her. Let me pull up her text: it made me smile and freak out a little, all at the same time.

Sounds like what they call wheezing.

Between the altitude (elevation is around 7000 feet) and the smoke, my lungs began to protest. I rested another day and now am feeling much better.

Ok - scenery time!

Entering Yellowstone by the North Entrance, near Mammoth Hot Springs, the landscape is not immediately endearing. It looks like the Central Valley of California: dead brown golden hills.

Along rivers, though, you see a stripe of green. I love how this picture depicts the change in vegetation:

Here's a distance shot of the Mammoth Hot Springs. It looks like the set of a futuristic 60s space movie. There are several active hot springs on this hillside. Where the hot water dribbles down, there is a thin crust of mineral deposits over squishy land. You cannot walk on the land directly. You have to walk on wooden platforms built over the springs (as seen in the center left of this photo) - or take pictures from a distance, if you can't deal with pushing through busloads of tourists on the narrow walkways.

With 2.2 million acres of park, Yellowstone has several distinct microclimates. While the northern area near Mammoth is hot and dry, when I drove further southeast to the so-called Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, it was much more green. The air smelled piney and fresh: like the Northwest!

I realize that I feel subtly uneasy in these dry, flat, golden landscapes surrounding the Rockies. They are a bit Valley of the Shadow of Death for my taste. My subconscious goes on yellow alert. I feel this sense of relaxation when I get back somewhere cool and green, with plenty of water in sight. Is this a Washington native thing? Do Aborigines, for example, relax in dry landscapes? But I digress...

On the southern side of the Yellowstone River, not far downstream from Yellowstone Lake (one of the largest lakes at this elevation in the world), the trail sits just a few feet above the banks of the river:

Continuing east, you come to the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone:

After a couple of miles and another waterfall, the river is some ways below you. Now you can see why they call it the Grand Canyon!

The canyon walls are decorated with sunset pinks, oranges, and a hint of violet. You cannot quite see the colors as vibrantly here as they are in real life.

Next stop: another day or so in Yellowstone, then heading into Grand Teton National Park (which borders Yellowstone to the south) and Jackson Hole.

Days 12-17: East Glacier and Bozeman, MT

Ack! I am going AGES between posts.

After dropping Elizabeth at the Calgary airport last Saturday, I spent one night in Waterton (a Canadian national park that borders the US Glacier National Park in Montana) and two nights in East Glacier.

Without further ado, let me show you many pictures from an exceptionally gorgeous hike from the Many Glacier campground in Glacier NP to Grinnell Glacier.

A mountain goat along the way:

Grinnell Glacier itself. At the summit, I crashed a ranger-led hike. The ranger said that the small glacial pool here - an almost ludicrously lovely turquoise blue - is 160 feet deep. Glacial lakes are quite deep, in spite of their clarity.

Glacier National Park: as you might guess from the name, it's cold! Here's the temp on the INSIDE of my RV at 8am one morning. Fortunately, in the last 48 hours, my mom's amazing coworker friend Ken has helped me figure out how to make my furnace work - though I have still not quite figured out how I will stay warm when I am camping without electricity (i.e., camping in any wilderness area).

After the Frigidaire blast of camping without heat in Glacier National Park, I've spent the past few days having a staycation in Bozeman, Montana.

A staycation (as I'll rename it for the purposes of this trip) is a vacation from the vacation - an opportunity to live like I'm at home, not camping. This means watching Downton Abbeyon RV park WiFi, baking scones and showering daily.

I have been biking the six miles into town daily to join yoga classes, be a pedestrian, and otherwise live like an urbanite - at least for a little while.

Bozeman is a college town (home to Montana State University) with some beautiful old homes and a thriving art scene. The following pictures don't quite do it justice, but it is a very nice place.

Tomorrow: off to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks!

Days 5-11: Glacier and Banff National Parks

Greetings from Okotoks, Alberta!

Over the past week, my friend Elizabeth has been on the road with me as we visited Glacier National Park in Montana and crossed into Canada to visit Banff.

Elizabeth took the train from Boston to West Glacier last weekend and flew home from Calgary yesterday, planning the trip in less than a week. So much fun to have her company!

Let's start with Glacier National Park photos:

Next up is Logan Pass, elevation 6,646 feet, along the Continental Divide. You reach Logan Pass by driving up, up, up the Going-to-the-Sun Road. The drive hugs the mountainside with waterfalls dousing you along the way, at least in July. By our trip in September, the creeks were trickling. This drive would remind you Californians of Highway 1.

The historic Lake McDonald Lodge, with one of Glacier's refurbished 1930s Ford tour buses parked in front. The bright orange-red of the tour buses is intended to mimic the local berries.

By Banff, Elizabeth and I were becoming cavalier about the gorgeous scenery and starting to realize our memory drives were getting filled with nearly identical mountain shots. That said, I still wish I'd taken more. Here's my one picture of Lake Louise, where we had stiff cocktails at the lakeside Fairmont:

Last but not least - animals! First, an implacable snacking mountain goat near Logan Pass. He did not allow many aggressive European photographers to interrupt his snack.

Second, a ballsy elk approached the campsite next door to ours in Banff. After grazing within three feet of the neighbors' trailer for about fifteen minutes, he moved back into the wilderness. Given that a grizzly had been spotted in the campground earlier that day, the several hundred pound elk seemed cuddly by comparison.

Highlights not pictured:

1. Sitting in the outdoor Radium Hot Springs on a rainy evening, watching bighorn sheep play on a rocky hillside.

2. Nightly campfires with s'mores. Roaring fires courtesy of our former camp counselor, Elizabeth.

3. Large bruise and gash outside my right eye, thanks to a run-in with the RV's drivers side mirror. (Long story, and no one ever accused me of gracefulness.) I can no longer laugh ironically at peopleofwalmart.com - look for me to be posted there next week, with greasy hair and a snarling "who moved my cart?" face.

Day 3/4 - Coeur d'Alene, ID to Glacier National Park

It turns out WiFi is not always easy to find, so a day or two might go by between posts.

Yesterday I woke up in a Walmart parking lot north of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. To thank Walmart for the free camping spot, I headed into the supercenter to pick up supplies for Glacier National Park. This was the 3rd trip to a Walmart in my life: the first an exploratory run with my mom when the first Seattle area Walmart opened in Renton (high school??), the second a late night trip to a San Diego store for Trivial Pursuit and a bottle of Walmart's finest red ($11.99).

All was well until someone stole my cart. I was 90% done with shopping when I left my cart behind to grab a roll of foil. When I came back, the cart was MIA. I wandered the aisles in a daze, wondering if I'd just gotten lost in the supercenter maze. Nope: it was gone.

(Wait - that rhymes. You could rework the last two sentences into a haiku:

Aisles in a daze

Lost in Walmart maze

Cart was gone)

I headed back to the entrance to start over. And when the aisle was blocked later by a woman in a wheelchair cart trying to corral her young daughter, I pushed rudely past them rather than let the cart go even for a moment.

From Coeur d'Alene, it was off to Farragut State Park for hiking, sunbathing by Lake Pend Oreille, and a cadged shower near their campground.

By 2pm, I was back on the road with the goal of getting most of the way to Glacier National Park. Elizabeth is on her way in from Boston by train, plane and automobile and will get off the Amtrak in West Glacier later today.

Taking highway 200 east from Sandpoint, I traveled along this Idaho Scenic Byway into Montana. Here's a quick snapshot from the driver's seat to give you a feel for the road - dead bugs included:

Spent the night in Lolo National Forest, in a rustic campground with about a dozen camping sites. (Forgive the garbage photo quality.)

Backing into a tight camping spot alone: officially hard.

Cocoa the cat regards nature.

And now, sitting in a Starbucks in Kalispell after driving for an hour along Flathead Lake, the largest lake west of the Mississippi.

Off to Glacier!