We are in the middle of our epic family road trip adventure
to Yellowstone National Park (Motto: America’s Hot Tub, with Bears).
Everything hurts as I write this – my back, my face, my
knees, my feet, my wallet – everything.
Yellowstone is the nation’s largest national park, covering
ninety-eight percent of the lower forty-eight states, and much of Canada. On
our first day in the park we entered through the South Gate, which is in
Arkansas, and exited though the West Gate, located on the Oregon coast.
One thing you don’t realize about Yellowstone until it’s too
late is that the entire park is above thirty thousand feet in elevation. Not
only is there very little oxygen to share with your fellow hikers, but there is
way too much sun.
Yellowstone is tricky, however, and fools you into
forgetting about the sun by giving you late June temperatures in the low teens
and sixty mile per hour winds.
In addition to a wicked sunburn that hurts my face, I also
can’t feel my feet anymore. Besides sitting in the car for forty-eight hours,
waiting to make a left turn into a particular geyser’s parking lot, once you
find a parking spot a few days later, the geyser is still six or seven hours
away on foot. They should really warn you that flip flops are not the way to
go.
I tried to suggest wider roads and drive-thru geysers to one
of the rangers, but he said something about fragile geothermal areas, blah,
blah, and I tuned out.
I also suggested to another ranger that they put the geysers
on a more regular schedule to make planning your day easier. I mean,
Yellowstone boasts eighty percent of the world’s geysers, and the only one they
have on any kind of a schedule is Old Faithful. And they can’t even seem to
nail the time down on that one to anything closer than a twenty-minute window!
As far as all the other ones go, you walk three hundred
miles to see the geyser and it might not even geys! That can be disappointing
for the kids, and lead the adults to wish that each geyser had a bar, which is
another suggestion that the rangers seemed to dismiss a little too quickly. I’m
not too sure about these people.
In addition to all the geysers, they keep quite a few
animals in the park, not the least of which is the grizzly bear. I’m not sure
why they think keeping dangerous bears near all the human tourists is a good
idea, but then I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, based on how the rangers
dismissed all my reasonable suggestions for park improvements.
My theory is that they keep the bears in the park to boost
sales of bear-repelling pepper spray. Bear spray is like really industrial
strength Mace, and comes in a pressurized spray cannister the size of a soda
can. I’m not sure how much Mace costs, but bear spray retails in the park for a
little under five thousand dollars an ounce.
But you can’t put a price on the safety of your family, and
by “you” in this case I mean my wife. I can put a price on our safety,
and it’s well below five thousand dollars an ounce, but my wife strongly disagreed.
And she strongly disagreed with that look. You guys know the look. So now we
own bear spray.
Thankfully, the bear spray cannister remains fully charged
after our first day in the park, which is much more than I can say for myself
or any of my lobster-red family.
Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to go ice half my body
and apply heat to the other half. I’ll catch up with you after we get done with
our National Park adventure. Hopefully I will still have a full can of bear
spray that I can sell to you, cheap. I’ll let you have it for the low price of
only three thousand dollars an ounce.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen
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