| The summer of 2001 led to my
first visit to Yellowstone and it was as impromptu as they
come. My friend Travis and I had decided we were going
to do a backpacking trip in the Rockies, but being the lazy
planners that we are, we still had not decided on where we
were going the night before the trip.
The weather forecast here
looked miserable, but I noticed that Yellowstone, just ten
hours south of us, was going to be bathed in sunshine for the
coming week. A phone call later the plans were made --
four hours after that, at 3 am in the morning, we left for
Yellowstone and five days in the backcountry through the Lamar
River Valley to the remote and rarely visited Parker's Peak.
The most shocking part of
the visit for me was that Yellowstone did not really have any
mountains, at least not compared to here in Banff and
Canmore. We drove into the park and kept wondering when
the 'sea of peaks' was going to appear, but it never
did. Instead, Yellowstone was more of an oasis of lush
green valleys and rolling hills, with much of the landscape
featuring beautiful tree skeletons -- a result of the fire in
1988. |
