The road to Yellowstone

Hester van den Berg
Aug 16, 2018
5 min read

So we didn’t cross the border to Mexico in El Paso as initially planned. Instead, we are driving up north again to Yellowstone National Park. Luckily for us, there’s a lot to see on the way. With a new Spanish student in the passenger seat, we were leaving El Paso and the border behind, and drove off to White Sands National Park. Even though I already was quite sure that Timon is a man, I now also got confirmation in Spanish - multiple times (see previous blog post 😉).

According to the weather forecast, White Sands was going to be very hot, very quickly in the day. To prevent us from reaching boiling point in the middle of the desert, we decided to leave El Paso very early. Fortunately, we had a very slow start that morning and Google tried to navigate us via a military base where they weren't really happy to see us, we only arrived at the park at 10:30 am. A ranger came up to our car and told us that the gate was not opening before 11 am, since the missile test was delayed. Apparently, White Sands is in the middle of an army base, where missiles are being tested. That gave us some spare time to gather some information about the park at the visitor center and rent a sled. Lucky we were not there already at 9:30 am as planned 😊.

In the park you can drive around, take some short hikes and observe the white gypsum sand dunes. Like mentioned, we rented a sled, to use on the bigger dunes. Promising as it looked, this was a big tourist trap. It doesn’t work, the sand is not sliding and you end up digging sand.

Because of the temperatures we decided not to stay and camp in the park but drive further to Albuquerque. As coincidence happened, we found an AirBnB hosted by a Dutch woman. She was already living in the United States for 18 years, but thought it was really ‘gezellig’ to have some Dutch people in her AirBnB. We didn’t see much of Albuquerque, except for a big summer storm in the evening. Hail as big as golf balls came down out of the sky. Afraid for damage to our car, especially since we have a glass sun-roof, Timon put some blankets over his head and ran to our car to protect it with these same blankets. We were very lucky that the car was under two trees, as we didn’t have any damage in the end. Also no (additional :-) ) damage to Timon's head fortunately..

Next stop was Mesa Verde National Park. In this park, you can see ancient cliff dwellings from the Pueblo Indians, who lived there approximately 800 years ago. We chose a guided tour, so we could learn something instead of just looking at these dwellings. Our guide was very enthusiastic, but also a little spiritual. This left us with a nice experience learning something about the nature in the park, the history of the Pueblan dwellings and a rain dance at the end of the tour.

There’s a serious issue of drought in the US at the moment, as we also learned in Mesa Verde. The park was very dry, there have been a lot of fires in the past years and the last time it was this dry it was approximately 800 years ago, when the Pueblo people needed to leave the lands. Also, when driving to our next destination Moab, we were driving through smoke of several wildfires in the area. Curious about where these fires were exactly located, I tried to look it up online. Shockingly, I found out that there were around 1170 active wildfires in the US at that moment. A lot of them in California, as most have seen on the news probably, but also in Colorado, Utah and surrounding states in the West.

In Moab we visited Arches National Park. Because of the wildfires, the air up there was not really clean and we decided to make it not a too extensive trip, but instead visit a few pretty views and then return to our campground pool. Apparently, we have reached the typical, touristic road trip area of the US. All you can see RV’s and caravans, and a lot of Dutch people around every corner you go. At some point there were 12 people in the campsite pool of which 0 of them were not Dutch.

Leaving the desert with all the sand and heat behind, we entered Colorado – The Rockies. The Rocky Mountains is an area that stretches out over Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Something I recently learned. Than a small part of it, just north of Denver, is the Rocky Mountain National Park which we wanted to visit. We cut our trip from Moab to the Rocky Mountains National Park in two, so we stayed one night on a campground in New Castle, close to the big ski areas around Glenwood Springs (with Aspen as the most famous one). Unfortunately, our rain dance in Mesa Verde finally seemed to have caught up on us, since it started raining during the night and it didn’t stop before being long gone from that campsite. First time packing up the tent in the rain, well that will probably happen again the coming year..

Denver seemed to be dry, or at least dryer, according to the weather app, so off to Denver. Driving Highway i70 is an experience for itself. It goes up to 3500 meters high and it circles through the mountains, so beautiful views all the way. For cyclists who are reading this, there is a bike path along the i70 which takes you over the same high peaks. Denver is a big city that is currently only growing bigger and bigger. Apparently, it is quite popular to move to Colorado, and we can understand why! Denver is a city with a very outdoorsy, but hip and laidback atmosphere. There are a lot of bars and restaurants, and you’re so close to the mountains!! Unfortunately, it was raining in Denver, so we walked around for two hours and then decided to proceed our drive to our AirBnB in Berthoud.

Since we decided so last minute to go to Yellowstone, we were a bit late with booking campgrounds etc. If you want to stay in the national parks, this is an issue since everything is already completely booked full months in advance. But, from our AirBnB in Berthoud we were in the Rocky Mountains national park in no time. We were already told that in the weekends, especially on a Saturday, the parking lots could be full by 8am or even 7am. For that reason, we decided to go really early, which resulted in us securing one of the last parking spots available. We parked our car at the end of the trail (fern lake) and then took the shuttle bus to the beginning of the trail (bear lake). The trail we hiked (17 km) was one of the best hikes we did so far; beautiful mountain top views, blue mountain lakes, and even some wildlife spotting. That night we cooked dinner in the AirBnB and enjoyed it in the backyard with a sunset over the mountains, when our hosts joined us with their anniversary dinner and we ended up having a fun evening.

The last part of the road to Yellowstone will probably be our longest drive in the US, but we are prepared and excited! Yellowstone, are you prepared and excited for us?