So, Yellowstone 🤔. Firstly, it cannot be overstated how amazing, beautiful, and spectacular this wilderness is. The views are astonishing, the wildlife amazing and the trekking great. However, if Yellowstone is 3472 square miles, then it is 3272 square miles of wilderness and 200 square miles of concrete. The area around Old Faithful, being the best example, is highly developed and is not a pleasant place to be. Is Yellowstone a victim of its own success? Possibly.

To get around Yellowstone most people drive. To provide an example, to get to one of the valleys in North East Yellowstone was 90 miles, at 45 mph! This leads to people rushing and not spending time to see what is in front of them. In true American (and Japanese) fashion, people drive from beauty spot to beauty spot, getting out to have a look and take photos, and then driving on. The tour buses add to this. Most people also stop on the roadside whenever wildlife is spotted close by. At times it can feel like driving through a safari park 😞.

Having said all that, the majority of what we did was amazing. Yes we did the “main” things, as we said before, but we were also able to escape the people, even if it was only for an hour or two at a time. We trekked through meadows, forests and spectacular gorges….with bear spray at hand. We saw Bison, Elk, an Osprey, a mountain goat, chipmunks and a deer that literally wandered past our lodge as we sat there with a beer! Sadly we did not see a Bear, but we have more opportunity for this in other locations. We also saw many, many Squirrels that chirped away at us. This may have been stress but it sounded more like they were just cross with us 😄.

Our take away from Yellowstone was that we are very glad we did it, but it feels like accessible wilderness for the most part.

We left Yellowstone this morning and headed South towards Salt Lake City. The best route was a road around the West side of the Tetons, so we took this…..big mistake. After 3 or 4 miles the tarmac ended, no biggie as we have been on unpaved (gravel) roads before. After another 3 or 4 miles the gravel ended….starting to worry now 😟. Frankly it was a dirt road/track with plenty of holes 😮. Maximum speed 15-20mph with frequent slowing right down. Not designed for a Nissan Hire Car. However, we were committed so…….30 or so very stressy miles later the tarmac started, thank god 😄. We don’t appear to have broken the car 👍.

We didn’t want to stay in Salt Late City, but we did want to see the lake. So, we drove to Antelope Island and took a short trek to see spectacular views of a salt lake/flats. Yet another beautiful place 😍.

We then drove into the mountains and are staying at a lovely ski hotel (which is currently a summer hotel). Tomorrow we head for Bryce Canyon.