Be careful of what you wish for...

Yellowstone Lake

...Because you may actually get it.

Moab was fun and all, and it's justifiably known as "The Mecca of Mountain Biking", but after a few days I got seriously tired of it. Tired of the desiccating heat, tired of the noisy campground (I swear, the guy two sites down must have been half-chainsaw!), tired of the crowds, and tired of all the red. The intense red of the rocks, cliffs, arches and sand is fantastically and spectacularly scenic and is absolutely breathtaking when you first see it, but I found that after a while I just found it agitating. So three days into my Moab stay, I started looking forward to cool, green, and water, which I hoped to find in Wyoming, my next stop. Oh boy did I ever find it... On my way into Jackson, Wyoming - the main town servicing the Grand Teton National Park and the south end of Yellowstone National Park - I was greeted by road barriers and a helpful sign that said that the highway was closed due to mudslides. Yup, they'd had a bad winter... The snow that was supposed to have melted a month previous was still on the ground, and the torrential rainstorms from the previous week had conspired to send a mountainside into my path. Since night had just fallen when I made this discovery and I didn't feel like wandering around backcountry Wyoming in the dark trying to find the detour, I spent the night in a far-too-expensive motel and continued on my way in the morning. It's a good thing I didn't continue that night - the detour added two hours to the trip, and took me waaaaayyyy up into the mountains, into Teton Pass, which was a bit nerve-wracking to drive in the daylight.

Jackson Lake

Yellowstone Bison

Cloudy skies and cold pretty much summed up my Wyoming experience. Tried to do a hike in the Tetons but was thwarted by the snow cover. Renting snowshoes wouldn't have done any good because the trails weren't marked, and it didn't appear that any hardy souls had blazed the way. The one good thing about all the snow is that it concentrated all the wildlife down by the roads; I saw more elk and bison and moose than I'd ever thought to see in my lifetime, and I even saw a bear. There were hawks and eagles aplenty, and I caught a glimpse of an owl on a telephone pole as I drove by the highway.

Yellowstone Tourists

What really ended the Wyoming segment of my journey for me was the poop. The sheer number of elk and bison made it almost impossible to take a step without putting your foot in something. Well, truth be told, the cold and the wet and the generally poor weather played a role in my decision to leave a day earlier than I had scheduled - without even seeing many of the hot springs and geysers - but the poop put me over the edge.

At this point, I was ready to stop traveling and just stay put for a while.