Love summer national parks! I am font of hiking (even/especially long and difficult trails) and not afraid of heat or bugs. Plus there are so many cute animals and amazing nature to see, the sky is high, and the air is sweet 🙂 My mom is in her 70s and was wearing a long dress with some city shoes, but she still walked on these trails so easily.
Going to Yellowstone, you can fly to Bozeman, Jackson hole or Utah. Last time in 2011, I went to Yellowstone in winter. From Bozeman, you can drive to the north entrance using only a little over an hour. In winter, Yellowstone was super quite. There was a layer of thin snow covering the landscape. On the cliffs, many big horn sheep comfortably looked around, and there are so many of them that they were so easily spotted and definitely outnumbered people around them. At the corner of my eyes, a coyote ran towards a tree and then into the horizon. Coyote is always on move and alone 🙂 Then, I saw a pack of wolf in the binocular, they were staying calmly within a short distance from a bison group, and one of the wolfs has a bloody mouth. People around us said that the wolf just ate some bison :/
This time, we flied into the Jackson hole.
Jackson hole is a small airport near the Grand Teton national park. It is 2 and half an hour driving from Yellowstone west entrance and 1+ hour from Yellowstone south entrance. Jackson hole is a surprisingly cool town, with very high end galleries and shops. Jackson hole has the longest and craziest black ski runs, like 4.5 miles in 4139 feet vertical drop. No wonder even the cheap chain hotels like super 8 are 3-4 hundred dollars a night per room. Their airport has such a modern design like SFO. There is even a small library :).
Yellowstone is a very big national park. There were many cabins, hotels, and camp sites in the park. You can book them either very early like more than half a year ago, or you can book them close to the date you go. As most of the reservations can be canceled several days before the trip, so you may get lucky for a spot of cancellation. If you want to see animals in nature, you should try to stay at the north and east entrances, as at the Lamar valley on the northeast, you have the most chance to see bears, wolves in the early mornings, and of course, there are thousands of bison, which you can see however close throughout the day. West Yellowstone is a town with very nice lodges and reasonable priced restaurants, and they are just located 2-3 minutes drive from the park entrance. There are two big groceries stores in town, where you can get most of the groceries you want.
Restaurants here look like the ones in the western movies
The road in the park shapes an eight: the top loop takes 3+ hours and the bottom loop takes 4+ hours just for driving. We spent the total 4 days just in the park, and even did not get into long hikes. During these 4 days, we hit most of the attraction points, had a few surprises of seeing animals and the eruption of geysers, and did several short and fun scenic hikes. I highly recommend our itineraries to light weight travelers and to the family travelers who are looking for 8+am-to 5+pm comfortable paces: (1) Day 1: overview of the park (2) Day 2: the bottom loop route (3) Day 3: the top loop route (4) Day 4: catch up (any additional stops people propose) (5) Day 5: explore the nearby towns like West Yellowstone or Jackson hole. Of courses, we left many “regrets”, like I wanted to see the night sky and shooting stars, my son wanted to wait for the biggest predicable Geyser in the world to erupt and wanted to feed baby bears, and we all wanted to see bears and wolfs but couldn’t get up at 5am :). Those “regrets” and imperfections are just inspirations to bring us back here again.
Here is a teaser for the beautiful yellow stone. It is so pure and feels like somewhere in the heaven 🙂
