Yellowstone 2025 - Day 4 - Waterfall Redemption Night

Okay, technically this is post starts on Day 3, but the post about Day 3 started on the evening of Day 2 so time is just a little fluid at this point. 

Brandon got back from his adventure to get the new alternator. He suggested that I take the kids in the rental car to go do some sight seeing while he stayed at camp and fixed the Honda. 

That sounded great to me because my plan for the night had been "burn through the second box of wood for the day."  Charlotte, Derrick, Veronica and I were SUPER sick of sitting around the camp site. 

So we all got in the car. Brandon talked me through how to start the car. (It literally involved pushing a button labeled "start.") You don't even want to know how I currently start my van so to suddenly have a super updated vehicle was quite the upgrade. 

Also it was a little 5 seater car. I basically can count on one hand the number of actual cars I've ever driven. Two were rentals, two were my parents, and let's just throw another one in there because I'm sure I'm forgetting one. I've always driven vehicles that are a little higher on the road. Vans and SUVs. So to drive a little sporty rental car - well that was FUN!

Here I am in the car with Charlotte, Veronica, and Derrick in the back. 

Lydia was in the front because she knew how all the buttons worked from driving with Brandon. 

And look at how many miles it had. 1785. For comparison the van currently has something like 289000. (My goal is to get it to 300,000 before we replace it.)

I was really disappointed that we hadn't been able to spend as much time doing cool stuff at Canyon Village on Saturday so I wanted to go back there. 

But on our way over there we passed Gibbon Falls and I decided we needed to stop there really fast. 

There's a paved walkway that leads to a viewpoint for the falls. 

And then we could look over the rock wall and see the falls. 

They looked really cool. This was definitely worth the little stop. 

I always like pictures like this. 

It was much cuter before I asked them to turn around and smile for the camera. 

We went north for a little bit more and then turned east at Norris. Then it was just 12 miles to Canyon, 

As we dropped down the last mile or so into Canyon the trees opened up into a clearing. We could see a whole herd of elk in the clearing. 

This was incredible. I've only ever seen a few elk together at a time. So to see at least 20 of them was amazing. 

It was almost like Yellowstone was saying, "Sorry you missed out on so much. Let's make it up to you."

We admired the elk for  awhile and then kept driving. Before we got to the Canyon intersection I pulled down a little non-descript road. Derrick was like, "why are we going this way?"  I told him, "this is the way to our campground."  And soon we were driving past our old spot. 

Then we drove over to the road the runs along the Canyon's North rim. We didn't have time to do the trail down to the Brink of the Lower Falls so we skipped that spot and just went to Lookout Point. 

This is one of those views that never gets old. 

The road looped back around to the visitor center area. The actual visitor center closed at 6:00 and it was like 8:30 at this point so we'd completely missed that, but the bathroom area was open. 

Then we drove back down to the South Rim of the Canyon. We'd already been on this road the day before. But we weren't interested in seeing Artist point again. This time we stopped in the parking lot for the Upper Falls view point. This area was under construction the WHOLE summer of 2017 so we never were able to go over here when we lived in the park. We had been here in 2021, but I wanted to come again. 

I started out just trying to take a selfie, but Charlotte and wanted in. And Veronica jumped in at the last minute. 

So then we took a real one with Veronica. 

And then Derrick jumped in too. We called this "The Survivors" because we were the ones stuck at camp all day. 

Then we went back to the car. This parking lot was put in during 2017 and it is HUGE. When we were here in 2021 it was nearly full. But now, at 9:00 PM we were the only car there. 

See no body this direction either. 

We started driving back to Madison Campground. Somewhere between Norris and Madison we had to stop because there were bison on the road. 

They are hard to see, but they are there. 

You can kind of see the one in the road in this picture. There was another one walking in the front of the line of cars. People would try to sneak past our line of cars, but then get stuck by the one that was on this side of the road. 

We were in no hurry so I thought this was great. It was even cooler when a Bison walked right in front of our car. 

Yep, it really was like Yellowstone was trying to make up for our lost sightseeing day. 

We got back to camp and saw Brandon lounging on the picnic bench. He'd replaced the alternator and got everything back together. It was good to know that we'd be leaving right on schedule on Monday. 

Okay here is actual Day 4. This was Monday, May 26th. It was also Memorial Day. My original plan for the day was to pack everything up and then go home through the south entrance of the park. We'd maybe stop in West Thumb if parking wasn't crazy. 

Then we'd drive south through Grand Teton National Park and see the mountains. We'd missed seeing them in 2021 because everything had been really smoky from fires. And we didn't see them in 2017 because they had just been a little too far for us to drive while we were having so much fun exploring Yellowstone. So I was hoping to see them on this trip. 

But we'd have to skip them again this year. We had the rental car that had to be returned to West Yellowstone. So that meant we were going home through West. And honestly, we were all a little done with this trip. 

I told the kids that maybe we'd plan a trip specifically to the Teton's some time. 

We had leftovers for breakfast - and we had quite a few leftovers. We still had sausage and english muffins from Saturday's breakfast so I cooked those. Then we packed up everything. 

We'd eating through most of our food supply so now there was enough room in the back of the van to squish our stuff. We didn't need the roof top carrier. 

Look at all that!

Charlotte was sad she couldn't bring her stick. So I took a picture of it. (And she found a replacement at our ward campout so she's fine.)

That little crate is basically what's left of our food supply. It's sitting on top of the cooler which was wedged between the seats. The kids had to climb over that every time we stopped, but we didn't stop much. 

I think we pulled out of the campsite around 9:00. That might be one of our quickest clean ups yet.  Brandon drove the rental car with Charlotte and Lydia. I drove the van with Derrick and Veronica. 

Derrick had been telling me about a song from Dispicable Me 4 that he wanted to listen to. So when Brandon stopped for gas in West we pulled up the song on Youtube. It's called Double Life and was actually really good. Derrick has surprisingly good taste in music for someone who is overwhelmed by music sometimes. He'll be like, "Mom, I want to listen to this song from this movie."  And I'll find it and be like, "Wow! That's a fun song."  Other recent additions are "Boom, Boom, Boom" from Sonic the Hedgehog and "Best Day" from Angry Birds 2.

We drove to the West Yellowstone Airport while reminded me a lot of the Nuuk Greenland Airport in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. 

We all went in to use the bathrooms while Brandon returned the car. The airport was really cool inside. 

I'm not sure if you are supposed to like a bathroom floor, but I REALLY liked the bathroom floor. 

We got the car returned and everyone piled into the van for the first time since Saturday night. We started driving home. We finished listening to "Harris and Me" by Gary Paulsen. Charlotte had read this in 7th grade and had been saying we needed to listen to it. It was a fun book, but I'd kind of wondered why Charlotte liked it so much. And then we got to a really funny chapter and we were all laughing really hard and I was like, "Ohhhhhhhhhh, that's why."

We stopped at Wendy's in Pocatello and got hambergers, fries, and shakes. We went to a park and ate them. 

They were really good. I always order a Dave's Single because Baconsale talked really highly of it when they did their "We ate everything at Wendy's episode" back in like 2021. Baconsale actually released their 500th episode that day. They have been doing shows since 2015 and I've listened to every single one. The 500th episode was recorded live in Utah. I would have loved to go to the recording, but it was on May 17th - which was my wedding anniversary and we already had plans. 

Anyway, after that little stop we drove the last 100 miles home. We got home around like 1:00 which was super early all things considered. 

I made the kids help unload the car before anyone could take a shower. Then I watered my plants while the kids started taking showers. 

I was happy to see that my strawberries were turning red. 

Brandon laid down on the living room floor and slept for hours. I kind of puttered around and then took a shower when it was available. 

At 5:00 some friends from our ward were hosting a bring your own meat BBQ. None of the kids were interested in going, but Brandon and I wanted to hang out so we went. I diced up the strawberries that I'd accidently left in the fridge on Thursday. They were a perfect little side dish.

The BBQ was really fun. There are a lot of cool families with kids about the same age and younger than my kids. We really like getting together and talking. 

We stayed for a few hours. Then Brandon went to get Marcia from the puppy sitter. Whenever Marcia comes home I know the vacation is over. (She's a really good dog these days, but she still is an extra responsibility.) 

And that was the end of our Yellowstone trip. In a lot of ways it had kind of felt like a dream. Like did we really go to Yellowstone and have our car break down and then get it fixed 24 hours later?  It didn't feel real. 

But it was real and now it's one of those family stories that we will tell forever.

Anyway, thanks for reading these in depth posts about Yellowstone. I'll hopefully have more posts up soon about our first two weeks of Summer Vacation.