GNAST: Day Six

Starting: Camp Dick, CO
Destination: Jackson, WY
Distance: enough to make me want to cry. (13 hours, almost 14, according to Aaron)

I woke up at 6am MDT because the tent was drooling on my forehead.

We're not sure if the seams are saturated and leaking, or if it's condensating, or if the tent has finally just reached total saturation point, but after drying out the perimeter again last night, it was still soaked and permeating my pillow, the sleeping bag, and almost all of our clothes.

No hike. All the laundromat. We packed up (in the fading, returned rain) and headed back down to Estes Park. On the way out, we noticed that our campsite river, the Middle St. Vrain, had risen significantly, almost to its banks, overnight. The Middle St. Vrain is one of the rivers that flooded so badly in 2013.

BYE COLORADO

We found a laundromat right off the road in Estes Park and promptly set to scrounging up quarters to dry our things and charge a few electronics. Right after that came McDonalds (which we had DESERVED), and then we were on the road, taking the Big Thompson river canyon down to the Loveland. This also flooded, severely, and the evidence, like a hurricane, is still there almost two years later. I didn't get a picture, but the most sobering was a cabin covered in orange search-and-rescue spray paint.

Oh, and it rained the entire way to Cheyenne, because WHY NOT.

That said, the welcome center outside of Cheyenne on I-25 is AWESOME! It's classy, there's wifi, they gave us snacks and free Park booklets and a sticker, and there's a replica mammoth skeleton. We stayed for a fair bit to update some things and charge our phones.

It rained with dense fog about all the way to Laramie, including Medicine Bow National Forest, which I didn't realize had such a steep elevation until the sign told me we were at like 8000 feet again and to prepare for a 5.5% grade back down to Laramie. Whee! The temperature, in dense fog, also dropped rapidly to 44 degrees, and once out of the fog bank and back into weak sunlight again, rose to above 70.

Hello, Great Plains temperature swings, it's nice to meet you.

Words don't do Wyoming justice. Pics will. Sort of. We expected to see dinosaurs any moment.

We switched out shortly before Lander, after another large thunderstorm wiped me out mentally and my adrenaline crash required food and sleep (the latter of which I never got--turns out, I can't sleep while driving through Wyoming). There was some super sketchy road construction that looked like what Alaska and British Columbia are described as, so practice? Except next time, in AWD?

We got food in Lander, and stopped to bum some Wifi in Dubois after watching lots of intimidating thunderstorms form over the Wind River mountain range.

Then it got interesting.

As we drove into Grand Teton, I saw two female moose. Yay! We went through the entrance and asked the ranger about campgrounds, as we did not have reservations, as the GTNP website AND RECREATION.GOV BOTH SAID "fills up in evening, if at all" and DID NOT EVEN LINK TO THE CHANCE TO RESERVE ANYWAY.

"Ohh... well, Headquarters 30 miles north and Dornan down in Moose haven't called in full yet."

Son of a biscuit-eater.

So Aaron drove through a beautiful sunset (we stopped to admire) like 30 miles north, almost to the Yellowstone gate, only to find out that there was A vacancy in Headquarters, and it was, I quote, "$73 plus tax for four walls and a roof." That's a big fat NOPE.

So here's where we went wrong. We never prayed TOGETHER about where to go. And this is how we spent two hours wandering gravel roads and the freaking LENGTH OF GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, after TWELVE HOURS ON THE ROAD, functionally homeless. I might have had a brief meltdown. I blame exhaustion. We also snuck into Yellowstone just long enough for me to pee in another vault toilet. Also, we came like two feet from slamming into a male elk's butt, but he stayed off the road.

When Dornan wasn't even a campground, but a set of cabins, Aaron pulled us over, took my hand, and we miserably prayed. But it worked. After praying in the dark in Moose, WY, we had a huge shot of energy. I cried more because that's what I do, and he got tingles, and I don't know, less than an hour later, with the aid of the GPS and the miraculous 3G in Jackson, WY, we ended up a Motel 6 for the astoundingly cheap rate of $150. (Check nearby competitors. Super 8 is over $200.)

I'd had the feeling all day that maybe we weren't supposed to sleep in the park, and there was a place for us, but the borders are so porous that I didn't know how to interpret that. In the adjacent national forest? I was also just too tired to properly function. So, lesson learned, PRAY TOGETHER OFTEN AND FREQUENTLY AND DON'T HALF-ASS IT or you will spend 2 hours driving around a rural park road trying not to hit an elk.

I woke up at 6 this morning because our upstairs neighbors were noisily packing their rolling suitcases, and on a whim, checked the radar. A storm was moving into GTNP from the west. I don't know if that's why we're in Jackson. Aaron doesn't care why, just that we followed directions and had a cozy, warm, dry place to sleep. We might never know.

But we're here, we slept great, and it's time to pack up and check out everything we drove by in the dark.

(written at 10:30am, 7/9/15, pics not in order)