Now that I’ve marked out to my buddy KC, it's time to get to some trip details posted! :)

The morning we left was rainy and cold. KC was concerned that the weather would hurt the trip and I told him not to worry. I said “Who cares, we’ll just sit around a drink in the snow if it comes to that, it’s all gravy dood!” With all the references to drinking one might assume I may have a bit of an issue! No, I only drink when I camp, and I just happen to camp a lot! :)

After a healthy dose of gas station coffee and burritos we headed off for Cody. It wasn’t long before the Owl Creek Mountains came into view, with the tops dusted heavily in snow. It’s nice to see the mountains in the background beyond the hundreds of miles of sage brush flats in Wyoming.

KC told me over the CB that if one had the gumption to do so, they could take a horse and ride the ridgeline all the way into the back side of Yellowstone. What a trip that would be.

We took a detour to see some of Boysen Lake State Park, one of the larger bodies of water around. The roads were in rough shape with all the moisture. From across the lake you can see the deep cut through the Owl Creek Mountains known as Wind River Pass. We’d be driving through there shortly. My GPS lost coverage several times in the pass because it is so steep and so narrow. That is why the track log in the map for that day has those spikes.

We mosey on up to Cody and then head toward the eastern Yellowstone entrance to explore and look for critters. I stopped counting the bald and golden eagles on the drive. Wyoming is full of amazing country and lot of wildlife.

We stopped at one of the big souvenir stores because I saw this crazy van parked outside with tracks. It looked like a fun vehicle to drive. I wonder how much of the turning radius is lost with the tracks?

We went back into Cody for provisions and then headed north and west. The goal was Sunlight Basin. KC had a camp spot in mind already, but in the wintery conditions we didn’t know how bad the road would be. A week prior KC had emailed me to let me know that the season’s first grizzly bear tracks had been found in Sunlight Basin. That sort of wore on me over the week before I came out. I’ve camped my whole life in the southwest and yelled at dozens of bears to get away from me or out of my camp, even had one walk up to me while asleep on my cot, but those were black bears. Black bears are pussycats. They used to have grizzly bears in the southwest, but we killed them all in our quest to tame the land. The last grizzly was shot in New Mexico in the 1950s.

This is the view of Sunlight Basin as we drove in from the east and dropped out of the clouds.

Anyway, I had a good week to ruminate on the potential to see a bear, a real one. As we turned off the pavement toward Sunlight Basin the road deteriorated. It wasn’t bad, just some mucky stuff. After a little while we hit the snow line and we kept going. We then saw the first “You’re in grizzly country” signs.

Great, more stuff to get my imagination going. We kept driving and the snow kept getting deeper. Finally the decent road ended at a large hunting camp, we waved at them and continued on with the slushy two-track. How far up are we going I wondered. A little while later we took a steep turn down to the left off the main road and found camp next to the river. The river and the adjacent cliffs were stunning and it was well past beer-thirty, so we decided to stay.

Then I saw something blue in the snow maybe 50 meters away. As we walked closer, it became apparent that there were several tents buried in the snow, but when I first walked up to the tents my thoughts were all about bears. I was looking for tracks and looking for rips in these abandoned tents.

Feeling somewhat unsettled with the entire scene, better off to have a drink and not worry about it. I popped the top on some Patron Silver and a cold Tecate. We talked trash until late in the night. Anyone around here feel their ears burning that night?!

I fell asleep listening to the river. Maybe I was worrying about nothing with grizzlies, then again, the .45 under my pillow helped.

Still, things did get interesting the next night...

Here is a little map of the route we took the 23rd...

On to May 24th....