Montana, Idaho, Wyoming – #48 and #49

MONTANA, IDAHO, WYOMING — JULY 2016

Montana and Idaho are states #48 and 49.  Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks are beautiful, but incredibly expensive.  For Grand Tetons we stayed in Victor, Idaho, which is a 30 minute drive, has good amenities, and has several excellent B&Bs at half the price of Jackson Hole and the parks.  4^th of July was very crowded, but the Yellowstone season is short and so it’s crowded throughout the summer.  For people with a flexible schedule early September is probably the ideal time to go.

30-Jun-2016

2 hour layover in Chicago and a delicious bacon / egg / arugula / sweet salad from Tortas Frontera (a Rick Bayliss place we’d been told was an excellent airport eatery, and it was).

From Jackson Hole Airport the shuttle ride to rental car (Alamo) is about 11 miles, 20 minutes.  Traffic is congested, but we find a space for lunch at The Local.  It promised butcher fresh meat.  We ordered the $15 buffalo, 8 oz, buffalo burger with small side salad and blue cheese and a steak sandwich with fries.  Mine came out fine, med-rare, Mimma came out smothered with tomatoes.  Order was screwed up including raw fries, so we were comped the steak sandwich.  Walk around the block to Coco, an espresso / gelato / high end chocolate and pastry shop.  I had pistachio gelato, mimma had a 3 tea truffle and flourless orange / cardamom, and chooclate half-globe.  NYC prices and nothing had strong flavor, very sad.

Visit  to the Miller House, which is a historic house on the grounds of the National Elk Preserve.  The Elk are in their summer home but we see great blue herons in the marsh and dozens of prairie dogs (they do NOT cooperate for the camera.  Volunteers still live in the house and gave us lots of information.  Unfortunately for Vito this means she also informed us about a good the in-town charity shop at St. Joseph’s Church.  We god shirts, caps, and jewelry.

It’s about a 30 minute ride to Victor, Idaho and the awesome Fin & Feather Inn.  When researching places to stay we were getting a bit desperate because everything around Yellowstone and Jackson Hole is so grossly overpriced.  This is a little bit of a drive, but such a fantastic place for half the price of the Montana side.  Log exterior, exposed logs inside, cut stone steps, super large shower in bathroom that was recently tiled, and now we’re sorry we are only here one night.  Each guest had a tiny folded note taped to the door with name on the outside and printed instructions on the inside.  We have the Mallard room.

Drive back a few minutes into town of Victor to a music festival (which are frequent in summer).  We get huckleberry shakes at Victor Emporium, an old-timey ice cream and country store.  Gleefully we take our shakes, get beer and pork taco plates from a truck and enjoy the live band.  Opening band is called One Ton Pig, and they are good.  Fireworks are going off at 9:30 tonight because sunset is very late in this part of country.

1-Jul-2016

Breakfast is at 8:30.  Very nice breakfast spread including Shredded potatoes, cherries and cut cantaloupe with blueberries, coffee, flavored yoghurt cups, apple and other cakes.  Then our host came out with an omelette roll with fried mushrooms and onions.  The other guests are nice company.

Grand Teton National Park.  First stop is the South Entrance Visitor center.  Wow, is it busy here! We purchased our credit card sized Annual Parks Pass for $80 (this turns out to be a wise investment since the Roosevelt sites in NY that we’ll visit in a few weeks are part of the park system. Teton & Yellowstone together are $50, so the pass is worth it if you plan to see any other parks) and also received basic information on swimming and lakes.  The Ranger said Genny Lake was having parking lot construction, so parking was limited and we skipped it and continued on to Signal Lake.

Lots of ground squirrels ( as it turns out are not prairie dogs) like at the Elk Reserve.  We decided on 2 person kayak to explore Signal Lake for about an hour.  The views of the mountains were great and many are still snow covered (snow is so pretty when it is far away from you).

Lunch at Signal Mountain Lodge restaurant (check out the HUGE chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies here, which you can buy at the register even if you don’t eat here).  We ordered a “Half” order of nachos with cheese and chicken and a green salad with goat cheese and pear dressing.  When the nachos came out, we flipped as the plate was piled like 10 inches high. Everyone around us laughed.  We ate as much as we could with guacamole (no cilantro) and sour cream.  We took the salad to go. I made quick lemonade out of water, lemon slices and splenda.  Waitress was very nice.  We were told the water all comes from the mountains and filtered and tastes really good.

Northwards to Yellowstone.  It was a long hour drive, along some windy roads.  We passed by a couple other lakes and lodges.  At the Visitor center we see the last 15 minutes of the history after the 1988 great fire.  We start to see geysers.  Drive along Firehole Road and also see a mound called Painted Pot.

We go through the West Exit to our West Yellowstone B&B.  The room is “wilderness” decorated.  Large and clean, but the towels smell like mold and our little table has the world’s most uncomfortable chairs.  Everything is tired, but it is rough to find something around here for less than $200/night.  Terrible values, but this seemed to be the best choice and the location is perfect.

Tapas for dinner at Café Madriz, which is crazy popular.  We get chorizo served on skewers that you heat yourself over a hollow pig that is spitting out a flame (which makes the teen age girls at the next tabled laugh) and washed food down with dark bear from Oregon.  At a local market we get huckleberry filled chocolates, bananas, plumatos, tasty cherries, water, one beer.

No cell phone service for either of us in this area, but the WiFi at the B&B is okay.  It starts raining and hailing, and we take photos of the hail next to a quarter.  No TV, but we watch Deadwood on our iPad.

2-Jul-2016

Our hostess is nice.  She has a large griddle and make eggs, french toast, sausage patties and slices up a baked potato and cooks that.  We just had eggs, sausage and potato.  Nothing is really fresh (including the juice).

On the road by 8:30, gas up in town.  Drive to West Entrance of Yellowstone.  There are lines to get in. We do the Grand Loop, and the first stop is Canyon Village.  At one point, all cars had to stop to allow buffalo to go across the road.  Drove down to Yellowstone Lake Lodge for a snack and to enjoy the views.  We should have eaten lunch here because at the next place we have to wait more than an hour.

Drive north again toward Mammoth Springs.  We stopped to see a petrified tree down a 1/4 road, but there was a traffic jam there, which we find out later was a bear sighting.  We also saw elk.

Mammoth Springs has a very helpful visitor center.  First thing we do is get “hand dipped” ice cream.  To us, this means ice cream that is dipped, is usually covered in chocolate.  Here, dipped simply means scooped.  So, we each had 2 large scoops of huckleberry and whatever ice cream.  Yummy.

We walked up the “terraces” in this park.  Bubbling hot water comes up from the earth and deposits limestone, looks like a bunch of staggered tables or terraces.  Very cool, we walk around an hour.  It starts to rain.

We drive on to Boiling River point, or actually we drive past, since the Welcome to Montana sign we are looking for is a small as a street sign. This place is busy. It is where boiling water from the mountain escape to the running Garden River.  Dozens of people relax in the small coves near the shore.  With our sandals from Niagara Falls, we walk down the rocky riverbed and find a cove near where the hot and very cold water are mixing.  The currents are strong and each of us has one sandal break.  While we are soaking two majestic elk cross a little farther upstream – it’s sad we don’t have a waterproof camera.

Back in West Yellowstone we stop for tacos at the local Taco Bus.  This is a fiasco as they are slow, and naturally the person in front of us orders 20 tacos.

3-Jul-2016

We head towards Ennis, Montana as well as Virginia City and Nevada City.

Not 8 miles from the B&B, we stop at an overpriced yard sale.  This is 2^nd day.  I ask if they have cast iron pots, they said all gone yesterday.  But, the old man neighbor next to these crazy priced women has a Griswold deep fat fryer for $5.  Cha -ching.  It is heavy, but worth money.  Best of all they are selling some clean, not smell towels!  In Ennis we find a thrift shop and buy a couple of shirts.  Stop at Deemo’s Italian shop for some elk salami or jerkey.  It is refrigerated and expensive, so we just get beef jerkey for $25 pound, but it is very soft and good.

Drive through Virginia City, an old collection of late 1800s buildings. Arrive at Nevada City, a very small town of log buildings as well.  We peek inside the Star Bakery and spy pie and cookies.

So the truth here is that Virginia City is free, and you can just walk around.  Nevada City you have to pay to enter the complex, and it’s really probably not worth the price of admission except that you are helping the preservation efforts.  And inside the main building, it is filled with music machines that play sheet music or use air valves to play xylophones, etc.  Very cool exterior on some of the 1910-20s machines.  Most of them still work and you can feed coins to start them up.

In Virginia City, we realized we could have saved the $20 because this city has lots of buildings that are free to visit in between the candy store, ice cream shop, knife maker shop, antique shop, etc.  There’s an arcade where you can put in coins to watch the old time “films” (flip cards).  We get some double chocolate orange icec ream before lunch because it is so good.

Lunch at the Gravel Bar and Grill in Ennis.  Very slow here, and we were about to walk out when we finally got served.  Smoked pork and chicken leg, very good.  After, we tried to visit the local whiskey distillery, but it was super crowded from a one man concert.

Back in West Yellowstone we go to iMax to see “Yellowstone.”  We splurge the extra $4 for premium seating, which apparently NO ONE else ever does (according to the seating attendant), but we have the top row all to ourselves.  The movie focused on the history of discovery by white men, but it was lacking in the details of the park and spent far too much time spent on a corny animatronic bear.

Dinner at the Slippery Otter.  Elk burger and salads and artichoke / spinach dip with LOTS of artichoke.

4-July-2016

Chilly today, and off on the road we go to Yellowstone and FINALLY Old Faithful.  We arrive at 10:30 for the approximately 11:07 blast off.  Lots of cars.  It erupts for about 2 minutes, and we reward ourselves with 99 cent huckleberry ice cream sandwiches.

We got back to Signal Lake Lodge for lunch.  It was a mad house so we took it to go and found a fantastic spot under a tree at a picnic table.  We drive around Grand Teton and then back to Jackson Hole to visit the thrift shop again.

Drive back to Victor, ID to our next B&B, the Fox Creek Inn, another fantastic place with a terrific breakfast and an outdoor hot tub.

5-Jul-2016      

Excellent breakfast and then a long trip home.