Day 57

26. June 2000, Bozeman to Billings

Today we crossed the border from Montana to Wyoming and changed back to the Pacific side of the continental divide and back to the Atlantic. Yellowstone National Park is mostly situated in Wyoming, but with the far north in Montana. It offers a variety of landscapes, nature and geologic features. We drive from the North entrance to the Northeast Entrance, which is about 252 kilometres. Apart from its size, the most interesting feature of Yellowstone is its location in the mountains with several going above 3000 metres. We then drive on through Shoshone National Park, over the Bear Tooth Pass (3336 m) back into Montana. A long day is concluded in Billings a reasonably-sized city: Big billboards by the common and not so common American chains (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc.) announced to us that this would not be another small town. Billings is named after the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, that was its founder in 1882.

TC 210: Bozeman OUT
8:
 17  
PC Divide Road
   
PC Old Faithful
   
TC 211: Billings IN
20:
 17 560 km

Overall 1 hour 31 minutes penalty

The official results can be looked up on this website

Driving through Montana towards...

Yellowstone has geology: Mammoth Hot Springs

Yellowstone has waterfalls and many other beautiful nature spots.

Yellowstone has recently been severely damaged by a large forest fire, but trees are already growing back abundantly.

Pilot-Index overlook: view back to Yellowstone. Does anyone know the name of the pointy mountain in the middle?

border of the clouds at Bear Tooth

Just outside Billings there are several stores selling ... houses!!! They are stored next to each other, you can make your choice and then the houses are transported to your chosen destination. A "single wide" house is a house which just fits on a truck, bigger houses are assembled together to "double wide", etc. Guess that explains why we saw two of these big signs on the next street.

  

... Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone has biology: We mostly saw deer and buffalo, also a coyote but we saw no bears

Yellowstone has cars, maybe too many of them. Okay, these are our rally cars, but there are actually quite a lot of big RVs or pickups blocking the view or small traffic-jams around any animal sighting even on a Monday. If you enjoy nature I would recommend coming to Yellowstone at off-peak times or do some hiking instead of using the busy roads.

Karl, Old Faithful and Kaya. The geyser Old Faithful regularly makes an appearance about every hour.

Bear Tooth Pass still has snow and is in the clouds

After the pass we drive down to a beautiful but sparsely populated valley back in Montana. The drive involves many hairpin curves.