Sometimes you just need a road trip.
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After the holidays my daughter Rebecca and I were doing our best to get back into the routine of school and work. I’m not sure who first thought it, but one day we both realized we needed a road trip. We decided to go to Gardiner, Montana. (I’ll explain that in a minute.) I originally wrote a bunch of stuff for this post extolling the virtues of road trips. But you know, you either get road-tripping or you don’t. Those that get it don’t need an explanation, and those that don’t; well they just don’t. So I simplified. This blog’s really about the photos anyway.
Getting to Gardiner from Ogden in the winter requires a drive north to I-90 in Montana, east to Livingston and back down to Gardiner. It’s a very long drive; perfect for a road trip. Routes are seldom important on a road trip. I had three to choose from. Thanks to some bad advice and my penchant for exploring new roads, I chose poorly. It cost us two hours and took us through sub-zero temperatures and an icy mountain pass, but we finally made it nine hours after we left. That’s one great thing about road trips, living to tell the stories.
We decided on Gardiner, Montana because from there you have access to the only road in Yellowstone National Park that is kept open in the winter. Our road trips usually involve looking for wildlife, and this road happens to bisect some of the most prime wolf habitat in the country. It turns out that winter is a great time to spot wolves, and we ended up seeing 43. Most were distant, but for a few precious minutes we got to hear them howl for the first time – our first time not theirs. We even got close enough to take a few pictures. This trip is the first time we’ve seen them running in packs. We saw as many as 16 in one group. We watched two different packs, the Lamar Canyon Pack and the Molly pack. We also spotted a few other wildlife – a fox, coyotes, golden eagles, dipper birds, bighorns, antelope, ravens, elk and of course bison.
I took my new iPhone and tried to document the trip itself, not just the wildlife we saw. So welcome to the world premiere of video on ThaynesWorld.com. It’s not exactly National Geographic, but it shows a little of what was definitely an epic road trip.
I hope you enjoy the video. If you get road trips, I think you will.
