Back in 2019 my husband and I bought a Subaru Outback for a couple of reasons. The first was because we lived in Colorado and were required by law to either own a Subaru or a Jeep and since neither of us have a job that consists of being drunk at the beach we went with a Subaru. Also, the two of us fucking hate air travel which is its own article but just know that I have had multiple adult-sized meltdowns on airplanes so fuck them. The solution, we decided, was car trips! We’ll go on so many car trips! We even made plans to go to Moab, had the AirBnB set up and everything.
And then the world ended and we cancelled everything and didn’t go anywhere at all until a few weeks ago when our little Annie Oakley finally got to live her bliss (you don’t name your cars? Weird). We pack up the back with too many clothes and insane amount of snacks, shoved the cats in my parents’ general direction, and drove north for ten hours until we finally reached Yellowstone National Park.
Despite all my research, here’s a bunch of stuff I wished I’d learned before we got there.
There Is No Internet or Cell Service in the Park
Listen, I’m not a stupid fucking idiot. I wasn’t driving deeper into the Nowhere At All that is most of Wyoming thinking, ‘Oh, man, I can’t wait to hike out into the middle of the woods and watch some YouTube Videos. Can’t wait to be on top of a mountain making a TikTok. It’s going to be so rad when I’m able to pay my phone bill while standing directly on top of Old Faithful.’ I completely assumed that while actually out in the park my phone would be good for taking pictures and exactly nothing else.
But what I did expect was WiFi at the hotels. And I was very, very wrong.
Incredibly Lake Yellowstone Hotel offers wired internet in all their rooms, in case you want to live out your 2010 fantasy of still having a laptop with an ethernet port, or, fuck it, a laptop at all. Meanwhile, over at the Old Faithful Inn, you can live out your pre-internet fantasy because you ain’t getting diddly squat. Here is the official list of where you’re allowed to have internet whilst surrounded by the bears and the bison, something I apparently should have paid more attention to before we left.
We also basically had no cell service the entire time, either. Very occasionally, especially if we drove/climbed up somewhere high, we’d get a very basic trickle that would allow for incoming emails and spam texts, and once all of my Tumblr notes??? But nothing outgoing and the few times we tried desperately to connect to Duolingo so we didn’t completely nuke our streaks it simply wasn’t happening. We did see other people making calls and staring at their phones like they were achieving something so perhaps it works better with other carriers (we are both on Google Fi) but there’s also very few cell towers in the park to begin with so I think once, like, twelve people are using it everyone else has to wait.
If You Enter Yellowstone Through the South Entrance, You WILL Have to Pay to Go Through Grand Teton National Park
I am including this one because I found several sites saying the same thing, but the phrasing was always vague to the point where I still wasn’t sure. It was always sort of wishy-washy, like, ‘You will drive through Grand Teton and if you want to visit you have to pay.’ Does that mean I have to pay? Or does that mean as long as I don’t get off 191 I won’t have to pay, and it’s simply warning me that if I try to enter I will have to pay? Why can’t anyone spell this out for me?
I don’t know, I’m pretty dumb, so maybe everyone else understood. But just in case, I’m spelling it out for you now: If you go through the South Entrance, you will have to pay entrance fees for both Grand Teton and Yellowstone.
Curiously, if you leave Yellowstone through the South Entrance, you don’t have to pay to enter Grand Teton. So even if you enter Yellowstone through a different station, you should definitely find a way to leave through the South Station, because…
Holy Fucking Shit The Tetons Are Insane
My husband and I are no stranger to mountains. We live in the Rockies, the same fucking mountain range that the Tetons are supposedly a part of. And yet the closer we got to these things the more I had to fight the urge to tuck and roll out of the car to have a full-blown hysterical fit on the side of the road because Jesus fucking Christ these things are completely fucking insane.
Yellowstone is a Lot More Than Old Faithful
On one level I knew it had to be. It takes up a considerable chunk of our emptiest state, it couldn’t possible be just a single volcanic geyser surrounded by acres of schmucks trying to take selfies with bison. But on another level I simply never thought too hard about it because how often do American national parks come up in day to day life? Unless you work there. I guess then it comes up every day. But I’m not talking about the National Park Georgs of the world.
Anyway, there is so much else to do here. They have a huge canyon that they officially refer to as The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone without so much as a hint of irony. They have a lake that’s 110 miles around. There are geysers, thermal vents, and mud volcanos everywhere. There’s a spot on the western part of a lake that’s a caldera, but most of the park is already a caldera. It’s a caldera in a caldera! Who even knew that could happen?
Again, I’m guessing the answer includes people who work there, but fuck ‘em. They don’t even have internet.
The Old Faithful Area is Referred to as the Disneyland of Yellowstone
And that’s not a good thing.
It turns out I’m not the only one in the world who only thinks of Old Faithful when they think of this park because that’s where roughly 85% of attendees are at any given time. It’s more crowded. It’s louder. It’s where I saw the majority of the assholes and idiots I encountered on the trip. Trying to park anywhere past ten in the morning is impossible. We tried to drive up to the Grand Prismatic Spring around noon and after chugging along in fifteen mile per hour traffic and being held up at two different spots where they were repaving the road we simply turned around and headed back to the hotel to get something to eat because not only was the entire parking lot filled, the entire parking lot for the area next to it was filled. And the little turn-offs were completely filled. And the side of the road parking had filled in for over half a mile. Fuck. That.
The very next day though we woke up at six thirty and headed right over and only three cars beat us there, so if you want to experience this area of the park just be ready to chug coffee at the ass-crack of dawn.
Do Not Stay in the West Wing of the Old Faithful Inn
Old Faithful Inn is one of the largest log-style structures in the world. The lobby is seven stories high and completely built with pine logs, and the rooms in the main building are over a hundred years old and have the same old-timey wooden charms. They also don’t have showers in their rooms, instead pointing lodgers to shared bathrooms on every floor, so I decided to ‘upgrade’ to the newer rooms with full bathrooms to save us the hassle.
That decision put us in the west wing, which looks like someone tacked 1990’s Days Inn rooms onto the scary basement hallway of your local government building, and then tacked that to the Old Faithful Inn. And I definitely didn’t pay Days Inn Underneath The Mendon Courthouse prices. The amount of money I paid for these rooms I should have been able to take the people one room up who spent a full two hours apparently sprinting around the beds for no good reason outside into the wilderness and hunted them for sport.
But the real tip for lodging is…
Stay In A Cabin
All of the lodging areas in the park come with a set of cabins that I personally didn’t see the interior of, but was able to note from the outside that no one could stay directly above you and practice their line dancing for the big line dancing competition, so for that alone I say get a cabin when you can.
And finally, my last bit of advice that I probably don’t have to reiterate but I’m going to say it anyway…
For the Love of God, People, Giant Wild Animals Can Hurt You
I think sometimes people forget that humanity is only on the list of apex predators with a medium-length line of asterisks. I also think that a lot of tourism has been sanitized to the point that people just expect a certain amount of safety no matter where they are or what they’re doing, and that amount of safety doesn’t exist in national parks, especially national parks squarely in grizzly country.
Bison are absolutely all over the park. Except for the first day when we were only there for two hours before we went to bed, we saw bison every day. Sometimes a herd that hung out on the road to stop traffic out of what felt like giggles and spite. Sometimes a single bison that decided the grass next to the hotel parking lot was the tastiest. Park Rangers aren’t following these guys around, putting up barriers between you and them. They also aren’t setting up lines for rides and pets. The ethos in the park is, the animals live here and you’re just visiting so you fucking move. As long as you give bison space, they fully do not give half a fart that you are alive and staring at them and taking pictures. The second you get too close, though, you are Fully Fucked, and only the bison knows how close is ‘too close.’
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 