Yellowstone National Park

If you have never been to Yellowstone National Park it would be hard for me to explain how amazing it is and most pictures cannot do it justice! It is a huge park, 3,468 square miles/2.2 million acres to be exact, with a wide array of terrain including rivers, forests, grasslands, mountains, and thermal fields. The thermal fields were the most interesting thing to me; there would be holes in the ground constantly pouring scalding hot gases or boiling water. We spent three days exploring the park; with an estimated 400 miles of road in the park we covered just about all of them! Along the way we encountered a lot of wildlife including bald eagles, elk, bison, black bear, blacktail deer and a lot of Asian tourists!! The first day we did all the touristy things like seeing Old Faithful, reading all the history and nature facts and taking a million pictures. After a day of driving, Cheggy and I decided it was time to get out of the truck and start doing some fishing! We had stopped by a fishing outfitter shop that night and explained to them that we were just a bunch of rednecks from Georgia (like we needed to explain that) and didn’t have fly rods so wanted to know what was the best tactic to catch some trout. They were helpful enough to tell us of what tackle we needed to use and what areas in the park we would have the best chance to catch some fish.


So the next morning we started on our great fishing expedition into the park, of course after buying a license and getting a lecture from the park ranger who obviously thought we were adult delinquents based on our camo hats and NASCAR t-shirts! We scouted out some areas where we thought surely the tourists wouldn’t be so we could get some serious fishing done but upon our arrival we found fly fisherman everywhere! We stuck out among this group of fishermen, to say the least, with our Wal-mart water shoes, shorts, spinning rods and southern accents. After 10 hours we returned to the camper empty handed, kind of, we had fished in rivers that looked like they came straight from a National Geographic documentary and that in its self was worth the trip.


The next morning we headed to some creeks and rivers on the western border of the park to try our luck. We rode around debating where the creeks were and if we were still in the park or which direction we needed to go before finding the perfect fishing hole. Cheggy was the first to the river and on the first cast caught a nice brown trout; finally we had found some fish!!! The next few hours we either caught or lost (we like to call it easy release) about 6 nice trout. We felt a little special after talking to some fly fishermen who had only had one hit, the Georgia boys had showed them up! After cleaning our catch, under the watchful eye of a hungry bald eagle, we headed home to get ready for our big event in West Yellowstone, the local rodeo! The rodeo was located about 5 miles out of town in the middle of a field and had a seating capacity of about 350. The crowd was mainly tourist and totally diverse! They had all the events of a typical rodeo just with a few less participants than usual, mainly because of no-shows according to the announcer. It was still a good time and a great way to end our stay in West Yellowstone. We’re actually headed back east to Cody Wyoming, Home of the Rodeo, for a few days. Stay posted we’ve got some cool things planned for this weekend!