Why-oming?

Today sucked. I’m sorry, did I say sucked? I meant it super-sucked. It was raining the entire day. We drove all over the park. It was cold and all the locals are sick of the snow. It ain’t that great for us tourist either! Deepest snowpack this late into the year for over thirty years, they say. We were to go to our second campsite today. The kids are upset because we are leaving their friends. “This campsite is even further south so it should be even warmer and there will be kids there too,” I say.

As I pull the RV past snow drifts so high I can’t see over them from where I sit six feet up in the RV, our hearts sink. We spent four hours driving around in the cold trying to find places to hike that aren’t closed due to snow, not that it makes much of a difference with the steady, cold rain, and now we arrive at 5 p.m. at an RV site so deep in the snow that most of the sites haven’t been shoveled and there are no pull-through spots available so we need to take a back-in site because that’s all they have and they haven’t seen weather like this in years and it really SUCKS!

We check out the site. The pad has been plowed and then they did something very unusual; they shoveled a path to the picnic table and shoveled out about half of the table and benches. And when I say a path to the table I really mean a hallway to the table. The snow is higher than the table, hell, its taller than the kids.

We second guess staying at Canyon Village and call to try to get our site at Madison back for another two nights. All booked. The people here at Canyon recommend Norris campground. It is a self-reservation NPS run site but it is very nice they say and its only 12 miles away but lower in elevation so not snowed in. We go to take a look. It is a nice site, right by the Norris Geyser Basin, and we get a spot in a hilly part of the campground. Teresa doesn’t like the look of several of the single, male campers sleeping in their trucks and we start to have third thoughts about this decision. Besides, its raining and cold here and there are absolutely no facilities and Canyon had laundry, showers, dining room, cafeteria, shops, a grocery. Let’s go back.

We head back to Canyon and they still have our spot. We pull in and settle in for a chilly night underwhelmed by what we are sure is normally an incredible park.