Ahhhh...Yellowstone National Park - the geysers, the hot springs, the wildlife!
Man...that place rubs me the wrong way in mid-summer. After 3 days of postponing, procrastinating by taking long drives through the Tetons and Yellowstone, and gorging myself to non-movement at all you can eat lunch and dinner buffets I decided NOT to hike into Yellowstone. Fuck Yellowstone in the summer - its a god damn zoo - with fat tourists in RV's that I didn't feel like dealing with. Plus - I couldn't find the trail head to my hike.
I decided I just wanted to drive - to burn some fuel and put some more miles on my car. I drove about 4 hours north to Salmon, Idaho. I small little nothing town. I stayed in a wonderful hotel there for $42 with an added $3 for a hot breakfast in the morning. "MMmmmmmm...that sounds good...I'll have that." It was a hotel out of the 1960's. Flashing neon lights -" SACajawea INN - VACANCY - Free Hot tub" (It was a hot tub in the middle of the breakfast room and yes the SAC is capitalized). The rooms were oriented in a U-shape with a nice grass lawn in the middle - each door faced outside and had a screen for the bugs to watch you. I enjoyed SACajawea Inn and found Salmon, Idaho to be quite pleasant.
Goldbug Hot Springs was only 20 miles away and my main objective for the region. A steep 1000' gain and 1.7 mile hike took me to some very lovely 100 degree natural hot tubs with a view of the valley I had hiked up. It was perfect - other than having to wait for the naked couple to finish up 'conudeling' right by the better soak zones. When I'm mature enough for a woman of my own - I'm taking her to Goldbug Hot Springs. I read and relaxed there for several hours.
I had been kind of fluffing around the last few days in preparation for a hiking weekend with my great friend Kevin who just moved to Bozeman, Montana to continue with his education. After the hot springs I spent a night outside Butte, Montana (en route to Bozeman). Butte's a city off 1-90 lined with slot machine casinos and neon lights. I also returned my second interim camera for I knew my wonderful mother sent my fixed camera - the one that broke in Wisconsin - to Kevin in Montana.
It was great to be able to spend the weekend with a Kevin and have some company out in the woods for once. He planned a perfectly challenging and rewarding hike in the Spanish Lakes region of the Madison Range in the Rocky Mountains only 45 minutes from Bozeman. On the first day on the trail we accomplished a strenuous off trail bushwhack over large boulders and a talus and gravel filled couloir up and over 10,000' "Crocodile Pass" - so named by Kevin for no particular reason what so ever. 40 - 50 mph wind gusts threatened to rip our tents down during the night but both our identical "Tarptents" prevailed. We hiked 16 miles on the last day to complete our 25 mile loop. It was cloudy and rainy mostly all of the last day - but spirits were truly souring. Both Kevin and I had difficulty containing how awesome we felt through out the day. I'll never stop saying it. There's energy out in the woods - more I feel the higher you get up a mountain. Perhaps it has something to do with the magnetic energy of the rock - I don't know - but we felt it - and that's why I'm always going back for more.
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