6 June – Madison Junction to Cody

We woke up to a very cold morning after a broken sleep (heard someone screaming during the night… seems to happen a bit over hereJ).  There were very light flakes of snow falling and it was only 5 degrees inside the van (on went the gas heating).

We packed up the RV, said goodbye to Madison and headed off towards Norris (another spot in Yellowstone).  Along the way we stopped at the “Artist’s Paint pots”, a series of pools/springs & geysers that were of different colours.  Unfortunately we found that the colours were not all that vivid but still quite a nice walk.  There was a volcanic mud pool, which was quite interesting to look at.  Basically hot mud plopping up from underground gases.

Just a note here, it was still really cold and we were rugged up in beanies, ski jackets, hiking boots etc and the snow was still falling!  It is quite common for the weather at Yellowstone to change dramatically from one day to the next.

On that way to Norris we saw a couple of elk grazing away from the road.  We stopped a bit down the road, as there was nowhere to park (lot of people taking pictures), and ran back to get some pictures ourselves.

At Norris we walked around the Porcelain Basin area, looking at the various hot pools, springs and vents.  The smell was a bit stronger here than at previous locations.

We went on to Fishing Village (still in Yellowstone).  Along the way we saw Trumpeter Swan and we also followed along the shores of Yellowstone Lake.  There were some great views of snow-caped mountains along the shores of the lake and Ros spotted a Marmot on the side of the road (a bit like a beaver but without the flat tail).  There were also lots of bison grazing on the side of the road… and lots of people taking pictures of the bison. A bit further on we saw several big horned sheep grazing as they clung to the cliff side with their little goat feet. It looked very precarious.

With the weather still being quite cold we decided to push on to Cody (a cowboy town outside of Yellowstone).

On leaving Yellowstone the scenery dramatically changed to typical wild, wild west country side, fairly barren hills and mountains with red soil.  There was some farming along the Shoshone River (we followed this most of the way into Cody) and these were the only green areas we saw on the way.

We got into Cody and followed “Lucy” (our trusty sat nav) to our one of our camp options.  Unfortunately “Lucy” seemed to think that there was a street that went off the side of a cliff in Cody that would take us to our destination.  We sorted her out (by ignoring her “recalculating… turn left at 6^th street …recalculating.. turn left at 7^th street… I think you get the idea J).  We finally got to our site and camped up.