The Vacation of a Lifetime

Printed in the Olathe News in August, 2007

The Vacation of A Lifetime
By Leonard Hall

After visiting Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, Yellowstone National Park was the jewel of the two-week family vacation. The Yellowstone attractions of geysers, hot springs, mud volcanoes, water falls, forests, and wildlife are among the magnificent sites to see in the world.

Old Faithful geyser, Mammoth Hot Springs, and dozen of sites were active as Yellowstone sits on one of the world’s most active volcano caldera.

Many programs and tours are offered by a private vendor operating the park. You can spend an entire week in Yellowstone, but only see half of the attractions and programs.

But unless you make reservations several weeks in advance, it is impossible to secure an interpreter at Yellowstone.

Upon arriving in Yellowstone, reservations were made for a boat tour and a one-day bus tour for the “Circle of Fire” in the south loop of the park. I requested an interpreter, but was simply told that it would be difficult to secure one upon short notice.

The problem with this arrangement is most tourists have no idea of what they want to see and do until they arrive in Yellowstone. There are many programs to choose from.

Reservations for hotels and camp grounds needed to be made at least several months in advance as all sleeping facilities are full during the months of July and August at Yellowstone. Picking a place to sleep is easy, but choosing among the programs and tours several months in advance is hard for any tourist.

During the tours, it was difficult to understand the tour guide’s stories. The spectacular sites with boardwalk trails and display exhibits were helpful and self-explanatory.

We camped out in a tent for 5 nights and attended the evening Park Ranger programs at the camp site. It was a wonderful and cool week to spend at Yellowstone.

The 1988 Yellowstone fire burned 40% of the park, so the rebirth of new trees with most being 8 to 10’ tall changed the heavily forest area to diversity of forest areas.

Our last part of the vacation ended up in the Black Hills area near Rapid City, South Dakota, the location of Mount Rushmore. The Mount Rushmore night program was the highlight.

There are several tourist towns, such as Deadwood, Lead, Keystone, and Hill City, where every hotel and bar have a casino. We left just before the week-long Sturgis, South Dakota Bike Rally, where 400,000 bikers attend the rally.

In the pre-bike rally week, there were many thousands of bikers with their heavy motorcycles in the Rapid City area. Most gas stations, tourist attractions, restaurants, and hotels had hundreds of bikers.

My advice is to go to Yellowstone and Black Hills in June or September and avoid the peak season crowds. It was a vacation of a life-time.

(Leonard Hall writes a weekly column for the Olathe News. He can be reached at Legalnetwk@aol.com.)