WoWhead Blog

Friday, July 30th, 2010

a grizzly family

? You hear the word “rodeo” used as a verb. Then you attend one in Cody, about 50 miles east of Yellowstone, and see not only bucking broncs, bull-riding, barrel-racing and calf-roping but also a stunt rider who circles the ring while standing astride two galloping horses. You look up from lunch at Buffalo Bill’s old hotel and find that Miss Rodeo Wyoming is seated at the counter, right between Miss Cody Stampede and Miss Rodeo America, all chowing down in their spangled blouses and sashes.

? Old Faithful, which generally rests for 90 minutes between eruptions, starts spouting the moment you step up.

? The Old Faithful Inn, whose dinner tables are often booked months in advance, has space for you the moment you step up. (It helps to step up at 10 minutes before 5 p.m.)

? On a foray into Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs area, you discover an appalling array of tasteless lawn ornaments at the home reserved for the Yellowstone concessionaire’s top executive. Then they move, and you realize the elk are real. All 10 of them. They can’t resist the grass and shade, the camera-happy tourists can’t resist the elk and the rangers are forever struggling to keep the beasts with antlers separated from the beasts without.

OK, so by now, you’ve realized this isn’t a multiple-choice test. It’s more a reminder: Even when fully besieged by the summering masses, Yellowstone National Park remains a wildlife parade, a geothermal freak show, an essential rite of North American tourism, a lot of fun. And a side trip to Cody can fit about as nicely as cornbread alongside a slab of ribs.

In early July, my family and I spent five days in tiny Cody and massive Yellowstone, whose 3,472 square miles cover much of northwestern Wyoming, spilling over into southern Montana and eastern Idaho. The park — which became the first national park in the world when it opened in 1872 — had nearly 3.3 million visitors in 2009.

That was a record, but with so many Americans reconsidering foreign travel, packing up cars and heading for the parks, it might soon be broken. Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash says June was the busiest ever at the park: 694,841 visitors in 30 days. For at least a few nights of our visit, every one of the more than 2,000 hotel rooms and cabins in the park was booked.