Day 9: Yellowstone and the Oil Crisis

I hope that in the future I’ll look back on Day 9 as the day we went to Yellowstone, and not the day I destroyed the car. Let me explain.

As I described in yesterday’s entry, we changed up our plan to camp in Yellowstone and instead decided to do the park as a one-day driving tour and push on to a private campground in Montana. So far, it seems like that plan was a success. Yellowstone itself was as advertised--- immense, breathtaking, unique, etc. We drove in through the East entrance and wound our way around to exit at the North exit, leaving, admittedly, almost all of the park unseen. Yesterday, we drove all the way around Grand Teton park and, while there were plenty of spots in it we didn’t see, I definitely got a real sense of the park as a whole. But even if we had camped out there, most of it would have gone unobserved—you would have to spend months there to really explore all the trails and experience everything that park has to offer.

That being said, I feel like this one day was enough for me. We saw a lot of the cool geothermal activity--- pots, geysers, springs, etc. And we saw incredible land formations--- canyons, rivers, mountains, sheer cliffs, etc. Our drive took us all the way to the top of the park on the highest peak and we got to look out over the entire caldera. We did not, however, see much at all of the wildlife that Yellowstone is famous for. I saw one buffalo, in the distance, and a small herd of elk after we had left the park.  After everything I’d read about the place, I feel kind of ripped off that no moose kicked out our back windshield and no grizzly bears mated on the hood of the car. Maybe next time.

Now the terrifying part of the day. After we left the park, we were driving through a truly desolate stretch of Montana, down a steep mountainside, between a steep ravine and a high hillside. And the “oil” light came on in the car. Now, I’m no expert in car maintenance, but one thing that’s always been impressed on me is that if the “oil” light comes on, you are dealing with an immediate and probably irrecoverable crisis. I was taught in drivers ed that if that happens, you immediately stop the car, where ever you are, and make a sacrifice to the car gods that the engine doesn’t seize up in a solid block of metal. However, as I described, I was in the literal middle of nowhere. And I theorized, boldly, that the engine was probably feeling very overworked after hours of driving up and down mountains in the park, and starting and stopping numerous times when we got to pull offs where I could jump out and take a picture of a geyser. So, I turned off the air conditioning, took my foot of the gas, and just let the car coast down the steeply sloped road for a while. And after a few minutes, the light turned off. So I kept driving, the entire remaining two hours to our campsite. No smoke, no terrible griding sounds, no additional warning lights. Now the car gets to spend the entire night chilling out, and the first order of business tomorrow morning is to get to a Jiffy Lube or a Car X or whatever iteration of that they have here and get the thing evaluated and the oil changed. There’s definitely still a nonzero chance that the car explodes when I hit the start button tomorrow morning, but for now Schoedinger’s Car is both fine and ruined, and that’s better than it being definitely ruined. Needless to say, if the engine is totaled in Montana I have absolutely no idea how we are going to proceed.

This campground I’m staying at has absolutely no cell service--- somehow we had better service in between mountains in the Tetons—so I won’t be able to post this until we go into town tomorrow. I spent a not inconsiderable amount of money on a fancy satellite communicator thing so that I could text home even if we didn’t have cell coverage, but the communicator thing is controlled by an app on my phone, and I got logged out of that app when I had to replace my phone a few days back, and I can’t set the app up without internet access, so I’m totally cut off for tonight. Let’s hope I don’t get attacked by an ax murderer, and no one at home gets attacked by an ax murderer either, until I get this sorted out. Although honestly, I suppose it would be best if no one ever got attacked by an ax murderer…