We’re ready to return to Yellowstone and get ourselves packed and make sure we hit the free breakfast buffet in the lobby. As we check out, the front desk girl tried to tell us that we hadn’t paid for our second night. So Melodie and I dug around for our receipts and she was very apologetic but I don’t like when a business keeps shoddy records. Bugged me to the point I almost turned the car around to go back and talk with the manager and complain.
Got over it and off to Old Trail Town for a couple hours of roaming an old West town and letting it take us back to “the day”. The suggested admission donation was $8 for adults and I also purchased a “Wyoming” Christmas decoration and three post cards I intend to keep and not mail. Not much time left in our trip to get them home before we get there.
Some of the highlights in this “town” besides the old buildings which had been moved from their original locations around Wyoming to this museum location were the gravesites of rough-and-ready frontiersmen including Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnston. Robert Redford portrayed Jeremiah in a movie and, when Johnston’s grave was moved to the Old Trail Town years ago, Redford was a pallbearer for the re-burial of Johnston. Jeremiah got his “liver-eating” name when he returned from an extended absence during hunting to find his wife and child massacred in his home. Learning that the Crow had committed the act, he went on a rampage and was known to cut open his victims and eat their liver in front of the other braves as a way to intimidate them….and it worked!
The many buildings had furnishings that I plan to quiz the kids at school about during a presentation. There was a woman there who actually said that the Native American women had it easy since they didn’t have to keep a 3000 SF house clean! How stupid a comment can you make? No, they didn’t but they had to grow food, grind the corn into meal for bread, skin the animals brought home from a hunt and spread the hide to cure, make clothing from the skin and hide, cure the meat so it wouldn’t spoil, prepare meals, raise the children and much more. Give me a 3000 SF house to clean any day over all THAT work!
The saloon was complete with a card game in progress, a brass rail for propping up your foot, a spittoon and 3 bullet holes in the door. The REAL old west.
We started out on scenic US 20 and stopped for photos at the Buffalo Bill Dam (memorial erected because it was the only time he had said the word ☺) and an overlook of Yellowstone Lake which is the largest high-altitude (above 7000’) lake in the world. The devastation of the fire of 1988 was evident in the many stark trees still standing. The lakeside with its waves crashing on the rocky beach required our attention and we just had to get photographs of the gorgeous rocky shoreline.
After checking in to our cabin, the most expensive nightly rate of our trip, we returned to the hotel lobby for a tour of the hotel by Ted. Waiting for the tour to begin, who did we see? Yup! The biker babes who elected to stay behind OFF THE BIKES and have some cocktails while the “boys” rode up to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I told them they needed some foo-foo time while the boys played. They agreed.
Ted was interesting but used the phrase “it was a different time and a different culture” more than 10 times. I felt like one of my middle schoolers as I began counting the number of times he said that. The tour focused a great deal on the architecture interests added by Harold Reamer who was the architect, at age 29, chosen to update and create all of the buildings in Yellowstone. Standing at the rear of the Lake Hotel, Ted explained that the annex to our left was built as a girls’ dorm. The girls had to bring their mother to the interview and, if offered the job, they had to get the blessing of their mother before they would be hired. The president of the Northern-Pacific Railroad, Mr. Childs, owned and ran the hotel and wanted blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls to work in the hotel. They were brought out on the Savage Express to Yellowstone. The were stacked “like cord wood” on bunkbeds with only a hook for their closet. The term “savages” came from the young men who were hired to work at Lake Hotel since they were hard drinkers and rowdy on their days off. The “Dudes” and “Dudettes” who were the high-class patrons of the hotel labeled them “savages”. The employees today take pride in calling themselves “savages”. And their employee dining hall is called the “zoo” because 42 countries are represented in the hotel’s personnel and having all those different languages being spoken at the same time over dinner sounds like a zoo.
We headed out to Hayden Valley in search of more wildlife after the tour. As we left the parking lot to have dinner, 4 Harley bikers passed in front of us and the last one waved! OMG! It was the same group we had met on Hwy 212 to Red Lodge, discovered they were staying at the same Yodeler Motel in Red Lodge as we and now they are staying here at Lake Lodge too! Great people.
Dinner was spinach pie at the Lake Lodge cafeteria since we decided the Lake Hotel Dining room didn’t have anything that appealed to our discerning taste…translation…it was too expensive! The cafeterias in Yellowstone serve you WAY too much food. It’s enough to share or, if you remember, to ask for a “half” portion and it’s cheaper too! Leaving the cafeteria, who do we see standing in line for dinner? You guessed it, our Minneapolis biker couple so we stopped and chatted one last time knowing that we probably wouldn’t run into them again on this trip.
Off to Hayden Valley finally where we only saw some mule deer and bison. Stopped at LeHardy Rapids and photographed some funny looking white pelicans trying to get some food out of the raging rapids. Came home with some wonderful shots of the birds and the white water.
Gonna miss the scenery and the laid-back days with only photography and wildlife to fill them up.
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