Day 13: Jackson, WY to West Yellowstone, MT

I think that this day is the early frontrunner for my favorite day of the whole trip. I was partnered with Jack, our resident Londoner and token foreigner, for the 10 miles. I mean, we hit two national parks today… how can we top that?!

First we ran through the Grand Tetons. The views were just unreal. The way that the Tetons formed resulted in the jagged mountains rising up into the sky without creating any foothills in front of them, so there are these crazy long valleys (where we were running thank GOD) directly adjacent to these intimidating, stark mountains. It’s quite a contrast and it’s really unbelievable. Also we saw a huge herd of bison that was awe inspiring!

We also ran alongside the Snake River, where we had a pretty fun (for me) encounter. We asked a guy to take our picture and he said “ok” with a rather heavy accent. My suspicions were aroused. Then, when he took the picture, he said, “un, deux, trois.” Now, I was certain. I burst into French, asking the guy if he was French or Quebecois. He was so taken aback that I was speaking French, HAH! He kind of stumbled over his words and was just like, “uhm, wow, your French is great, I’m from France……how do you know French?” It felt pretty good. Hopefully I helped to rectify some of America’s public-image issues abroad. After explaining to the man what we were doing for the summer (in French, hell yeah!) he had perhaps the most French reaction of all time and simply said, “Oh, that’s really cool, good luck” before walking away, seemingly exasperated. I think it really only could have been more French if he had puffed a cigarette as he walked away.

I’m done humble-bragging about that. We went to Jackson Lake in Grand Teton Nat’l Park after that. Proud to say that I honored my commitment to Coach Ringwood and I did indeed swim in this body of water! On our way out of Teton and into Yellowstone we stopped on the banks of the Snake River and I was feeling good, so I took another dip. Another body of water down! The Snake River was a bit intimidating, the current was REALLY swift. It was truly an in and out affair. Both bodies of water were glacial as hell, but when else am I going to be out here? Hopefully soon…

We drove through Yellowstone, and stopped by Old Faithful, the geyser that erupts (not sure if that’s the proper term or not but we’re rolling with it!) on the most regular schedule. We only had to hang around about 15 minutes until we saw the real deal. It was phenomenal. Awe-inspiring. But I’m going to talk about Yellowstone much much more in the next post.

We didn’t really fully celebrate Evan’s birthday because we had a 5 AM wake-up the morning after. However, we had a full rest (ie no service event) day in West Yellowstone on Saturday, so all bets were off for Friday night. We were told by locals that Buffalo Bar was the place to be, so we walked on over. Evan showed up and attempted to order a draft beer. I stopped him in his tracks and told the bartender that he’d be having an AMF. If you don’t know what that is… google it, and you’ll have an idea of how our night went from there on out. Gotta say, Evan had a dope birthday! Schoch OUT!