US Road Trip | ID, WY, MT | 7.2019

Jeff and I love to travel, explore and adventure to new places. We moved to Boise, Idaho in September of 2018 and have been anxious to explore during the summer months in this beautiful nature-filled land.

We’ve explored a bit in the Winter, but were have been looking forward to explore east of Boise into eastern Idaho, northwestern Wyoming and the very southeastern corner of Montana during the warmer months. We didn’t really plan much for this road trip besides the dates we were going and the general location we were going to drive in.. oh and that we were camping.

We took recommendations from our friends and campsite neighbors that made our trip both spontaneous and easy. We camped for 5 nights over 6 days in 3 separate states and drove just about 1,300 miles to and from our apartment in west downtown boise.

Our favorite part? Camping for 3 of those nights in Colter Bay, Wyoming with the Grand Tetons as our backdrop. Pure natural perfection. A place with breathtakingly perfect mountain peaks formed by ancient glaciers and pristine glacier lakes.

We day tripped into Yellowstone National Park from Colter Bay - an easy 30 minute drive into the park. We left pretty early on a Wednesday morning the third week in July and managed to not hit much traffic, which was great. The biggest complaint we’ve heard about Yellowstone is the traffic during July and August months, so we were anticipating that, but lucked out. ‘Lucking out’ really is the foundation of this trip.

Like I had said, we didn’t plan much. We didn’t reserve any campsites and barely scouted out sites to potentially stay at. The main site we new we wanted to camp at was Colter Bay Campground. Apparently this campground gets full by 2pm-ish each day during July and August. We drove on Monday morning from Ketchum, Idaho and were originally going to stop in a town called Driggs on the western side of the Grand Tetons. From there we would leave early and get to Colter Bay Campground early enough to guarantee a stop. Well, along the drive Jeff was feeling lucky, so we arrived in Driggs at about 4pm and decided to just continue the drive, taking our shot at getting a campsite at Colter Bay later in the day…

We got there at about 6:30pm, pulled right up to the campground entrance window and, long story short, they ‘paid it forward’ and not only gave us an awesome open spot after much anticipation, but also sold us 2 nights for the price of 1, considering the previous party in the campsite left a day early!

We loved every bit of our stay there and are looking forward to going back later this year, maybe October. Besides Colter Bay, we spent one night at North Fork Campground in Ketchum, Idaho on a Sunday night. Also a walk-up campground and situated on a little river - Big Wood River to be exact. From there, we stayed in Colter Bay for 3 nights and the 5th night we stayed in Montana.

On Thursday, we drove from Colter Bay to West Yellowstone through Yellowstone National Park. We entered through the South Entrance of Yellowstone, drove to West Thumb Geyser (which we checked out the day before) and continued towards Madison and the West Entrance of Yellowstone. On our way, we stopped at the Old Faithful Geyser, that apparently erupts every 80-ish minutes. We had no idea when the geyser would erupt, but we showed up and went through to the general viewing spot to see what we’d find. On our way, we noticed people sort of rushing around us in a general direction, so we literally were like, “I think we should hurry because something might be happening”. So we did and boom. Old Faithful Geyser erupted! Lucky.

Timing things so unknowingly well, enabled us to sort of move quickly through that stop and we continued on our way to Montana. We stopped in West Yellowstone, so I could do some work for the naturopathic doctor I work remotely for and we found our next walk-up campsite. Lonesomehurst Campground just outside of West Yellowstone, MT on the Hebgen Lake. We showed up at about 2pm and found a perfect little site with a reservation sign occupying the site number post indicating the site was reserved on 7/19 and we were camping on 7/18. So we set up camp and went for a kayak!

We brought our friends inflatable kayak and man oh man, was that a great option. It created a whole new way for us to adventure and explore such special places in our country.

Now we are back home, settling back in with our kitty, Mendel, and our little life here in Boise, Idaho. We are looking forward to this next big chapter in our lives. The time in nature was just what we needed to reconnect and recharged, gearing up to be our own bosses and own our transformation.

Life is good. Never stop exploring. Never stop moving. Never stop learning.
~ Namaste, J