Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park is always one of the places on my travel bucket list. In the summer of 2022, we finally had the chance to go to the park. During my research of the trip, I also found out that there was another beautiful national park, Grand Teton National Park, about an hour drive south of Yellowstone. We decided to visit both parks in this one trip.
Since flying there is very expensive for us, and we have to rent a car to drive around the parks any way if we take the fly route since Yellowstone is HUGE, we deiced to drive there with our own vehicle. Point to point distance between our home town of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to Yellowstone is about 1,400 kilo-meters (870 miles). It will take about 14 hours non-stop driving.
We decided to split the one-way-travel into 2 days, with enough time for food, stretching and bio breaks. For over-night stays, we chose Missoula, Montana when we were going to the parks, and Spokane, Washington when we came back. The 2 points were chosen because of couple reasons, 1. We wanted to do a little bit more driving in the first day. 2. Both cities are relatively large cities so we could stock up our supplies for the next few days when we were in the parks.
The Park
Yellowstone National Park is everything we saw in TV/Internet/photos and more. Even though the park is huge, it’s filled with colorful spring pools, interesting geyser, and abundant of wildlife everywhere. There are 2 main loops in Yellowstone, the north loop and the south loop. Driving around north loop takes about 3 hours non-stop. Driving around south loop takes about 5 hours nonstop. Of course you need to stop along the way to see all the amazing spring pools/geyser/wildlife. One of the best strategy I learned from an internet forum was that splitting the stay in the park to 2 locations. One is near/on the south loop, another is near/on the north loop. That will save you some driving time in the park. There are several lodges you can choose to accomplish that. We chose Canyon Lodge for the north loop, and Old faithful snow lodge for the south loop.
Grand Teton National Park
Grand Teton National Park is relatively smaller than Yellowstone. Its beauty is of its Glacier Mountains and beautiful rivers/lakes. You can drive around the park under a couple hours non-stop. However, you will need to stop along the way to admire the beauty of 2 main mountain ranges, Grand Teton and Mount Moran.
Photo Albums
Waterfalls of Yellowstone National Park
Canyon of Yellowstone National Park
Wildlife of Yellowstone National Park
Thermal Pools of Yellowstone National Park