Mountains, What Mountains?

We left Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park quite early in the morning. We started out just after sunrise as a hazy red sun was coming up. We soon got onto US 287 which would take us all the way to Yellowstone. Is was a cool and hazy morning, so much haze that we couldn't even seem the Tobacco Root Mountains ahead of us.

Having left with only a cup of coffee, we stopped for breakfast about an hour later in Ennis, MT. We pulled into a parking space in the downtown and saw the Ennis Cafe right across the street. It looked like a hometown local establishment, guys with beards, baseball caps and blue jeans sitting at the counter. We are suckers for local low-key places, but this time we were just suckers.

It may have had the homey look, but the cuisine was completely supplied by the Sysco truck. Pre-frozen shredded home-fries and jarred hollandaise on Ellen's eggs benedict. I had two giant fluffy pancakes, the kind that are soft and act like sponges for butter and maple syrup—if it were only butter and maple syrup instead of buttery-tasting spread (44% vegetable oil and 4% butter, 52% unknown) and brown high-fructose syrup. Ennis Cafe may be the old place in town, but has seen its day. The worst part, as we were leaving town there was the local coffee roaster at the other end of Main St.

Ennis seems to be famous as a fishing hub on the Madison River. It obviously attracts the monied fly fishing types with two fly shops, many galleries and two realtors, showing lots of multi-million dollar spreads for sale. We saw a few of them as we continued down the road. US 287 parallels the Madison all the way to Yellowstone. All along the way we saw lots of river boats and people on the banks and in the water fishing. We even a couple of naturals...we stopped to see an active osprey nest with two nearly grown osprey sitting in the nest and the parents swooping in to leave them food.

The Madison seems to be a free running river right up to Earthquake Canyon, which looks like there was a relatively recent major quake (in geologic time) with walls of rubble all the way up the canyon to a high lake, Quake Lake, at its head. The Madison returned after the lake an ran a short way to the dam creating the much larger Hebgen Lake. US 287 ran along this large developed lake almost all the way to the town of West Yellowstone, before the river reappeared. Time for us to enter Yellowstone National Park with all the crowds.

We were just passing through this time, as we had visited last year and felt crowded. The crowds and traffic seemed twice as bad this year. We made a quick stop at the Madison Visitor Center where the Madison River starts at the confluence of the Firehole and the Gibbon. While there I asked the ranger about the heavy haze we had been seeing all the way from Butte. She pulled out a map of the smoke dispersion from fires in Idaho and California. The smoke was covering an immense area and completely blanketing much of southern Montana and all of Yellowstone and the Tetons. No crystal clear vistas this year.

From there we drove straight through the park to Grand Teton National Park. The traffic through Yellowstone was quite heavy. It seemed like we were at home driving along 228 in Hingham...with the houses replaced by trees and geysers. Somehow, it thinned out after we left Yellowstone. I don't quite understand it, as there is only one road out of Yellowstone.

We pulled into the Signal Mountain Campground around lunch time. Finding our favorite site taken, we took an inland one across from it, and collapsed. The rest of the day was spent relaxing around the campsite and recovering from another 600 mile sprint.