Most readers will probably already be aware that the “voyage home” portion of my trip ran into…difficulties. But it didn’t start out that way!
I woke up on Sunday morning feeling rested, refreshed, and—if not by any means fully “healed in the heel”—at least enough better that my enthusiasm for Yellowstone fun was back in full force. It was time to pack up my campsite and hit the road toward home, but what I wanted to do was go hiking! Alas. Anyway, having gotten up at a satisfyingly, but not ridiculously, early hour (I want to say maybe quarter to seven or so?), and taken a bit less than an hour to get packed up, I bade farewell to Grant campground.
Varying from my usual route (i.e., the route that I had taken to get to Yellowstone at the start of this trip), my plan was to leave the park via the east entrance and then head toward Minnesota via Wyoming and South Dakota instead of Montana and North Dakota. Accordingly, I started by driving along the lakeshore from Grant to Fishing Bridge. I decided, though, that I had just not seen enough of the Hayden Valley (located along the road between Fishing Bridge and Canyon Village) on this trip, and that I would assuage my yearning for some final Yellowstone fun by at least driving up to Canyon and back one more time before heading east. The Hayden Valley, of course, is one of two areas in the park where you can count on always seeing lots of buffalo (often in the road). Also, it really sort of symbolizes the whole park, in my mind. Driving through it is one of the small handful of things that made a vivid enough impression on me the very first time I was out there (as a 14-year-old on a boy scout trip in 1988) that being there still calls up those ancient memories as much as it does any more recent ones. There’s just something weirdly primeval about the landscape there, with the Yellowstone River lazily winding its way through the prairie (with mountains visible in the distance), and herds of buffalo roaming around like they own the place (which, in my mind, they do). In my everyday life, when thoughts of Yellowstone drift into my mind, it’s usually the Hayden Valley that I picture first.
I can’t really claim that my drive through, and then back through, the Hayden Valley was successful in quenching my thirst for “more Yellowstone” on this final morning…but they helped, and I was really glad I decided to do this. I took my time, stopping at turn-out areas here and there to take pictures.
I encountered my first buffalo before I was even entirely past the woodsier area just south of the valley proper. 
Here’s a classic on-the-road sighting! 
I couldn’t help but to stop and snap a photo of the trailhead for 2018’s 20-mile hike with my brother Carl. Just seeing this spot always gives me a thrill of excitement. 
See? Buffalo, lazily winding river, rolling prairie. This is what I love about this area. 
There’s a whole herd out there… 
I encountered another road-crosser as I neared the southern end of the valley area again, shortly before turning off the loop road and heading for the east entrance.
After I did, reluctantly, turn off and head east, the Yellowstone scenery refused to get any less captivating. The road to the east entrance is one that I had never driven before, so the specific sights here were new to me. The first bit, as you can see from the map above, hugs the northern shoreline of Yellowstone Lake. Specifically, it goes past Mary Bay and Sedge Bay, which (it turns out) are the two “other” parts of the lake (besides the West Thumb; see previous post) that have the most lake-bottom thermal features.
After I left the lake behind, I continued having to wrestle with myself between stopping every few minutes to take pictures versus trying to actually make progress on the day’s drive—a dilemma that would keep plaguing me for much of the day. I did stop once more before exiting the park, though, to take a couple pictures of the creek that had been paralleling the road for awhile (and one shot of the Absarokas, into which I was heading).
Those pictures were all still taken inside Yellowstone, so duh, of course the scenery was gorgeous. What astounded me, though, was how amazingly scenic things remained once I was outside the park. The thought that kept going through my mind was: “Why have I always been so obsessed with coming and going via Beartooth Pass??” I mean, yes, that’s an awesome drive…but somehow I had (based on no evidence) always imagined that the other approaches to the park would not be similarly impressive. I don’t know…maybe it was because the “main” (north) entrance, by Gardiner, MT, doesn’t at all compare to the northeast entrance (via Beartooth). But driving through the Absarokas in Wyoming (along the North Fork Shoshone River)!? Unbelievable!
So, I passed the morning and part of the afternoon making relatively slow progress through extremely rugged and beautiful north-central Wyoming (grabbing a quick lunch somewhere along the way), before connecting with I-90 in Buffalo and then speeding across the eastern third or so of the state (I think I stopped for gas in Gillette). As I think back, I’m embarrassed to say that I think a light came on on my dashboard at some point during the day, to which I paid little heed. My car has a history of its “check engine” light activating when there is no actual problem (verified by a mechanic when I took it in for service in the past), and although I think it was a different light today, it also didn’t stay on continuously—and anyway, everything seemed to be fine. In retrospect, I perhaps should have been more concerned…but on the other hand, what action could I have really taken? Stop in some teeny little town in Wyoming, and try to find a mechanic there who could immediately have a look at things and advise me?
In any case, I rolled onward…across the border into South Dakota, and past Spearfish. I didn’t take careful note of times, so all I can say is that it was sometime in the late afternoon or early evening when, quite suddenly, the air conditioner stopped blowing. Oops, and was the power steering suddenly out as well? Yep…in fact, suddenly nothing was working at all, including (I realized) the engine itself. I was coasting along the interstate on momentum alone! Holding off panic, I noted that I just happened to be approaching an exit for a wayside rest, so I steered off the interstate proper (taking in, with dismay, the “no services” sign by the exit) and coasted to a stop in what was nothing more than a parking area clearly intended for semi drivers. “At least I’m not stranded on the shoulder of the highway itself,” I thought. I knew in advance what was going to happen (i.e., nothing) when I tried to restart the engine, but of course I tried anyway. Then I grabbed my phone, and was relieved to discover that I did, at least, have a cell signal. What followed was a series of phone calls between me, the roadside assistance service provided by my insurance company, and two different semi-local towing companies, with everything being complicated by the facts that I didn’t really know exactly where I was and that their GPS locater thingy decided I was somewhere other than where I actually was. It took a conversation with someone from the first towing company to determine, based on what I could tell him, where I really was (which was about halfway between Spearfish and Rapid City). Finally, after much confusion (but a surprisingly not-too-long wait), a tow truck arrived to tow me into Rapid City.
I want to say that it was around 7:00 pm by this time, and on a Sunday evening, no car repair places were open. The tow guy took me to a place where I could leave the car, dropping my keys in a drop box with a note and my phone number, in the hope that they might be able to work on it in the morning…and then he took me to a hotel.
I wish I could say that the rest of my evening was at least relaxing and uneventful, but… After a nice shower, and dinner at an Applebee’s across the street from the hotel, I realized that in quickly grabbing the things I thought I’d need from my car before leaving it behind, I had overlooked a few items. Most were things I wanted, but could do without…but one of them was the power cord for my CPAP machine, without which I would not really be able to sleep (!). My only hope for retrieving it was to find transportation back to my car’s location and hope that it would be possible to fish my keys out of the drop box (I couldn’t recall if they had maybe disappeared through a slot or something such that I wouldn’t be able to get at them). Uber didn’t seem to be available, so I resorted to asking the person at the hotel’s front desk to call me a cab. It all worked out in the end (the keys proved retrievable), but it was very stressful (and a surly cab driver who was upset to learn that I wanted two-way transportation didn’t help matters, although to be fair, he got nicer before the end of the ride)!
Naturally, when (first thing in the morning) I called the place where I’d left my car, they said they were booked full and couldn’t possible spare the time to look at my car until later in the week. So, I got to spend some time calling every car repair place I could find in Rapid City, until I finally found one that at least promised to get to it before the end of the day. Then I got to call roadside assistance again and persuade them to cover another tow, to get my car where it needed to be. After that, it was just a waiting game. Stranded and frustrated—and conscious that between the car repairs, the hotel, the taxi rides, and the eating out, the tail end of my trip was going to end up costing me more than the entire rest of the trip combined!—I basically spent the day sitting in my hotel room playing my favorite computer game. The mechanic did get to my car (which needed a new alternator) before the end of the day, as promised, but it (unsurprisingly) wasn’t ready until evening, and I really wasn’t keen to start a 9-hour drive at that point, so I extended my stay at the hotel to two nights. Then I arranged transport for myself over to the shop (the mechanic advised me that while Uber wasn’t currently operating in Rapid City, Lyft was) to pick up my car. I paid for it and drove away, bound for a gas station where I could replenish the ice in my cooler (even though I was pretty sure that all the food in there had spoiled by now), but en route, I noticed that the a/c was only blowing hot air. Not sure what was up, I turned around and went right back to the shop, where the mechanic took a cursory look but didn’t see any obvious reason for it not to be working. He was also closing up for the night, though, so he told me that I could bring the car back first thing in the morning and he would look at it. Great! Was I going to end up having to hang around Rapid City all day tomorrow, too!? Aaaauuuuggghhhh! (I soothed my frustrations with pizza.)
The next morning, I checked out of the hotel and headed back over to the car shop. The guy duly checked over the a/c and ultimately concluded that something called the “compressor clutch” was the problem, offering (I think) some explanation for how this could have been a secondary result of the alternator dying. It wasn’t something he was going to be able to fix right away, though, so I resigned myself to driving the rest of the way home without air conditioning. (Later, back in the Twin Cities, the mechanic at the dealership came up with the same answer to what was wrong, so that was at least reassuring.) What remained of the trip then was just a long, somewhat hot, rather loud (because I kept windows partly open for airflow), but uneventful drive across South Dakota and southern Minnesota. I think I finally made it home a little after 6:00 pm (having gotten under way around 8:45 am Mountain Time). Home at last (albeit, as a friend commented, “a day late and a [bunch of] dollar[s] short”)!