So, at the end of my previous post, I left myself waking up in my tent around 2:00 am when my second C-PAP battery died on me. I spent the next hour or so lying there, not entirely sure whether I was trying to sleep C-PAP-less or trying NOT to sleep, since sleeping C-PAP-less generally leaves me feeling crappy…and not being very successful either at sleeping or at staying entirely awake. During the more-awake moments, I pondered my options, but I didn’t really like any of them. But eventually, I decided to abandon the tent in favor of the passenger seat of my car. At a minimum, I reasoned that being in a more upright position should help me to get some “real” sleep—and I was also considering the possibility of running the car’s engine, plugging my power converter into the cigarette lighter, and powering my C-PAP machine that way. I didn’t love this idea, not least because the campground rules specifically said not to idle your vehicle engine (as well as because it would waste gas, pollute the air, and potentially disturb others with engine noise in the middle of the night). After trying to sleep semi-upright without the C-PAP for perhaps a half-hour or so, though, I gave in and spent the rest of the night with the engine running so that I could genuinely sleep…and, misgivings aside, this did at least work (and no one complained, or came and told me to turn my engine off).
On the bright side, too, I figured out WHY my batteries had both given out so prematurely. It turns out that I had messed up (sort of) when trying to turn off the humidifier feature on my C-PAP machine at the start of the trip. Since it greatly increases power consumption, I normally turn the humidifier off during camping trips—but there are actually two separate settings to adjust, and apparently I’d turned off the “heated hose” feature but not the actual humidifier heating element. (Only partly my fault, as my machine seems to have a weird glitch where sometimes it doesn’t want to let me access one of the settings, for some reason—which must be what had happened.) Anyway, I now turned the humidifier off, so that once I managed to get a battery charged back up, I wouldn’t continue drawing excessive amounts of power from it.
One additional positive was that since I’d already been planning to get a somewhat later start this morning due to having to drop the battery off for charging after 8:00 am before I could really head off anywhere else, there was no harm in sleeping in a bit, which partially made up for missing some sleep during the night and having to sleep less-than-comfortably in the car. Of course, the sun made it tough to sleep TOO late, but, whatever; that just meant that I actually had time for a shower (first one of the trip!) before heading to the service station to air up my car tire and drop off a battery. In short, this turned into a much more leisurely morning than most, and I managed to get various problems solved-ish.
Eventually, though, I got to the point of being ready to head out and actually do something with my day. My activity of choice was to hike part of another trail that had been on my list of “trails I’d like to check out” ever since my last trip out here. This one was called “Black Canyon of the Yellowstone,” and features two suspension bridges over the Yellowstone River, as well as (according to my Yellowstone hiking trails book) “scenery [that] rivals almost any other hike in the park.” It’s a 13-mile trail one-way, so obviously I would only be able to hike a small part of it—but it sounded worthwhile! And so it proved to be; I ended up having a great hike today, and (perhaps not surprisingly, since I was “solo” for the day) this turned out to be the day of the trip that most reminded me of my 2016 trip.
This trail was way up in the northern part of the park, with the trailhead located along the road between Tower and Mammoth (the trail, in fact, crosses the state line into Montana for a while, although I didn’t get that far). While driving up there and getting ready to hike, I was doing time calculations in my head; I only had so much time available for hiking, after all, since I had promised to meet up with Carl and family at the end point of the next day’s BIG hike at 5:00 this evening—and before doing that, I’d need to stop back at the service station at Canyon to pick up the battery that I’d dropped off, since the station closed at 5:00. I figured that I had time to hike out for about two hours, then take a half-hour or so to eat the lunch that I was packing, before turning around and hiking another two hours back to the trailhead, driving back to Canyon, picking up the battery, and then driving around to the other side of the loop road and getting to the trail-ending spot over there by 5:00. With this plan in mind, off I set!
The first section of the trail followed switchbacks down a fairly steep incline (“this is going to be fun on the way back up,” I thought) heading toward the Yellowstone River.
Not long after the switchbacked descent gave way to more level terrain, I approached the first suspension bridge (and the only one that I would see, since the second one was much farther down the trail than I would be going).
Past the bridge a ways, the terrain abruptly changed, becoming open and rolling instead of lightly wooded. The next section of the trail (which ended up being the rest of my hike) actually strays away from the Yellowstone (one of the only parts of the trail that doesn’t stick pretty close to it). More Yellowstone River scenery would have been great, but I was also happy with what I did get, so it was all good. This part of the trail went through what looked like good buffalo country, but alas, I didn’t see any buffalo.
In due course (specifically, about 2 miles into the hike), I came to—yep—a creek that had to be forded! Woo-hoo! This was Hellroaring Creek, which my book says can be dangerous early in the season, but which was only about knee-deep and delightful today. Here was an instance of the bracingly cold water that I expect from rivers and creeks (and lakes) in Yellowstone, and it felt wonderful to wade through and splash on my face.
Once across the creek, I hiked onward. The book and map promised another creek at the 4.2-mile mark (the Little Cottonwood), which I thought I might just be able to reach in the time that I had; a creek-side lunch sounded nice. This was not to be, though; I pushed on for almost 10 minutes beyond the time when I’d figured I ought to be stopping for lunch prior to turning back, but I never reached the creek, and eventually gave up and stopped, for fear of making myself late. I’d probably dawdled too much at the suspension bridge and/or the creek, taking pictures and whatnot. I did, though, at least find an alternate mildly interesting landmark for my lunch spot:
Lunch eaten, I climbed down from my rock and started the return trek. I was still pretty much on schedule—maybe a FEW minutes late getting started, but I was pretty sure that I had overestimated the drive times somewhat, so that I’d be fine. I also assumed that I would likely dawdle less on the return hike, although I was aware that any time that I saved this way might be balanced out by the climb at the end of the hike likely taking somewhat longer than the descent had taken at the start. And for the most part, all of these notions were borne out; putting aside the 2:00 am battery incident (which I’m choosing to assign to the previous day), this was one day when everything pretty much went according to plan.
I made my way back to the trailhead, hopped in the car, and drove back to the station at Canyon to pick up my battery. The guy estimated that it was perhaps up to three-fourths of its capacity—which, if it normally lasts me four nights, told me that it might just get me through the three remaining nights of this trip (with some emphasis on “might,” since he seemed a bit tentative, and I suspected he was probably “rounding up” somewhat). Fingers crossed. Next, I headed to my campsite to drop the battery off and do some quick packing and arranging; I was about to go leave my car on the far side of the loop road overnight, so I had to make sure that everything I would need during that time (such as the battery that I had just picked up) was at my site, among other details.
I ended up setting out for the prearranged meet-up at the far end of the trail in plenty of time. En route, I got to thinking: I knew that the nephews (especially Bram) had been really hoping their parents would take them back to the Firehole Canyon Drive swimming spot today, so that they could actually swim there. Carl and Cassie, I knew, had had a trip up to Mammoth in mind for at least part of the day, but it seemed like a pretty good bet that they might take the boys to the swimming spot afterwards—especially considering that it would be right on their way between Mammoth and the trail-end meeting spot. So, I thought, what the heck: Why not take Firehole Canyon Drive and see if I could spot their vehicle parked along the side of the road near the swimming spot? I knew that I probably wouldn’t get there in time to be able to join them in any swimming, but even just another trip along the highly scenic road had its appeal. When I got to the swimming area, I drove along slowly, looking at the line of parked cars, until…I saw Carl and Cassie loading stuff up into one of them! Greetings were duly exchanged, and then we all drove down the road to the end of the trail for the following day’s big hike. My food, of course, was all in my car, so I took a few moments here to make a lunch for myself for tomorrow, which I gave to Carl to keep cold for me overnight and bring when they picked me up in the morning. Then I left my car behind and hopped in with Carl and Cassie for a ride back to Canyon. In lieu of my usual dinner cooked over a campfire (what with my cooler being in my car), I had them drop me off at the diner/cafe attached to the store by the Canyon visitor center, where I ordered some dinner, ate, and then walked back to my campsite from there. I still got a campfire going, even though I didn’t need it for cooking, and relaxed next to it for a few hours before hitting the sack. It had been a really good day—and tomorrow promised to be another!