The Beauty of Montana
As we left Idaho and entered Montana, we entered magnificent, magnificent forest. It was a forest like nothing I’d ever seen before - a forest right out of a fairy tale. Even the most beautiful forest in California that you see in the Redwoods and their Mammoth Mountain looked nothing like this. The forest was so dense and the snow was so thick and so fluffy that it was just breathtaking. At one point, we stopped to get a photo of the (???) and now entering Montana. I get out of the car with a pair of jeans and a long sleeveless shirt on. We set a tripod, and my wife got me into a position where I fell almost waist-deep into the snow. And I got so cold that I decided that I better get back to the car. As I was walking back to the car, it was freezing so much that I started to wonder if I was even going to make it the 50 ft back to the car.
That day, we rolled into west Yellow Stone. West Yellow Stone is the perfect little tourist town. What makes it different to most tourist towns is that it’s absolutely in the middle of nowhere. It has a nice, even square street with lots of little shops, and lots of little restaurants - most of which are closed in the winter time. We found a fantastic place to stay on tripadvisor.com. It had our own little apartment up above and behind the back of a hotel that had two bedrooms and lots of room. We were very, very happy there.
Unfortunately, the restaurants in Yellow Stone really weren’t that exciting. But I guess we need to consider how difficult it is to get any kind of food in or out of there, in hundreds of miles of snowy icy roads to have to drive the food on. I really shouldn’t complain. Also, the fact that there’s not many people there in the winter time to keep fancy restaurants open. We did find one place that we really loved for breakfast. Again, we got scrambled eggs and hash browns there for breakfast. [And of course, we'd have to work there in the name. (?)]
We also spent New Year’ Eve in west Yellow Stone at the Holiday Inn. It was really quaint, campy(?) and a lot of fun. They brought in a band from Jackson Hall, Wyoming and played a lot of 70s rock and roll music. At first, we just watched and thought it was kind of funny in a small town, but as we started to get more and more in the mood of it, we actually got out on the dance floor and one of the rare moments of our trip, we danced. At first, my wife had worn way too many sweaters and halfway through the first song, I could see that she was already beginning to sweat. She was forced to dance a few dances with me, but we had absolutely magnificent time.
We saw the owner of the restaurant where they were also throwing a big New Year’s Eve party for the town, and you can tell that he was having more fun than anyone else. He was loving the music and he looked like he was re-living a rock concert back in the 70s when he was in junior high school just having the time of his life.
The funny thing, too, is we even ran into people we knew there. We ran into the guy we met at the snow mobile trip, and even the mechanic from the snow mobile shop where we rented the snow mobiles. West Yellow Stone is a very small town. The people were very nice and I felt very privileged to be invited into their little world for New Year’s Eve to have a truly, truly authentic American experience.
