After an amazing first 3 weeks full of grand cities and fantastic national parks it was time for a little 'city break' again: Salt Lake City - Mormone Headquaters :)
The town is quite nice, not too big and very clean but also not lots to see there. We were more interested in closeby Park City, home of the Olympic Games 2002. We did a little tour of the facilities, our tour guide the #5 ranked US skeleton athlete. After telling us that his best friends are the Austrian skeleton athletes we pretty much became his best friends as well; he loved us so much, he invited us to a drive down the original bob sled track (normally $75 per person). Whoohoo, what a ride!! 100kmh and about 4G in the corners! We managed the course in about 1 minute, not sure what the winning time of the Olympics was back then, I reckon pretty close ;). How cool are the summer training facilities for the freestyle guys, what do you reckon? We saw some huge jumps and a few of our friends would love that climbing tower, wouldn't you?
Leaving the Mormones we made our way up North towards Wyoming where more National Parks, more hiking and wildlife encounter was about to happen.
Grand Teton was the first 'hiking'-park for us. This was also the first visitor centre that promised or they rather 'threatened' us that we would encounter bears on our hikes. Not only are there Black Bears but the Grizzly Bears are the ones to be worried about if you run into one. We kept our eyes open a little more than usual. At Grand Teton National Park we started with a fairly short walk to Signal Mountain and in the morning we did Cascade Canyon which added up to our first 20km in a hike with a beautiful scenery.
We didn't miss to have a beer in the infamous Million Dollar Cowboy Bar in Jackson and then made it on to Yellowstone National Park which was definitely one of the trip highlights.
The 'Old Faithful' Geyser errupts about every 50 minutes and therefore, although it is a fairly small geyser, attracts thousands of people every time as you can see.
Amazing!! Geysers, hot springs, mud holes, steam vents, .. all on top of a 'super volcano'; most of the park lies within the caldera of a volcano which last errupted about 640,000 years ago. This park is really humbling and makes you realise how powerless we actually are in comparison to the forces of nature. You could really spend weeks at Yellowstone, there's so much going on, behind every corner a different landscape, a different smell (mostly not very nice smells though).
Riverside Geyser erupting
One of the many awesome pools. Mostly boiling hot and not "swimable'. One is called Belgian pool named after a lady who fell into it at the beginning of the last century and died of the burns, horrible story actually :-(
We didn't see any bears in Yellowstone either but hundreds of bison (some very, very close), moose and elk. It was a comparable experience to South Africa with everyone being completely happy with any wildlife sighting and some animals just mingling into the park traffic, awesome.
In Cody, the self-proclaimed Rodeo capital of the world, a little outside of the park, we also attended our first Rodeo - yeeha! Pretty funny to watch AND after being on a horse ourselves just a few weeks earlier, we appreciated the guys' (and girls') efforts a lot more.
We then made our way through the Glacier Nationalpark in Montana (which visitor centre actually guaranteed us a bear sighting but of course we didn't see any). The hike to Grinnel Glacier in the early morning turned out to be wonderful and exciting. Aware of the 'bear-danger' we were advised by the Park Rangers to talk loudly and sing to 'scare' bears aware from us, it worked ;-(. As we were the second group to hike the 19km we at least saw some Big Horn sheep and crossing a waterfall was also exciting. The 'Going-to-the-Sun' Road through the park was a very picturesque drive.
We went all the way up to the glacier you can see on the right top of the picture.
From there we made our way to Seattle where we visted the Boeing factory, rode up the Space Needle, spent ages at the EMP museum (awesome!) and had clam chowder at the Pike Street Markets. We really enjoyed Seattle, very cool, relaxed and livable city.
On Stefan's birthday we did another short walk in Mt Rainier Nationalpark and believe it or not we actually saw a bear eating berries on a closeby meadow - all in safe distance :) We then spent the night in a forest spa retreat with an outdoor hot tub and far away from the civilisation, great.
Via Mt St Helens and Portland (and its many, many breweries - awesome city!) we then slowly made our way down the coastal highway back towards our starting point. We spent a whole day wandering beneath the Redwood trees, the tallest trees on earth and even drove through one by car which was up to 2500 years old and about 100m high, truly unbelievable.
We also still had time to do a wine tour in the Napa Valley. After having tasted our way through pretty much all the Australian wine regions, Napa was really different for us. You actually have to pay for your tastings, from $20 to $55 for 4-5 tastings of wine. So it actually comes cheaper to just walk in and buy a glass (with $10-15 also not on the cheap side). All in all, very beautiful and posh wineries, the wine itself, well... I don't know. I prefer my Barossa Shiraz, lets put it that way :) The tour in a limousine bus was another nice 'Ausklang' to our travels through the US of A.
And then, when we thought there weren't many more highlights to come, we woke up at 3:20am to a 6.1 earthquake, with the epicentre only a few kilometers from where we stayed! Holy moly, we never experienced anything like this, it was scary and cool at the same time!
Still a bit shaken (pun intended) from the nightly excitement we spent our last day in the US in Yosemite Nationalpark, which initially wasn't on our to do list but ended up as a nice last hike - no bears here, just lots and lots of tourists, mainly French and Germans...
So, this was it, almost 10 weeks (incl Hawaii) that really have gone by so fast. 12 states, 14,000km, lowest point of -86m and highest temperature of 52C both in Death Valley, highest point of 3055m on Haleakala, Hawaii.
It was truly amazing, we loved every single minute of our time here. So many amazing landscapes, we're still discussing what our favourite was - Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, Hawaii - they were all just so different but equally beautiful.
There were quite a few things that really surprised us,p and others that were exactly how you imagine them to be. As for the surprises, we always thought all the ridiculous rules and laws in Australia are originating from the US but we found that the US are much more open and 'lenient'. They drive like maniacs (speed limits are not really limits here, rather recommendations...) and even alcohol laws are much more reasonable than how far Australia has gone by now. And as for health and safety regulations, well I'm pretty sure some of the hikes we did wouldn't even be open to the public in Australia.
But then there are some things that are exactly like you imagine them to be, fast food chains on every corner, trying to eat healthy almost impossible, everything is super-size here (we quickly learned to always order the smallest size and still always had more than enough), and there really are many obese people - no surprise really. But they know how to cook a good steak (medium rare really is medium rare here, other than in Australia... ). Cars are big, fuel is cheap. AND nobody knows where Austria is or of course thinks it's the same as Australia. Lucky for us we can work with both, hehe :)
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