Sept. 18th: Grant Village to Canyon Village 79km 730m

Natural Bridge

The price for everything in Yellowstone park has been high so we were pleased to find an all you can eat buffet breakfast to start the day.  It had all our favourite breakfast items and included a bottomless cup of coffee.  We hit the road rather late. 

Our first stop was a natural stone bridge followed by the mud volcano area.  The mud volcano area was impressive, but the pictures of mud looked just like mud.  When we arrived near Canyon we rode to the viewing points along the south and north rims of the canyon.  The Yellowstone river flows through a canyon of high rock walls.  The colouration in the rock was a surprise – bright yellows and reds.   It was an impressive sight.

Yellowstone Canyon

    

When we planned the trip I had read that cycling in the park was difficult.  This has proved true.  The traffic is heavy, the roads are poor quality and the shoulders are narrow.  I have ridden off the road twice so far due to narrow shoulders, but until today we have had no serious mishaps.  Our luck ended today.  As we were crossing a bridge we were overtaken by a camper van.  I was startled by the blast of air as the van just missed me.  TimG was 10 meters ahead of me and the van hit him in the shoulder.  TimG was lucky to maintain his balance and neither of us fell.  The driver pulled over about 200 meters up the road and was checking his mirror (which was broken) when we arrived.  He said he wasn’t used to such a big vehicle, pointed out the mirrors were really wide, and blamed us for being on the road.  I took his picture, with the van’s licence number, and we carried on.   We waved down the first ranger we saw and he wrote up a report.  Then we had lunch.  TimG is suffering from a bruised shoulder, so as a preventive measure I made sure he drank lots of alcohol to deaden the pain and improve the blood flow to the injured shoulder.