I tried to get an early early start this morning to get as near up to West Yellowstone as I could to set me up for tomorrow when I enter Yellowstone. The queues to get in can get very long so I want to get to the gate as early as I can.

Today’s riding first took me up Ruby Valley, following the Ruby River. The river is misnamed, what they found was actually garnet rather than ruby. The route then follows Alder Gulch up through Nevada City and Virginia City. Both cities are old mining towns, gold was discovered in the stream and over a period of years the entire stream was dredged for gold, a huge amount of gold was extracted, billions of dollars in today’s money, and it partly funded Harvard University. Nevada City is a ghost town that’s maintained by the state, and Virginia City is an active tourist town with old mining city buildings, and an abandoned train line that ran all the way up Ruby Valley.

From Virginia City it’s a steep climb over a pass to Ennis, which sits on the Madison River, which flows out of Yellowstone. The road from Ennis down to West Yellowstone is very long and very straight and very exposed, it sits in a huge valley that the Madison flows through, with mountains rising on either side. Eventually it gets to the bottom of the mountain range and curves east to follow the Madison into the mountains.

As the road climbs into the mountains it passes Earthquake Lake which is really interesting, it is a natural lake formed in 1959 when an earthquake hit overnight and caused a huge landslide that blocked the path of the Madison River. The river then proceeded to back up and caused a large lake to form behind the blockage. What makes it an even more interesting story is that it was an August evening and the valley was packed with campers, a campsite was actually submerged by the rising water and the campers had to escape by climbing up to higher ground. As I cycled round the ghostly trees stood out, as they had been killed by the rising waters.

Tonight I gambled that a national forest campsite would let me squeeze in, I knew that it would be next to impossible to find a walk up campsite, I have the worst timing being a holiday weekend. Infact the campsite host and other people at the campsite were very generous, and a couple from Colorado let me pitch a tent on the edge of their site, they did the Trans-America 40 odd years ago.

Tomorrow I will get up again as early as I can, I’m a little over 20 miles from the Yellowstone entrance and I want to get there as early as I can, I plan to spend a night in Yellowstone and try to do as much of the southern loop as I can before continuing south to Grand Teton National Park.