US-89 Day-5 "Goodbye Yellowstone Park and Hello Bear Tooth"

I sleeping in the Grand Teton Park, I started North on the 89 to Yellowstone and entered Yellowstone after a very short wait. I drove for the next 6.5 hours through Yellowstone and this is what it was like the whole time. The speed limit was 45 miles per hour.  People drove at 37 miles per hour. There was always at least on car in front of me, and at least one car behind be at all times. Most of the time I traveled in a caravan of 10 cars.  You just could not get away from people. 

Whenever you thought you could stop and look at a sight, then there was a line of people waiting to get into the parking lot. I went to “old Faithful”, but with really bad time I noticed that everyone was leaving the parking lot. “Old Faithful” had just blown her stack. I found out that the next show would be in one and ½ hours. I was not going to sit on the bench like others and wait for old faithful to erupt. I left the stage after getting some gas.  I looked into getting some food, but one again there was a huge line. I did not get any real food until 2:00 pm, and that food was out of a machine in a gas station. I felt lucky to get it. 

This was the only time in my life that I could not wait to get out of a nation park. After 6.5 hours I finally left and was on the Bear Tooth highway. 

The Bear Tooth Highway is one of the top 10 motorcycle rides in the country. For the first 20 miles I was pretty disappointed. Just a normal run of the mill twisty road in the forest. Then the road started to rise and I got up to about 10,000 feet. The vegetation vanished, the clouds moved in and it started to get cold to the mid 40s.  Suddenly, I felt pain on my face.  It had started to sleet and my visor was up. I put down my visor and watched as sleet started to blow across the road. The winds picked up as I got just shy of 11,000 feet. At times it was hard to keep the bike on the road, which you must, since there are no guard rails and the drop is sudden and far. 

After about what seemed like an hour, the road descended back into the sun, where I stopped at a lookout point overlooking the back side of the mountain. 

I continued down the road and took a room in Laurel, Montana on the I-90. I was dead tired and the bed felt wonderful.