Day Five Wyoming, Idaho and Utah

Mostly a driving day, and split into two halves. The first half of the drive was mostly on small state roads, then moved to the Interstate.


The drive out of Jackson Hole was really beautiful, we spent the first 50 miles or so driving alongside a river. Timing was perfect, the leaves on the trees were changing to fall colours. Really, we could have stopped every 100 yards to admire another fantastic view.

Sadly the road left the riverbank and we just carried on the state roads. Probably close to 200 miles on almost empty single carriageway roads. There were towns here and there, usually with populations between 2-600 people. The towns seemed to vary between really poor, all trailers and no stores, to other similar size towns with McDonalds, Starbucks, Hardware stores, Radioshacks. I didn't really get it. I really enjoyed this portion of the drive, though I think Krista would have preferred to be speeding along a little more.

There were several times when driving along these roads where we would have to wait for some roadworks. There'd be several miles of one track road and we'd have to wait for one of the workers to arrive in his "guide car" to take us through the mostly gravel roads. On a couple of these stretches we were following a guy on a motorcycle, I felt bad for him as he slipped and slid around.

For a while the road kept flitting back and forth between Wyoming, Idaho and Utah. It didn't want to decide which state to be in. The google map was a litle confusing as each state used different numbers for the same road.

Somewhere a little north of Salt Lake City (maybe a hundred miles or so) we joined the Interstate Highway. It was weird to be back in all that fast moving traffic. Most of the state road drive we were only able to see two or three other vehicles at any time. Suddenly there were hundreds of them speeding along in each direction.

We had decided that driving all the way through from Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon was an impossibility so after hours hunting across the map we settled on the town of Beaver in Utah as a good place to spend the night. Partly because it was approximately halfway, but also because the name was funny. Nine hours after leaving Jackson Hole we arrived in Beaver, tired but glad to have chosen the Paradise Inn and restaurant.