Jared and I reached Big Sky, Montana, today, after another lengthy road leg of our trip. We only covered 624 miles today, according to Google, but it felt twice as long as yesterday, since we spent so much of it twisting up and down mountains. It was beautiful, but it was long.
To keep things interesting (especially since Montana is largely lots of open sky that I have already seen before), we took I-90 only as far as about Sheridan, WY, and then took smaller Wyoming highways across to Yellowstone National Park, went through the park, and finally northward to Big Sky:
The biggest surprise of the day (other than how pretty the Big Horn National Forest was) was reaching a gas station just outside Yellowstone National Park and realizing that the “clouds” we were seeing in the sky over the mountains were actually plumes of smoke… as in, Yellowstone is on fire. We drove past the “Gunbarrel” fire burning between Cody, WY, and Yellowstone, and were forced to detour on a longer route to the West Entrance due to a road closure caused by the “LeHardy” fire burning within the park itself.
I don’t have my pictures ready to go yet, we didn’t reach Big Sky until after 9pm due to the slow going through Yellowstone and a surprise bit of construction a mere 3 miles south of the exit we wanted for Big Sky itself :-/ I’ll put some up tomorrow.
Update: Photos are now uploaded! See below to be warped into our Day 2 gallery.
