We really enjoyed our two week stint as campground hosts. We met so many wonderful people from around the world. Over half of the campers were from someplace other than US. Our duties as hots consisted of checking people in during evening hours, educating campers about bear safety and fire safety and driving or walking around to check status of sites. John and I had our individual areas of expertise. He was very good about welcoming people and going over all the rules about fires, bears etc, while I asked folks about their plans and recommended drives, wildlife watching spots etc. I also warned them about winter weather conditions if they planned to go over any passes.
A typical day included riding around in golf cart each morning to check if people left sites, picking up micro trash left on the ite, and ensuring all fires were out. At lunch we often covered the office while ranger hsd lunch break.. At 4:00 we were at the ranger station checking peolpe in (this is when most people arrived) and 8:00 pm we drove around to be sure all generators were off and no one was having a crazy loud party. If we found an issue we didn’t have to confront the offenders, just radio the law enforcement rangers. (this didn’t happen on our watch). We really enjoyed our tasks and I have to say we did a pretty good job. We were told by the ranger to keep our uniforms as they would like to have us return next year. 😀
On our days off we drove thru the Lamar Valley looking for wildlife (we saw a lot) and we drove over the Beartooth Pass, something that has been on Donna’s bucket list.
The ride over Beartooth Pass was truely increadible – beautiful and a little scary at times. There was quite a bit of snow at the top and a number of lakes. We traveled 68 miles from Yellowstone East Entrance to the community of Red Lodge Montana. Red Lodge was a great little town – several restaurants, a great children’s consignment shop and very friendly people. I hurt my ankle the day before and went to the local health center to have it checked out. The people there were super nice and only had great things to say about the community. The provider who saw me actually also applied for a job at Waldo Hospital in Belfast about 15 years earlier but decided to move to Montana instead. There seemed to be a strong community spirit in the town. If it wasn’t so isolated, I might even want to live there. 🙂
We spent the night at a bed and breakfast and headed back to Yellowstone over Chief Joseph Scenic Byway – this was almost as impressive as the Beattooth highway. If anyone is out in this part of the country, we highly recommend this loop to Red Lodge and back to Yellowstone!
