SeniorTravel: Yellowstone For Remote Active Adventures
The Oldest National Park Starts Phased Re-Opening This Week.
Yellowstone’s vast 2.2 million acres holds many opportunities for an active vacation, and there’s plenty of space for isolation.
Located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, Yellowstone National Park is the first national park, named in 1872, and ideal for active seniors who want to explore the great outdoors. The park is about to be gradually opened up this month. Here’s more information on the re-opening plan.
There’s something surreal about being in Yellowstone. Maybe it’s the millions of years of formation that seem to hold tight to its secrets. When you’re in the park at 8,000 feet of elevation, it evokes a serene sense of calm with lush valleys, jagged buttes, and free-flowing waterfalls.
For seniors who love adventure, the park offers a range of recreational opportunities from hiking, biking and horseback riding to kayaking, white water rafting and fishing. One of the most popular sports is wildlife spotting. When you see a line-up of cars along the highway pulled over to the side, you know there’s something to see. Maybe it’s a herd of bison with their babies, an elk, antelope, or mountain goat. Get your camera out and take some pictures.
See Old Faithful in All its Glory
When Old Faithful will erupt is predicted on the NPS webcam. Place your bets.
The star of Yellowstone is Old Faithful, erupting on schedule every 35 – 120 minutes and shooting as high as 140 feet in the air. This magnificent geyser in all its splendor lasts between 1 minute, 30 seconds, and five minutes. For those fascinated with statistics, there’s even a clock in the lodge to predict the next eruption. For now, check out the webcam at yellowstone.net/webcams/old-faithful.
With more than 1,000 miles of trails, there’s a hike to challenge you and take you out of your comfort zone. There’s a range of activity for all. Check out the 500-plus geysers in the park with their own schedules, paint pots, calderas, and hydrothermal wonders. Fish enthusiasts will discover the largest population of wild cutthroat trout in North America. Don’t miss the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River with its gorgeous waterfalls that will simply take your breath away.
Lake Yellowstone Hotel: Classic Accommodations with Spectacular Views
Hugging the shores of Yellowstone Lake, the “Lady of the Lake” is a magnificent hotel featuring 158 deluxe rooms, recreating a time of grandeur and elegance. Built in 1891, this historic hotel provides guests with fine dining, a string quartet, and an Inspired by Artist series. The narrow halls, back porch, and Sunroom make you feel like you’re on a cruise ship.
A Range of Accommodations and Dining
Yellowstone offers nine types of lodging from the elegant Lake Yellowstone Hotel to cabins and more rustic lodging for those who prefer something other than a hotel. as a part of the premier Xanterra Travel Collection. Check their website for lodging openings. The Lodges also offer tours and activities guided by Certified Interpretive Guides.
Consider visiting in the shoulder season when crowds are a little thinner. Spring (May – June) welcomes bison and antelope newborns, while bears are out of hibernation. In winter, wolf-watching is popular and the geysers even more spectacular.
Yellowstone will be back this summer. If you decide to travel, you can get “lost” in its vastness. Talk about getting away from it all.
For group travel and recommendations, check out roadscholar.org, yellowstone vacations.com and www.nps.gov.
Yellowstone sits on top a thin part of the earth’s mantel, so hot springs are everywhere, heated by the planet’s core.
Open: South and East entrances in Wyoming, the lower loop of the Grand Loop Road, restrooms, self-service gas stations, trails, and boardwalks in open areas
Closed: Montana entrances, overnight accommodation, full-service dining, commercial tour buses, and ranger programs.
For the most current information, visit www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm.
This Week In SeniorsSkiing.com (April 10)
Season Wrap: It Was A Very Good Season Until It Wasn’t.
[Editor note: We’re including a few notable pics from the year to accompany this article.]
Credit: Taos
And so ends the sixth publishing year of SeniorsSkiing.com. A little earlier than planned. We had some spring skiing in mind around mid-March; we bet you did, too. Nothing is constant but change.
As we move into the blooming part of Spring 2020—the weather breaking, nature waking up—we have to be grateful for what we did have this year. So, in this last This Week of the publishing year, we are going to look back.
The Women’s World Cup on Thanksgiving Weekend at Killington was, luckily, an act of kindness from the snow gods. Thanks to an early snowstorm, there was snow for racing. And the East was poised to have another fantastic year. California also had a early snow. Hopes were up. Little did we know the season would be U-shaped, snow-wise, when all was said and done. Rockies, BC, Northwest, mostly great to fantastic. The report card for 2019-20: All good West (not California), Meh, East. Maybe next year.
SeniorsSkiing.com continued to publish its directory of 157 ski resorts where seniors could ski for free or almost free. We defined almost free as deeply discounted lift tickets and season passes. We keep uncovering more of these bargain spots, thanks, in part, to referrals from our readers. We can still download that directory. Note: You will have to re-enter your name and email to access subscriber-only content.
We also published our yearly list of skis for seniors, thanks to our partnership with Realskiers.com. That is still available, too, as a download. Note: You will have to re-enter your name and email to access subscriber-only content.
This season, we had technique tips from Bob Trueman, Pat McCloskey, and Marc Liebman, as well as a new Ask The Expert series, where reader questions were fielded by industry savants. We published personal memoirs about last turns of the season and Moriarty hats, profiles and obits of ski personalities, and fitness routines, personal stories of knee replacements, and health tips especially for seniors. We had a series of pre-season puzzles to keep readers’ interests engaged while we waited for the weather to turn colder.
We also published resort reviews, based on visits by our correspondents, and a collection of cross-country skiing articles, about places, technique, and news.
Correspondent Jan Brunvand captured an incident in action.
We were happy to publish the Skiing Weatherman’s weekly predictions all season long. Thanks to Herb Stevens for delivering interesting analyses of how the weather works. We actually learned a lot about troughs and ridges in the process.
We published over 20 Mystery Glimpse pictures contributed by the many fabulous ski museums around North America. In looking at your guesses, we realized there are many astute observers of ski history out there. Thanks for playing the game.
This February, we had our second fundraiser. We were humbled and grateful for the wonderful contributions from our readers that will keep this enterprise going.
Finally, this year’s Incidents And Accidents series has led to important recommendations, shaped by our readers, to make the on-slope experience safer for everyone. We are currently bringing our findings to the ski industry for their reaction and action. We will report how that project is processing over the next few months. Bear in mind, the ski business is pre-occupied with virus management, so we are treading carefully and patiently.
Our Magnificent Correspondents
SeniorsSkiing.com could not exist without the contributions of our correspondents, most of whom are professional journalists. Most of these writers have been with SeniorsSkiing.com since we started six years ago. We hope you appreciate their work; we can’t thank them enough.
This year’s regular contributors are:
- Harriet Wallis, Salt Lake City, UT
- Roger Lohr, Lebanon, NH
- Tamsin Venn, Ipswich, MA
- Pat McCloskey, Sewickley, PA
- Marc Liebman, Savannah, TX
- Don Burch, South Windsor, CT
- Joan Wallen, Andover, NH
- Bob Trueman, Welshpool, Wales
- Herb “Skiing Weatherman” Stevens, Wakefield, RI
- Mike Roth, Albany, NY
- Rose Marie Cleese, San Francisco, CA
- Yvette Cardozo, Issaquah, WA
- Mary Jo Tarallo, Rehoboth Beach, DE
And thanks to the one-time contributors who made it to our pages.
This Week
Co-Publisher Jon Weisberg reviews Roam Robotics Elevate, a computer-assisted exo skeleton, that supplies subtle support and a completely different approach to assistive ski devices.
We reveal last week’s Mystery Glimpse picture from the Tread Of Pioneers Museum, Steamboat Springs, CO. One reader did a Sherlock-like job connecting the dots, deducting the right answer by reading the clues in the article and pic. Nice work.
We reprise a verse from Two Tramps In Mud Time, by Robert Frost, which fits the temperament of April. We have also included a link to Frost reading the poem himself. The Snow In Literature series has been fun for us to curate, and we’re glad we’ve reached a number of readers. Just shows you there’s another part of winter besides resorts, skis, gear, etc.
Thanks for reading SeniorsSkiing.com. Take good care in these disruptive days. We will publish monthly over the non-snow months.
Remember, there are more of us every day, and we aren’t going away.
Sunday River, ME
Short Swings!
Source: Deseret News
In the past few weeks, we’ve learned that skiing has been identified as a significant vector in the spread of COVID-19. If you have not read this article in The New Yorker magazine about Sun Valley’s role, it’s an eye-opener.
Germany, described as a “skiing nation,” has traced many of its cases to a beer pong table in the Austrian resort of Ischgl, a popular destination for German skiers.
The outbreak in Mexico, in part, originated from a group of Mexican business leaders returned from a ski holiday in Vail, where they contracted the disease.
It makes sense. When we ski, we share trams, gondolas, and chairs and dine and shop in the same places. These are ideal conditions for picking up an invisible bug and transporting it back home where it can catch fire.
And ski towns are suffering. Sun Valley and Vail have some of the highest infection rates in the country. They and others are discouraging visitors and second homeowners from seeking refuge in the mountains.
This is not to place blame on ski areas. The same could be said of any form of public transportation, terminals, cruise ships, hotels, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, gyms, beauty salons, etc., etc. It’s just that until now, the most dangerous thing about the sport was hitting or breaking something or getting buried. Now skiing has entered the realm of public health hazard.
We can only hope that the aftershocks will not permanently alter the sport.
It would be great to get your points of view on the subject, which you can do by commenting at the end of this article.
On a related note, we normally stop publishing weekly at the end of April and publish monthly June through September.
Because there’s less and less ski-related things to write about, this will be our last weekly distribution for the season. We’ll continue to publish articles throughout the ensuing weeks. The next issue will be emailed in May.
Since last September, counting this column, you’ve been sent more than 200 articles, including 26 Short Swings! columns. Each week in this column I attempt to deliver a point of view and a gathering of interesting and sometimes weird developments from the world of skiing. Since we started publication in 2013, more than 1300 articles including 134 Short Swings! columns have appeared.
We’ll be back in about a month.
In the meanwhile, stay safe, stay healthy, and do what you can to bring this thing to an end.
Alterra Lays off 17,000
Vail Patrol Training As Paramedics
More than 20 Vail ski patrollers are training to join Eagle County (CO) Paramedic Services. They are part of a contingency plan that could keep ECPS running even if 40% of staff becomes ill.
Video Explains Storing Skis and Boots for Summer
This five-minute Nordica production gives sensible advice on storing your gear for summer. Among other useful tips, don’t use ski straps and be sure to engage the power strap on your boots.
22 Ski Films from Red Bull TV
Red Bull sponsored these ski films ranging from 10-minutes two hours. Now, with the season shortened and many confined to their homes, the company is making them available free-of-charge. Click here to connect.
Two of the All-Time Best Short Ski Videos
Hardship (e.g. sheltering in place) often spawns creativity.
- Freeride at Home (90 seconds) is one of the cleverest ski films I’ve seen.
- Lego Skier (40 seconds) is another terrific little film.
Alta Season Recap
DailyPow.com is a site that produces and posts video reports for the legions of Altaholics everywhere. Whether or not you’re an Alta skier, you’ll enjoy it.
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