Johnson Gardner

Today is the last full day of the Caravan. We head for home tomorrow…

We had a quiet morning, with a rare breakfast of bacon and eggs… We headed for the Final Banquet (lunch) at 10:30 – if you show up on time you are late!

We walked about the town of Gardiner. By the way, the town is named after a 19th century fur-trapper named Johnson Gardner. Oh! The Ironing!

We walked over to the original entrance to Yellowstone, the Roosevelt Arch…

We also found out we were in the Gallatin Custer National Forest… Lots of Federally owned land around here…

From the town we could see the Airstreams parked in the adjacent RV Park. (Due to a variety of mix-ups, the Villa is parked at another RV Park seven miles out of town…

We like watching rivers. Here the Yellowstone River flows right through the town… and it continues down past our RV Park…

The Yellowstone River is a tributary of the Missouri River, approximately 692 miles long. It drains an area stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park, across the mountains and high plains of southern Montana and northern Wyoming. It eventually joins the Missouri and then the Mississippi Rivers.

We also saw a lot of the Snake River, in Yellowstone as well as in Grand Tetons NP. At 1,078 miles long, it is the largest tributary of the Columbia River, in turn the largest North American river that empties into the Pacific Ocean. The Snake River rises in western Wyoming, then flows through the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho, the rugged Hells Canyon on the Oregon–Idaho border and the rolling Palouse Hills of Washington, emptying into the Columbia River at the Tri-Cities, Washington.

So the Yellowstone River is on the east side of the Continental Divide, and the Snake River is on the west side… And they are both here in Yellowstone…!

We returned to the Cowboy, on their upper open-air deck. Caravans don’t usually repeat locations like this, but the restaurant that was planned for the final Banquet burned down last winter…