A journey through public lands

In the summer of 2014, I boarded a flight from Austin, Texas bound for Bozeman Montana. I was 19 years old at the time floundering through community college and unsure of what I wanted with my life. But I packed up all my camping shit and spent pretty much all the money in my bank account so that I could journey to Yellowstone National Park. I damn near missed my connecting flight in Denver due to weather, but I made it (and so did my travel buddy who was flying in from New Jersey). We landed in Bozeman with packs full of equipment and no plan. The first night didn't go well, it was too late to catch any public transit so we tucked our sleeping bags in a corner at the airport and slept there for the night. In the morning we headed out early, like 5am, we managed to hitch a ride from the airport into town and chilled there for a while.

We met a couple of locals who informed us that there is really no cheap way to get from Bozeman to Yellowstone, so we decided that hitching all the way there was pretty much the only option. We caught one or two rides down the highway, but they couldn't take us very far. We ended up in the middle of no-where-fucking-montana not having much luck getting a ride so we decided to set up shop and eat some lunch, it might have been annoying if Montana wasn't so beautiful (especially compared to Texas where it is a billion degrees in the summer)

.

It was here that Bob picked us up, he was about 27, driving an old Subaru Outback, it was trashed inside, but still managed to be cool, covered in stickers from local towns and breweries. We told him we were headed for Yellowstone and conveniently so was he. He explained to us how he had grown up in the area and he started working at the park when he was in college. The national park system has some very cool summer job opportunities where they house you and feed you and you only have to work 4 or 5 days a week (worth checking out if you are into that kind of thing). Anyways he had done that for a couple of years and now his kid sister was doing the same thing, he was headed to the park to pick her up because they were driving down to Colorado for some music festival. He was good for conversation and told us that he would get us there and show us the employee cabins and get us set up with some cool people in case we needed anything on our journey. I was sitting in the back seat watching the beautiful mountain scenery fly by us, and as we got closer the anticipation was growing, I could feel that the next 3 weeks would be life changing for me. There is no good way to explain the feeling that I had then in that car, all I can say was that it felt like freedom, a feeling that can really only be understood once you've experienced it.

To be continued: stay tuned for the next installment where I learn about "Old faithful the shopping mall", and why you shouldn't have lunch on thermal features!