By pure luck, our scheduled date for leaving South Lake Tahoe just happened to be two days before a full evacuation was ordered for the area due to the approaching wildfire (specifically, the Caldor fire). We were happy to get out of the heavy smoke, but because we were heading north, we were not able to escape all the smoke just yet. We planned to visit Tom’s Aunt Esther in Idaho Falls and it was a two day drive in a northeasterly direction to get there. Along the way we spent an overnight in Elko, Nevada.

Idaho Falls was really nice and Aunt Esther gave us a great tour of the town the first full day we were there. The next day was spent driving a big loop through Yellowstone Park, Grand Teton Park, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and back to Idaho Falls. While we got to see many of the sights in Yellowstone, including Old Faithful (featured picture for this post), the Grand Teton mountains were shrouded in wildfire smoke and nearly invisible. On the bright side, it provided a good reason to return sometime in the future.

After three days in Idaho Falls we continued on our trip back. We decided to revise our route to try and avoid the worst of the smoke plume. That meant heading due south instead of directly east as we had originally planned. Our next post will update our progress on that new route.