Experiencing Yellowstone with New Technology
Growing up, our family used to load up the VW Bus my father converted into a camper and we would head across country, camping and visiting our National Parks as we trekked from Miami to Anaheim. For the weeks leading up to our departure, we would talk about the Old Faithful, the bears and other wildlife at Yellowstone, which was one of our favorite stops during our three week summer trek. My father affectionately referred to the Park as “Jellystone National Park” after the cartoon with Yogi and Boo Boo bear and talk about “pic-a-nic baskets” until my brother and I laughed so hard we cried.
Maybe it was my father’s love of history or my grandfather’s love of Yellowstone from the days when the US Calvary used to protect it (he was in the Calvary and loved the west), but Yellowstone was always the pinnacle of our summer vacation. Four generations of our family have visited Yellowstone over the past one hundred years; we have marveled at the streaming geysers, sought out the wildlife for photo opportunities and have stood at numerous breathtaking points of interest to be memorialized by my father’s camera and pasted into our travel scrapbooks.
Visiting the park always left us wanting more, we wanted to know more about the geological features of the different geysers and vistas and back then we were fortunate enough to have a park ranger close by to ask those questions to.
A few years ago, we took my son who not only loves history but is very interested in find out all of the factoids that he could find as we let him be our tour guide on this trip. He spent days scouring the Internet, library books and printed guides to find every place that he wanted to see and to share about the park. One has to wonder how many printed maps and brochures are used every year with over three million park visitors needing resources to guide them through a park that encompasses over 2.2 million acres. Granted, most of the park is backcountry but it’s a lot to take in with over 1,100 miles of hiking trails and hundreds of points of interest to see. You don’t want to miss anything even if you don’t know you missed it.
How do you pick what you want to see?
As a kid, we had gotten some very colorful line-art cards that we have mounted in a family album next to each one of stops where we also have photos taken at (see photos). It was always fun to see how we looked next to the attraction year after year in comparison growing up as kids. Nowadays, we are a little more scientific with how we determine what trails we’re going to take and what stops we’re going to make, even around town, we use our cars’ GPS system and can figure out where we are while we drive. Ah, technology.
This year we want to plan our trip to Yellowstone and do more hiking and stay longer so we want to optimize our time in the park as it will be pretty crowded when we will be there. Did you know that the park employees a staff of eight hundred year round to take manage the park and deal with the over three million park visitors.
Talk about short-staffed.
It’s nice to do long trips like this with our family now that we are able to take long treks on hiking trails, and everyone having their own iPod or iPhone, we figured it would be good to take advantage of any special apps for the park. Which is why we are excited to have found this new iPhone app called GeoRoamer which was developed utilizing audio tours created by three of the parks experts, Aubrey Haines, John Good, and Lee Whittlesey.
We’re also excited to use our iPhone's GPS (global positioning system) and with this new app the audio tour segments will trigger automatically. The best part of the GeoRoamer app is that you can take photos of your experience and add it to the journal and then share it on Facebook when you get back to good cell service. I don’t know about you, but now that our whole family is using Facebook, this will bring us that much closer together, even though we are miles apart. We also like the fact that all the proceeds from the sale of this app ($8.99) will be donated to three organizations that support Yellowstone.
Be sure to stay tuned as we will be updating our Yellowstone journey through the park with new found technology on our iPhone, here on this blog and Facebook too (okay and we will be tweeting about it as well).
Funny, after we started planning our trip for this year, I had a dream about Jellystone and I can still hear Yogi say "hello, Mr. Ranger, sir!" and “hey, Boo Boo.” Well, here’s to seeing Yogi this summer along with Old Faithful, plus a whole score of other wonderful sites, it’s a good thing June’s not too far away.