Mac n' Fredo n' Cheese

5/28/24 - 5/29/24

Opal-

Our first real weekend in the park was spent backpacking. We didn’t quite have our work schedules aligned so one night was all we could manage. I went to the backcountry office on Monday morning and picked up a permit as well as some food. Tuesday morning, we packed lunch and drove to the Fairy Falls trailhead. We hiked about three miles to the falls which fell from a height of “pretty frickin tall” as Oliver puts it. After stopping there for a moment, we walked to our campsite which was in the middle of a valley that also happened to be a marsh. The area around our campsite was all boggy. I took my boots off and splashed around in the creek nearby. You could hear the frogs croaking all night. For dinner, I had planned what we have named Mac n’ Fredo n’ Cheese. Oliver has made a beatbox to its name, ask him about it after summer is over. Anyways, the recipe.

1 box of mac n cheese

1 premade tub of chicken alfredo

1/2 onion

13 cherry tomatoes

Garlic powder

Coconut oil

Prepare the mac n cheese and add the package of chicken alfredo overheat. Set aside. Chop the onions and tomatoes and sauté with coconut oil and garlic powder until onions are golden. Add tomato mixture to the mac n fredo mixture and warm up. Enjoy.

Oliver was skeptical of this idea, to say the least, but thoroughly enjoyed the meal. Later we made a fire and sketched some drawings until what looked like a thunderstorm sent us into the tent. It never actually rained and we got a good eight hours of sleep.

Oliver-

I know it's generally recommended to stick to trails in Yellowstone, and I have heard horror stories about people falling through the crust, but my general rule is where you can find Bison tracks you can go safely. We put this rule into practice this trip. We had got to the campsite early, turns out Opal and I walked pretty fast and had most of the afternoon to kill. We had noticed signs for Imperial Geyser earlier in the hike and could see steam rising from behind a hill which we assumed was it. I suggested instead of hiking all the way back the trail like we had just done we just point ourselves in the direction of the steam and bushwack it. This turned out to work well and the Geyser was well worth the trip. On the way back I dragged Opal up a hill overlooking the valley where we were camping, and we found a few ponds and a single lazy Bison. To get back I used a picture of the landscape that I had taken earlier to figure out which hill we were on. Right before we got back though we had to cross the marsh that surrounded our campsite, and I did a significantly worse job at keeping my shoes dry than Opal did. She generously let me use her extra pair of socks which turned out to be socks that I had given her at Christmas (among other things, I am not that bad of a gift giver). The lesson here; if you are going to get your girlfriend socks, make them Smartwool.