Boating on Lake Yellowstone-A Once In A Lifetime Experience

 why just once?  Well, there’s a rule of thumb for survival in cold water.  It’s called the 50/50 rule. 

 You have a 50% chance of surviving in 50 degree water for 50 minutes.  The water temperature of Lake Yellowstone is in the mid 40s.  That pretty much sums it up, but there were other factors as well.

So here we have this huge lake- one of the largest high altitude lakes in the world….and then we have us, in our tiny little dinghy. The air temperature was in the 80s, which is why we decided it was a good day to spend on the water.  We knew the water was too cold to swim in, so that was no surprise. Whenever we were anchored, we were doing fine, even getting hot sometimes. All we had to do to remedy that was run the boat  for a few minutes and the frigid cold spray soaking us cooled us down very quickly.

In theory it was a perfect day, with the warm temperatures and hardly a cloud in the sky, but the wind would go from 0 to 15 mph in the span of a few minutes.  Then it would die down again, only to start back up again but from a different direction!

There is an island about 2.5 miles offshore that I wanted to check out, because it has a resident Bald Eagle, but there was no way we could get there. We only tried once, and the waves kicked up so fast when the wind picked up that we knew it was just too dangerous.





So we anchored for a while, zipped around in the protected cove for a while and repeated that sequence several times before deciding it was time to head home. We still had a good time, and if the weather gets hot again, we may make another attempt and see what the winds are like.
{That was on Sunday. Today, Tuesday, our plan was to hike a 5 mile trail, but the wind is gusting over 40 mph, and we decided we’re going to be here too many days to torture ourselves by hiking in that kind of wind.  Also, its dangerous because the trees have such shallow roots that they blow over at the drop of a hat.}