Your Yellowstone Guide
help for mapping out your YNP adventure
+ hope for navigating life by faith
You’re in the right place.
- Are you planning a visit to Yellowstone?
- Are you an armchair traveler who would enjoy trekking across Yellowstone through the pages of a book?
- Do you need answers for your Yellowstone questions?
- Are you overwhlemed by everything you don’t know and some of what you do?
- Do you need some guideance to help you map out your Yellowstone adventure?
- Do you need a little hope for navigating everyday life by faith?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, you’re in the right place.
I’m Natalie. I’m here to help and offer hope. I’m glad you’re here.
Let’s go to Yellowstone.
Recent Posts
Walking by Faith | Using the Right Muscles
We left our car at the pullout, walked past the bungalow-sized glacial boulder, and started down an easy path. Short, flat, and offering a good view, the Cascade Overlook Trail promised to be a good wakeup hike. Enveloped in a thick evergreen wood, we relished the...
Walking Together
There is more to setting off on a hike than hopping over the back fence with a loaf of bread and a pound of tea à la John Muir--turn-of-the-nineteenth-century naturalist, writer, and outdoorsman. While his shortlist encompassed food and nutrition, survival and sanity...
One Question for When You’re Finding Your Way
The gradual slipping away of the pine-lined path went unnoticed—by me anyway. We’d set off that morning, wanting to spend just a little more time on the trail and in the park before heading home from our week in Yellowstone. Situated along the way, the Gneiss Creek...
Two Ways of Waiting
Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn gift shop hummed like a hive. All the time. Except when Old Faithful was about to erupt. Then, every visitor in the area was out on the boardwalk, waiting. After a short lull, the gift shop—site of my summer job between high school and...
Waiting for Tomorrow
Dad and I were the last to check in. The arrival window for the nature writing class was from four to eight, and the sun hung low behind the distant mountains when we stepped out of the van and onto the gravel parking lot. We’d put it off as long as possible. We’d...
Putting Myself Aside
With winter’s chill rolling off him as he and his siblings came in from the wintry night air, my son asked, “Can we have our friends over to play boot hockey?” Flanking him, his sisters, echoed the question silently with their eyes. We live in Iowa, and of the ten...
Pondering Life Outside {Why it Matters}
A strange sort of geography took my parents, my brother, and me from Glacier National Park in northern Montana back home by way of a one day drive through Yellowstone. It was 1989, the year after Yellowstone's Summer of Fire. We’d watched it unfold on the evening...
Trail Talk
Happy May! Isn't it wonderful to finally not be cold? If you've read around here long, you've probably picked up on the fact that I am a conflicted outdoorsy type--an avid indoorswoman and a reluctant hiker. Reluctant or not, time, experience, and maturity have...
Walking When You’d Rather Wait
A couple of Mays ago, our family was in Yellowstone, standing in line at the Visitor Education Center at Mammoth Hot Springs, waiting to find out if a trail was open. Because the wait was long, we ended up eavesdropping as a ranger recommended the Sepulcher Mountain...
Pondering Life Outside Challenge
According to C.S. Lewis, “No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.” My grandma began schooling me in the wonders of the back garden early, when I was just a little girl. Among the...
Whether We Perceive It or Not
Cool mountain air drifted in through our open window, carrying high-pitched beeps and deep rumblings that broke into my slumber. I lay in the dark of our tiny room at the back of the lodge and tried to place it. A tractor? A road grater? I recognized that sound. I...
Winter Gifts and Graces
Regardless of what the thermometer reads today or tomorrow or next week, winter is winding down. I'll just repeat that, mostly because I need the reassurance. Winter is winding down. I need the reassurance because I believe something that isn't true: Everything will...
“There is a great deal of good to be learned from what we see every day, if we would but consider it.”
~ Matthew Henry
