YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

June, 2019

We’ve mentioned before that a few years ago we shared a week or so with the Toporskis and the Stephens, friends from Pennsylvania, rambling around Yellowstone National Park.  We fell in love with our nation’s first national park (thank you Theodore Roosevelt!), and since we were heading up to Glacier National Park anyhow a stop over in Yellowstone NP was calling out to us!  We so looked forward to exploring parts of the Park we hadn’t seen before as well as setting aside some time to visit some of our favorite spots from the previous trip.  And if we saw a bear or 2, a wolf or moose, pronghorn, coyote, and an eagle it would even make the visit sweeter.  No doubt we would see the ubiquitous bison and elk.

We stayed in a campground about 20 miles west of the West Yellowstone entrance to the Park.  The campground was situated in a location that may have been the most beautiful we have experienced to date.

What we didn’t count on was the weather.  By this time in mid-to-late June it’s turning the corner into summer, and shouldn’t Yellowstone NP have warm days and cool nights?  Nah.  Not sure why, but Brian keeps forgetting that we’re in the Rocky Mountains, and at an elevation of 8,000 feet or so, and he obviously didn’t learn his lesson about elevation and precipitation from our experience traveling from Kanab to Richfield.  It snowed (blizzard for about 20 minutes) on us, it rained, day time temperatures ranged from a high in the 40s to highs in the 70s, and somedays we had to pull out our warmest warmer clothes.

Except for Saturday, traffic in Yellowstone NP was far worse than we remembered.  On Saturday we were able to drive freely, and we actually wondered where all of the other visitors might be hiding.  We found that on weekdays every parking lot near major attractions was pretty well filled by 10am, the roadways around the Park were jammed, and then the tour buses just clogged things up even more.  Vacationers, we guessed.  A traffic back-up is expected if there’s an animal sighting.  People will pass slowly by in order to get a good look or to take a picture – maybe they’ll jockey to find a place to park their vehicle to get a closer look.  It’s expected that if bison or elk are on the road and blocking the direction to which you want to go or maybe even if the animals are surrounding your vehicle, you will wait for them to clear off of the road (and pray they don’t take offense to your vehicle being in their way).  Doesn’t matter if it’s 5 minutes or 2 hours.  After all it is their home – we’re just visitors.  Rangers do sometimes help move rubbernecking tourists along a little more quickly, but rangers have no influence on 20-30 bison hanging out on the road.  So whether caused by human frailties or by residential imminent domain when driving through the Park, patience is required.

We looked forward to participating in talks, walks and hikes lead by Park Rangers; we chose the Mystic Falls hike.  Along with a dozen of our closest friends we met the Ranger at the Firehole River Bridge for a 2-1/2 mile hike to Mystic Falls along Biscuit Basin.  The hike starts out gloriously with a walk past Sapphire Pool and Black Opal Geyser…

…And then follows along the Little Firehole River before getting to the Falls.

After the mandatory “watch out for bears” and why you should always carry bear spray talk, the Ranger guiding our hike taught us about how to differentiate the type of pine trees in this forest, and the effect recent fires have had on the forest itself.  We didn’t know that the Lodge Pole Pine is extremely heat resistant and can survive a fire that devastates other pine species, that some pine trees drops their seeds as soon as the forest temperature reache a certain degree, and that other pine trees are constantly losing their cones (seed pods) in order to propagate their species.

We were chilled after our hike and decided to eat our lunch in the Old Faithful Inn…guess we felt we had to pay our respects.

Our next adventure took us out to the Lamar Valley in pursuit of animals.  Along the way we stopped to enjoy Gibbon Falls.

In the Lamar Valley we were able to see pronghorn, bison and their calves.  We were pretty disappointed at not seeing any bear, at least until we found one fast asleep behind a tree.

The Harlequin Lake Ranger Walk meets just west of Madison Junction, and is an easy 1.5 mile hike through the forest to a beautiful beaver pond.  Along the way we did see a snake slithering quickly into the underbrush, and we encountered a vole while down by the pond.

Steamboat Geyser is considered the tallest active geyser on earth.  Its major eruptions shoot water more than 300 feet into the air.  Listening to the Ranger we found out that Steamboat Geyser has had a history of inconsistent times between eruptions, and until recently, eruptions could be decades apart.  The geyser’s eruptions have become closer and closer together, the most recent 2 eruptions a mere 10 days apart.

Steamboat Geyser is located in the Norris Geyser Basin, which is home to many other thermal springs, pools and geysers.  Less spectacular than Steamboat is Vixen Geyser, which erupts every 12-14 minutes.

Returning to Aimee from our day hiking to Harlequin Lake and around the Norris Geyser Basin we ended up caught in a traffic jam…bison on the roadway.  We were one of the lead vehicles and soon surrounded by the obstinacy close enough to reach out and give several a nice scratch behind their ears…did we forget to mentioned they are huge?  We were very glad our Jeep didn’t look threatening to any of the bison as we suspected we could have easily been pushed aside.

The Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone NP is Brian’s favorite for several reasons.  There’s historic Fort Yellowstone to visit, but the real treat is the elk who wander around as if they own the place (they do!), and to explore the Upper and Lower Terraces.  The Terraces are formed by thermal waters traveling more than 50 miles from Geyser Basin, picking up minerals and other deposits during the journey and surfacing in such a way as to create a pretty bizarre landscape.

We finally had another chance to see a bear.  As happens in Yellowstone NP there were a number of cars parked along the roadside with their occupants standing at the edge of a field looking into the distance.  We stopped and were told there was a bear in the meadow, but we just couldn’t see the animal.  A short drive to another parking cutout, and we joined others now able to watch, about 20 yards away the bear hanging out in the meadow.  Barbara’s binoculars came in handy!

Barbara’s favorite place in Yellowstone NP is Grand Prismatic Spring.  It is the largest hot spring in the United States, and next to Old Faithful the most photographed attraction in the Park.  We parked and walked along the Firehole River to then cross a bridge and access the boardwalk that would take us to the Spring.  The walk to the bridge is spectacular in its own right as runoff from Grand Prismatic Spring colors the riverbank.

We passed Morning Glory Pool on our way to Grand Prismatic Spring.

Grand Prismatic Spring is bigger than a football field and bright bands of orange, yellow, and green ring the deep blue waters in the spring.

Bison can be anywhere in Yellowstone NP.  Elk can be anywhere in the Park (one barely stopped at the forest’s edge or it would have run into the Jeep!), but they can be found in large numbers hanging out near Mammoth Hot Springs.  To see bear and wolf we have been told that the Lamar Valley and Hayden Valley should be explored.  We had driven through the Lamar Valley so it was time for an adventure in the Hayden Valley.

We did see several bald eagles during our time in the Park, but as of yet we had not seen a wolf.  During our Harlequin Lake Walk the Ranger spoke about the wolf packs in the park, how they have changed over time, and about each of the pack’s territories.

Unfortunately other than a bird or 2 we saw no other wildlife in the Hayden Valley.

But this trip was cool – on the way we stopped to attend a Ranger talk at West Thumb Geyser Basin, spent some time admiring Yellowstone Lake,  and ate a delightful lunch in the woods.

This little fellow decided to join us for lunch!

As a farewell to The Park we couldn’t resist a walk to Artist’s Point and a couple of pictures of the Canyon and the Falls on the Yellowstone River.

Both of our visits to Yellowstone National Park have left us in awe.  This visit allowed us to stroll a bit more leisurely and to explore with eyes wide open – to revisit iconic and favorite places.  The Park doesn’t disappoint.

And with apologies to Frank Zappa, We’re Heading To Montana!

Barbara and Brian

PS:  We took a drive the back way into West Yellowstone, which passes Quake Lake.

On August 17, 1959 an earthquake in the Madison Canyon River Area, near West Yellowstone, formed Quake Lake. The earthquake created a massive landslide of about 80 million tons of rock, which stopped the flow of the Madison River in the Madison River Canyon gorge. The landslide caused 28 deaths, flooding, and about $11 million in damage to the forests and highways in the area.

Along the way…anyone recognize this bird?

…and we bumped into an osprey’s nest.