This morning, we sort of slept in being that we didn’t have to set the alarm for 5 AM. There wasn’t much to do in the tent or the campground in the morning so after getting dressed and brushing her teeth, we headed right to Yellowstone. We were a little bit later than we had planned, so we didn’t stop for any breakfast or coffee just decided to eat what we had in the car today.
Our first step of the day was Gibbon Falls, which was right along the road. I’m glad it didn’t require much of a hike because it was a little underwhelming. The fall themselves were beautiful, but they had no sunshine this early in the morning, so it was a little bit of a womp womp. Next we stopped at Berle Springs which was also right along the road. It had a really loud steam vent that was puffing steam everywhere. It was really cool to see and a very short little stop off the road. (We’re loving our handy-dandy audio guide because in addition to keeping us extremely entertained along these long drives, it also tells us exactly which stops along the way are worth our time!)
Because the sunshine wasn’t really in our favor, we skipped the Artist Paint Pots and headed right to Norris Geyser Basin. This was spectacular! We walked along a boardwalk and got to see several different steam vents and pools and bubbling, rivers and all sorts of formations. One of the geysers that we saw was called steamboat and it is the largest in the park. At one point when it erupts it goes up like 300 feet in the air. The tricky part is that there’s no way to really tell when this is going to happen. It would have like only three days between interruptions and then sometimes like 50 years in between interruptions. The last time interrupted was in April of this year, so we were hopeful, but nothing happened today.
After we left this area, we had a little bit of a drive up to the Mammoth Hot Springs area. We did have a cool encounter with a bison who was sitting literally right on the side of the road though! We had to drive our car very slowly past him to make sure that we didn’t disturb him. Mammoth Hot Springs was really cool. We did the upper road first and walked along boardwalks and saw these amazing white terrace structures that had been formed by all the weird gas and rocks. Everything of course, was steaming and stinky and bubbling and wet.
There were so many different formations in Mammoth, we spent a long time either walking, boardwalks or doing small little drives that took us past different white, bulbus structures, etc. Then we went into the little town of Mammoth and I got a stamp in my passport for the day!
We have been doing some research, talking to different people and Park Rangers and decided that instead of trying to come in super early to Lamar Valley for a wildlife viewing, we would just stay in the park tonight until sunset and see what kind of animals we encounter. So we left Mammoth and listened to our Guide Along guide, Dave, and did some little roadside stops here and there as we worked our way to the Lamar Valley area. During this drive — and the drive to Mammoth, we ran into wildlife too! We had a black bear on the side of the road, an elk, and a sheep!
Lamar Valley was spectacular and one of my favorite experiences of the entire trip! It was vast and huge and had rolling hills and pine forests and just massive vistas — exactly how you would imagine “out west” would look. At first it was a little disappointing because we would see a little dotted herds of buffalo far away on the mountains, but nothing was really close and all of the wildlife was buffalo.
Eventually, however, we did get to stop on the side of the road and we saw a little herd of buffalo cross the road almost right in front of us. They stopped traffic and it was really exciting! At one point one of the cows just stood in the middle of the road and eventually a Park Ranger had to come and use his click clack sound device to make the cow move off the road. I guess after a while they just don’t like to see them blocking the traffic that long and need to keep all of us moving.
We went further into the valley, and found a really good stopping point that had a really big view of a river down below and the mountain rising up on the side. Just as we were starting to question whether or not our tactic was right to keep driving or if it was better to just find a really good spot to sit and watch the evening migration of animals, Mark made friends with a husband and wife who had a powerful camera and scope. They eventually went across the road and up a large hill. We decided to stay in this spot for a while and at one point they waved us up — so we ridiculously found ourselves climbing a roadside hill in the middle of the Lamar Valley. This felt eerily similar to when we got out of our safari van in Africa to walk through the grass to view the hippos in the river — basically we felt very exposed!
The photographer had a black bear on the scope and he let us take several turns looking at it. It was very cool to see! The bear was all the way across the valley right on the edge of the forrest. There was a herd of bison right behind us on the hill and I kept a watchful eye on them. We joked that they were playing red light green light with us because I swore every time I checked they were ever so slightly closer. Our new friends told us where our best bet was for seeing wolves, so around 6:30pm we parted ways and headed to Slough Creek.
When we got to the wolf area, there were a lot of cars already parked on the side of the road, which was always a good sign! We talked to a lady who said that there were some wolves, but we had to go to the top of the hill to see them. So we set off walking through the sagebrush to join a couple of other people who had stationed themselves on top of a small hill. When we got there, the first group of people weren’t really friendly and didn’t want to share any details, but the second group was really nice and told us that they were still looking for wolves. We waited for a while and then decided to head back to the road and possibly start our very long drive home, but there was another huge group of people set up with scopes along the side of the road and they told us that there were four wolves that had left over the hill and were expected to come back this evening because there were still pups in the den. That seemed intriguing so we decided to stay and watch the hill to see if we could see the black wolves coming over. We stayed for about another half hour until it really got too dark to be able to see anything and we had a 2 1/2 hour drive back so we really needed to go.
On our drive back through the dark, we could tell we were passing beautiful canyons and we luckily had a big truck in front of us to sort of lead the way through the winding roads for most of the time. We had some deer on the side of the road and we also had to stop once for a coyote, which was really cool. We got back to the tent pretty late and it was absolutely freezing so I put my ear earplugs in and put my layers on and got under the covers quick.