06.05.08
Steamy and burned… and a wolf!
So its been a few days since i’ve added an update, and its been a crazy few days! Normally we wake up quite early and spend anywhere from 6-10 hours out in the morning, followed by a siesta in the afternoon. I’ve been able to check email or take a much needed nap during those times. Followed by another few hours out in the evenings.
Today was a bit different! We ended up driving south towards Old Faithful which is over 50 miles from gardiner where we are staying each night. Now that doesn’t sound far but when you are going 30-45 mph most of the time and then factor in the wonderful tourists who turn into idiots at the sight of a bear and it gets much much slower. So as we worked our way south we kept finding wonderful things to photograph (more details below). Before we knew it, it was noon so we decided to stay in the area for lunch and make it a long day with an early return. Well we always claim we’ll get done early, but as always we keep seeing things to stop for. It ended up being a 13 hour day and i’m super tired! Both me and my roomie Kay are now in bed at 9:00, with a “late” wakeup time of 6am, we’re so happy!
Ok on to more details! So to start from the last update, since then we’ve seen a few different moose, 2 with babies. One is a very sad story (the baby got mangled by a bison and they fear it has a broken back. we did see it moving but it looked pretty shaky). We have seen so many black bear, i think we saw about 8 just yesterday! We had fun shooting a bear from the van and then camping out to view “Rosie” and her 2 cubs. We also saw a few different sets of rocky mountain bighorn sheep, most with babies and oh they were so adorable!! They run along the cliffs like they are on a playground. We spotted a group late one afternoon on a cliff that has a dropoff of about 1,000 ft. Flowers are just starting to bloom so we stopped to enjoy the color. We’ve grabbed a few waterfall shots as well.
This morning started out a set of coyotes running right in front of the van! No chance to take photos but a great start to the day. Not long after we spotted a bull Elk walking through a meadow with a stream and steam behind him, a beautiful sight! Much of the morning was spent taking photos of bison with their calves.
We stopped for a bathroom break not far down the road from the bison. A few cars pulled in all excited about something. We quickly found out that a wolf was running along the river. We all dropped what we were doing and grabbed our cameras and ran to the riverside just in time to see the wolf cruising along. He came and went quick, although the cars following him were still around for a long while causing quite the traffic jam. You can see the van how we left it! We also found an elk and a baby just down the river as well
We then continued on to the thermal features – we visited some cone geysers and some spring pools that have that amazing color range. It was a bit windy and pretty chilly so there was a lot of steam. And apparently a lot of sun, silly me i forgot to put on my sunscreen! So now i’m burnt like toast!!
We spent a lot of time exploring the different thermal features and made our way to Old Faithful. Now i have to admit that i had high expectations. I really thought it was going to be a high geyser, but it left me a bit disappointed. Oddly i felt that the lodge was more worth the visit. It is an amazing log building with a huge lobby that is 4 stories tall and wide open in the center. We treated ourselves to some ice cream and decided to head home as we were getting super tired. We of course got sidetracked by a few more thermals but eventually made our way home. Ok with 1 more bear stop.
The weather looks to get a bit worse with 1″ of snow possibly coming down so we’re playing the next day by ear.