02.15.09

a Boiling river and a night at Mammoth

Posted in photo, travel, vacation, yellowstone at 10:58 pm by heidihoho7

So Saturday morning we went out for 1 last round of looking for wolves and photo ops.  We did see a group of at least 5 (i thought i saw a 6th) chasing bison for a little bit at Tower junction. They moved on fairly quickly and we didn’t really get any super photo ops of the wolves, but you can at least see them behind the bison.

We also have been noticing some issues with mange in the park. This set had at least 2 wolves that clearly had mange and i guess its pretty easy to spread along to other animals. It is also the mating season which means a lot of the males are out wandering looking for females. One in particular that morning looked an awful lot like a poodle, poor thing! We heard that the rangers actually introduced mange into the coyote population years and years ago in hopes that it would kill them off back when the wild dogs were considering a bad thing in the park. It seems that the coyote population is smaller now but all that we saw seemed very healthy so maybe it just needs to run its course and it will help produce healthier animals down the road.

After the wolves ran off we did a bit more trolling but had to head back to town since we had to check out late morning. We lucked out yet again and saw a “Sun Dog” – another phenomena with the snow crystals. We also saw the 3 bull elk we’d seen another morning back in the lakes area. They did some cool sparring and eventually crossed the road giving us some great photo ops to end our tour.

We checked out, and the rest of the group went on their way – either back to home in WY or on to the aiport to fly east. We wanted to say a big Thanks! to Dale and Mike as well as Rich and Art. Our week of photos with the group was an amazing one. It was a bit quieter without my photo gals, but super productive with what i’d consider to be some great photos and some fun video to boot.

On to the rest of the weekend!  We headed back into the park to go snowshoeing. We stopped to check out Wraith Falls which was just a short trail. We also decided to try just hiking a bit near Tower to get a bit more trail under our boots. Most of the trails were well groomed and we really didn’t need our snowshoes so we left them on the 2nd outing. We were a bit tired and turned around at a little lake that had some bison at it. As we turned around we took a close look at one of the skiers and we recognized our snowcoach driver from thursday, Zach an IL transport.  We found it kind of funny that will all the visitors to the park and with so many trails that we ran into him – a small world, small park!

Around 2pm we decided to see if we could check into the Mammoth Hotel we were staying in on Sat night. On our way to the hotel i noticed a lone black wolf watching us as we drove over the bridge just out side of mammoth. We pulled over to see if we could still see him just a bit past the bridge but we didn’t find him again. We just found it a bit funny that we’d be looking for wolves all morning and then midday we see 1 fairly close, not a 1/2 mile outside of mammoth where we’d be staying for the night!

We were able to check in and thought we’d check out the “boiling river” – an area where the spring from mammoth hot springs flows into the Gardiner River. It’s a really cool spot and has a bunch of terraces where the toasty water cascades over into the cold river. They have part of the river sectioned off and once you get into the warm cascading water its really quite nice, you can sit right at the base of a cascade and it flows right over you. You just have to be careful not to get too far into the cold water, in Feb it’s quite cold!  The only downside to our little outing was 1. that there were 2 buses so it was a bit crowded and 2. that in my rush to get dressed and get out of there i accidentally lost one of my most favorite hats. Still a but bummed about that but Bela was nice enough to buy me a very cute one from the gift shop.

We ended up enjoying Valentine’s Day Night with a few drinks from the bar and ordering our dinner to go (too late for reservations) which we enjoyed back in our room. We have to thank Beth, Oliver and Ty  at VE for our yummy dinner, they gave us a gift card to use in the park and we used it well – Bison meatloaf and idaho trout. It was REALLY good.  We were also were celebrating our 10th year of being together so it really made for a great gift.  We had no tv in our room (its a very old building) so we ended up playing cards out in the main hall which also made for a nice change as well.  Though if you are a light sleeper you might want to think about staying somewhere else – i slept ok but i guess the pipes were noisy and the walls are super thin- those old building designers knew nothing of sound suppression!

Permalink