Yellowstone National Park - 9/7 to 9/12

When we got to Yellowstone I can tell that we were both a little tired and willing to cut corners where we wouldn't normally do so. We ate more dinners at the lodges (most of them, oops) and stayed in a cabin rather than sleeping out in the tent (only once, but this was our first and has become more of a trend than we'd really like to admit). As for the dinners our excuse is that there were NO grocery stores in the park, and since we spent around 11 days here (and in Teton), there weren't a whole lot of options for food.

This is definitely a different place than I had expected. I had been anticipating a totally forested park, bears jumping out from behind bushes, and geysers spewing all of the time. It was really a lot more barren than that with fields of sage brush, no sighted bears (though a new friend saw one crossed the road right in front of his bike), and mainly lots of simmering pots of colored water.

Our experiences:
The terraces in the photo above were super cool. Its funny how the volcanic activity varies so much from year to year. The terraces recommended by our guide book seemed dead, while others not mentioned were alive and boiling.

The elk rut was in full force, and I woke up one morning to a harem of lady elk wandering through our campground, followed by a very disturbed elk bull (if you saw how he was behaving you'd understand).

We took a couple of hikes down canyon sides to the roaring Yellowstone river. Tubing on it is a popular sport once it leaves the park.

We spent one evening with some wildlife watchers stalking a wolf pack. We were so far away that without the watchers and their scopes we never would've seen their wolfey movements, much less guessed the movements were wolves themselves.

And while a lot of the park is forested, much of it was destroyed in a fire in the 1980s so large areas just seemed dead from a distance. Up close though there were definitely lots of little trees sprouting up.

Geysers and other thermal anomalies like fumaroles and, my favorites, boiling pots of mud litter the park. They don't let you walk near though as people fall in all the time and get burned to death.

Its a shame because as cool as all of this is, half of the informational signs tell of the way it used to be, before decades of vandalism and theft stripped the obsidian cliffs of their shiny rocks and filled the guysers and color pots with garbage.

It didn't seem like we spent so long here but I guess we did because the pictures just go on and on for days. Neato.

-Trent