We started day 10 of our trip in Yellowstone by getting up and preparing to go horseback riding through the park. What we didn't realize was that you had to book far in advance to do this, so we were turned away. We decided to do a long ride in Glacier to make up for it. On the way, we did see a bull elk with a pretty good size rack. He still had velvet on his antlers.
With the change in plans, we decided to go back down to see all the thermal features in teh Old Faithful area, or the Lower Geyser Basin. This is the most crowded part of the park, since it centers around Old Faithful. It's cool to see all the geysers and such, but all the people make it a little but annoying. Below are several pics from the area. I'm not going to title each one, but we can talk later if you're interested.
We went back up to the Tower-Roosevelt area of the park (NW area) to eat supper at the Roosevelt Lodge. Teddy Roosevelt took several trips to the park and this lodge was named for him. (I do beleive the Teddy commissioned the world's first national park, Yellowstone, as well, but you may need to check my facts.) The lodge is a great place, and specializes in BBQ ribs, so we had to give those a try. Kate had ribs and I had a sampler platter of ribs, bbq chicken and fried chicken. IT was all very good and I would reccommend it to anyone. Don't worry though, Granny Linker's fried chicken is still the champion.
The Roosevelt area is great for animal viewing as well, so we headed down to the Lamar River Valley to see if we could spot some wolves. We got into a little traffic jam on the way down there, but who am I to tell a 1,500 pound buffalo to get out of the road. He was missing his tail, though, which was a little weird. I guess something ate it.
We got down to the valley and drove until we spotted a bunch of cars. People line up every night to get a good look at the wolves. As we were pulling into a parking spot, we got a glimpse of a black wolf as it hid in the sagebrush. We waited for it to vome out for an hour, but it snuck around us somehow and we missed. While we were waiting, a large bull bison took offense to our standing where he wanted to be so he started snorting and pawing at the ground. We back off to the car pretty quickly and he calmed down. It was a little scary though.
We drove back to the campsite with wolves on our mind. We decided to get up early and go back to the Lamar Valley to see if we could see some. Kate was a little more enthusiastic about getting up at 5:15am than I was, but it is the best time to see them. We got there and weren't disappointed. We saw a gray wolf munching on a buffalo carcass. It was pretty far away, but a nice person let us use their spotting scope, which is apparently a must have in the park. We decided to drive down the road a little further and we saw one closer with our bare eyes. It was the same black one from last night and it was really cool to be able to see it in detail. Kate saw another one on the way back but I didn't catch it. I'm usually the driver and she's the spotter. We make a pretty good team.
We went back to the Roosevelt Lodge and ate breakfast then headed back to camp and packed up. Because we were at the north end of the park, we could make it to Glacier in one day, so we headed north to Montana. Below is a pic of our Yellowstone campsite.
We arrived in Glacier National Park around 8:00pm and drove around until we decided where we were going to camp. The wind was blowing at 35 mph with 50mph gusts. The campsite we wanted only had one spot left so wee were lucky to get it. We ate PB & J sandwhiches as we set up camp and called it a night.
The weather has been great all trip. Yellowstone was perfect and Glacier is windy but still not too cold. More on Glacier next time.
Ribs...
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