Yellowstone - Day two
Prepare for another photo overload!
We decided to wake up early and get a good start on our animal sightings. We sleep in our van and I was so surprised to see that our front window had frosted on the inside! Wow, 20 degrees overnight. Our extra cozy hats & layers are coming in handy even while we sleep in the car. We have a propane heater that we use in the canopy tent when it's cold so we're pretty set up and yes we even brought our chains. We came prepared.
Our route today would be the Lamar Valley & to the Northeast entrance/Cooke City, then on our return turn at the Norris junction and continue to the Hayden Valley area. The Bear-tooth hwy was still closed so that's about where the road ends going this direction. Here's the link for the PDF map of the Yellowstone area:
Yellowstone official road map PDF
Back up to the Mammoth area to turn off for the Lamar Valley.
Our first sighting of the day other than Bison, was this small Bighorn Mountain sheep.
As we were nearing the Yellowstone river bridge, something dark in a ditch caught my eye. I asked my husband to turn around and sure enough I had spotted a black bear. We don't have any fancy photo equipment, just binoculars (my husband gifted my a new pair of binoculars when we were in Gardiner), my iPhone and a small FujiXP camera. So that might give you an idea of how close things have to be for us to photo them and get a decent shot.
After congratulating ourselves on our first black bear sighting, we got in the car and drove across the bridge only to see another one down the bank. Wow!!
Zoomed in abit.
We continued on to the Lamar Valley, scanning the area for Elk, Wolves and Bears. We stopped and looked at something we thought might be bear, but it was so far away even with our best binoculars it was hard to see what exactly was there. So we moved on. We came up to a group of cars a short distance down the road where many people looking through Binoculars and spotting scopes. I later found a live Yellowstone animal reporting site, this link explains what everyone was looking at:
http://www.yellowstone.co/tripreports/2019/05082019.htm. It has a day by day reporting of what is seen, where and by whom. One of the people with a scope was kind enough to let us look through his scope. Then we could clearly see what had been a blur to us earlier. 2 Grizzlies (one small and one large), Wolves, Coyotes, Ravens all taking their not so patient turns at eating on a carcass. Since it's reported that these animals had been in here awhile it seems that the carcass was probably a Bison. The Ravens were enjoying harassing the bears.
We didn't see much of anything except two Elk on our way to
Cooke city. We found one of the few businesses open and had a good lunch. We had a great waiter, he shared fun local information while we ordered. The best one was that the bears like to come and lick the bugs off of the windshields when the cars are parked in town.
Local scenery
As were driving towards the next small city (
Silver gate) before re-entering the park, I looked towards some small shrubs and saw two Moose right at the outskirts of town!
The smaller one.
The larger one.
Oh oh, a stand off!
A lone Bison in the road.
We waited abit and he casually walked along side of us.
As we re-entered the park we saw a couple out with some big zoom lens cameras set up. Of course we stopped to take a look. Another Moose!
On our way back, another sighting.
Baby Bison
A storm approached as we made our way back towards Mammoth.
Snowing!
We turned at the Norris junction and headed towards Hayden Valley. There was quite abit of snow on this side of Yellowstone.
Hayden valley
A blue sky showed itself for awhile, making the river view very scenic as we drove towards Fishing bridge. The road was closed at Fishing bridge (east and south entrance roads - all closed) so we turned around.
As we came back into the valley I saw what I hope were two more bear. It was snowing and our camera's just didn't pick them up very well. What do you think?
iPhone photo
FujiXP photo, both photos are pretty much the same. Too hard to call, but I'm claiming two more bear for my list.
We stopped and took some waterfall photos. It was getting cold and snowy out, so we only got out and walked to one view area.
The north rim trail was looking a bit cold
Heading back to Norris junction.
We stopped at Elk park to take a photo of a pair of Sandhill cranes.
We stopped at a pullout and noticed this steaming rock across this river before we got to our campground.
❤
12 hours on the road today, yes we were tired, but before bed we took a walk to look out at the Madison river and to take a moment to be thankful for the wonderful views of scenery and animals we saw as this was to be our last night in Yellowstone.
