Yellowstone (6/23/2007

Today we got the east side of the lower loop. I had heard of bear jams before but not moose jams. Believe me this was a jam. There were cars every where on the side of the road in the middle of the road and some places were there wasn't a road. People walking every where including the middle of the road. Rangers trying to keep the traffic moving had a rough time.

Cow Moose and Calf. The animals in the park are so use to people that they don't even pay any attention to them. I'll bet they think you people are crazy I wouldn't spend my time watching you. :-)

The upper Falls of the Yellowstone.

The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone.

They have some really nice places to view things from in the park. At the busy parking areas they usually have at least a port-a-potty and well made trails and boardwalks when needed.

Here is an example of the board walks and parking area at the Mud Volcano pull off. Notice the RVs. I was amazed at the number of people who drive there RVs in the park and I mean large ones. There were also a lot of rented RVs. I think there are six campgrounds in the park, only one has hookups and it cost $44.00 a night and is full until the end of July. It is privately run. The other ones were full most of the time when we drove past. They are $20.00 a night unless you have the golden age pass, then it is $10.00 a night which I consider enough to just be allowed to park your RV.

The Green Dragon Calderon. It did sound like I think a dragon would sound. But I don't think even a dragon would smell that bad only roughten eggs.

The Mud Volcano. That is just percolating mud.

This was a Saturday and apparently the animals knew it. There were more animals out today than we had seen all week. I guess they are trained to come out when the tourist are the heaviest on week ends. :-) The first animal we saw was a grey wolf off in the meadow. Peggy was able to get some video of him but I didn't even try with my small telephoto Len. Next was the moose in the picture above. Further down the road we saw a large white bird standing near the creek. Again Peggy was able to get some video but I didn't get any stills. We thought it might be another Sandhill Crane but it turned out to be a Wood Stork. Then we really did run into a bear jam. We had to park so far away and the grizzly was even further away so I didn't even try to get any pictures. Again Peggy was able to get some videos of him. So glad we have the video camera. There were also some Buffalo in the area but when the grizzly got near them they took off running across the road and nearly gave the ranger a heart attack trying to be sure every one was out of the way. While Peggy was off taking the videos of the bear I was just standing by the car waiting. There were other cars all around and one fellow had a pair of binoculars, I have a pair also but Peggy had them with her, he was just scanning the terrain when he spotted a bald eagle sitting on a snag near the creek. Thankfully he let me look. Two minutes later he said there are two more on a log near the creek. Again fortunately he let me look. Unfortunately my little telephoto wasn't strong enough. But at least I did get to see them.
So all though I didn't get the pictures I would have liked I did get to see some animals I had never seen before and it is thrilling. I had seen a grizzly and a bald eagle before in Alaska but had never seen a wolf or a stork before and even if you have seen them before it is still awesome.

Yellowstone (6/22/2007)

6/22/2007
Today we will continue down the west side loops. We hope to finish the bottom loop today. We took a side road off the main road called the Fire Hole Road.

This is Fire Hole Falls on the Fire Hole River. I guess that's why they call it the Fire Hole Road. :-)

Fire Hole Rapids.

Looking back down the Fire Hole River from the main road. Note the stone wall that was built on the Fire Hole Road. It was probably built by the CCC in the 1930s.

Fire Hole Spring. The colors are beautiful. The colors come from different algae, bacteria and other micro-organisms. Which organism lives were is determined by the water temperature.

White Dove Geyser. This cone is one of the largest in Yellowstone.

Excelsior Geyser. What a beautiful blue. This geyser's eruptions are erratic but it's flow of water into the Fire Hole River is constant at 4000 gallons of boiling water per minute.

Grand Prismatic Spring. These colors are breath taking. One of the pictures in the album of this spring looks like a rainbow. The smell around all these areas is not pleasant. The smell comes from the sulphur. I wonder if that is what hell smells like? Hope I don't find out.

This is just the out flow from the Excelsior Geyser. You get the different colors from the different water temperatures.

Naturally any one going to Yellowstone has to see Old Faithful blow her top.

The Old Faithful Lodge. Remember in the fire of 1988 they though it was going to get burned down. From here we headed back to the campground which was about 70 miles. I have some pictures in the album from inside the lodge. Tomorrow we go again. There is just so much to see and we can't go as much as we use to. But we are plugging along and enjoying almost every minute of it. :-)

Yellowstone (6/21/2007)

6/21/2007
Today we went down the west side of the top loop again passed those things that we had seen the first day. We started at this pull off.

This is called Roaring Mountain. I don't know why it wasn't roaring when we were there. We were there in the morning and have passed it on the way back to the campground three times now. It still has never roared and in the afternoon you can't even see the steam.

The next stop was the Norris Geyser Basin. This is just one small view of it, it is very large. The trail around it was two miles and we made it all.

This one they called the Green Dragon Spring. I think that is the one I saw 40 years ago and they called it the Green Dragon Calderon and the tunnel part of it was not nearly as large then.

This is Gibbon Falls. Fortunately it was right along the road at a pull off. After the walk around Norris Geyser Basin we were so tired we just went to a picnic area and had lunch. Then headed back to the campground. It still was forty miles back from there. As you go down in altitude you can feel the air getting warmer. We have an altimeter with us and we are usually around 7000 feet. So it is cooler up there than at the campground at 5300 feet. There are more geyser pictures in the Yellowstone Album. Almost forgot to tell you. On the way back I was getting so sleepy I pull over to a pull off to take a stretch and walk around a little to get the blood flowing again. As I got out of the car and was standing there I noticed some movement between the trees in the field beyond the trees. I got out the binoculars and at first thought what I was looking at were some Turkeys. The longer I looked the more I realized they were not turkeys. The video camera we have has a much longer telephoto lens than my still camera so Peggy took some videos of the birds we were looking at. The next day we showed the video to a ranger to find out what they were. He told use they were Sandhill Cranes. At first we confused them with the Wooping Crane that are almost extinct, so we thought we saw something rare until we looked them up on the Internet and found out they are the most common of all cranes. However, they are large birds and it was neat to see them since we had never seen Sandhill Cranes before.

Yellowstone 6/20/2007

6/20/2007
If you are not familiar with the layout of the roads in Yellowstone the main road is a figure eight. The entrances to the park are from the east from Cody, Wyoming, south from the Teton's National Park, Wyoming, west from West Yellowstone, Montana, north west from Gardiner Montana and north east from Red Lodge through the Bear Tooth Pass, Montana. We started today on the east side of the north loop of the figure eight. Our first stop was at a trail to Warith Falls.

I really thought this turned out to be a cute picture. It looks like he is either hiding under that leaf or wearing it. This whole area was so full of these prairie dogs that I wondered if they really have coyotes in Yellowstone. There were hundreds of them running all over the place. They even had some of their tunnels dug in the middle of the path.

Warith Falls.

Yellow Columbine

Wood Forget-me-not

There are so many Buffalo around in the park that we don't even pay any attention to them except to keep our distcent. More people are hurt by the buffalo in the park than by bears.

Tower Falls on Tower Creek that just a little way down the creek flows into the Yellowstone River.

Blue Flax, I guess you can tell Peggy and I like the flowers as much as the animals. Every time we see a new flower we have to get out the flower books and try to identify it. We're no expert but we enjoy it. I did take a course in local flora at both Duquesne University and Penn State University. Also took a course in Dendrology but these western trees certainly are different from the eastern ones. We did have samples of pine cones from the west and I sure would like to find a sugar pine cone. They are huge.

This is Mount Washburn the highest peak in the park at 10243 feet. That's fairly high compared to most of the mountains in the east but when you compare it to Colorado which has about a dozen peak over 16000 feet, I guess that's not high. There is a trail up to the top. Sure wish I could walk that far but we are very thankful to get to do as much as we do and see as much as we see.

This is the view from the trail to Mount Washburn. We are at 9000 feet and believe me there isn't as much oxygen here as at lower levels.

This is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I have a slide of this same area that I took 40 years ago and it hasn't changed a bit. Aren't the colors beautiful? You can also see why they call it the Yellowstone Park and River.

This is another view of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The river is of course the Yellowstone River.

The Lower Yellowstone Falls. You can see many painting of this and the upper falls. We didn't get to the upper falls yet but we will so keep tuned.

This picture was taken when we were on our way back to the campground on the west side of the upper loop road. While I was taking this picture of the black bear, Peggy was on the other side of the road that videos of a grizzly. If you want to see a bear jam you should have seen this. There were cars all over the place, parked on the side of the road and even just in the middle. Traffic couldn't go any where and there was plenty of it. I should have got a picture of the traffic jam but didn't think of it. It probably was more interesting than the bears. I wonder why humans are so taken by these wild animals? You will notice Peg and I were both out there with the rest of them taking pictures and I guess that's part of the reason we are here. I have a hard time deciding which picture to put in the blog there are so many I want to share with everyone. There are many more in my picture album. I do put sign pictures in my albums not in the blog. I take the sign pictures to give any one looking at the pictures as much information as I can. I also want it for my own future reference because I sure forget a lot.

Yellowstone 6/19/2007

6/19/2007

We arrived at Gardiner about 12:30 and got checked into our site in the Rocky Mountain Campground. We decided to go to see a little of the park today.

This is the entrance sign for the north west entrance. This was the original entrance. In the eighteen hundreds the wealthy would ride a train to Gardiner and then take a stage coach tour through the park.

This is Mammoth Hot Springs it is the first stop coming in from the north west. There is a small town here it has a restaurant, post office, visitor center, naturally gift shops and staff housing. The best I can remember when I was here 40 years ago there was more water and less dead spring areas.

This little fellow was right by one of the walk ways. It is a Bull snake and is non-poisonous.

We didn't walk 50 feet when we came upon this one. He is not the same one as in the above picture. Remember we hadn't been in the park for more than an hour and already saw two rather large snakes albeit non-poisonous. Peggy wasn't sure she wanted to see any more of Yellowstone.

This is a view looking back to Mammoth business area. Mammoth and Gardiner are the winter head quarters for the park.

When we left Mammoth and headed south the road stats to climb again, it also climbs as you come into the park. Gardiner is at 5300 feet Mammoth is at 6239 feet. These falls were not named but they are at the top of the entrance to the Golden Gate pass.

Here is an example of the road construction through the Golden Gate pass. The original road was built in 1885 of wood. Since 1900 the original wood trestle was replaced two times by concrete roads. There are additional pictures in the Yellowstone album and as always remember to click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Glacier National Park (Going to the Sun Road 29 miles)

We went out today to drive the 13 additional miles of the Going to the Sun Road that they had just opened, unfortunately the weather didn't co-operate. It was rainy, cold, breezy and cloudy. I'm sure if I could have seen where we were I would have gotten a lot more pictures as it is here is the best I could do. What we could see was as the younger generation says "awesome."

It was raining here and you can see the clouds were already obscuring the mountains. We hadn't even started up the mountain yet. These next three pictures were all taken at the end of the road. At and elevation of about 6000 feet.

This is Bird Woman Falls and it is 492 feet high.

This view is looking down the valley. You can tell how cloudy it was. It was raining and some of the rain had snow flakes in it.

This was the end of the line. The road was closed from here on. But it was some ride. The road is narrow and curvy (I seem to like that word). The mountain stone walls are right at the edge of the road. In some places the rocks actually hang over the cars. I can see how on a clear day it would be a beautiful drive. Maybe next time. We were thankful to get to see as much as we did.

Tomorrow we are leaving for Yellowstone NP. I have reservations for a week at the Rocky Mountain Campground in Gardiner, MT. It is four blocks from the north entrance to the park. Boy when you get around these National Parks the price of camping really goes up. The best price I could get was $37.00 a night. Most of the other campground were $44.00 a night and almost all of them were full.

Glacier National Park (Many Glacier)

6/16/2007
We kept our vow to go back to the east side of Glacier. We drove straight to Many Glacier except for one stop for Peggy to buy a book about the Blackfeet. She had seen it at the St. Mary's visitor center and decided she wanted it. The entrance to Many Glacier is a few miles off route 89 at Babb, MT.

This is the view before you get into the park. It is called Sherburne Lake and is actually created by a dam. I could have lightened these pictures up but I thought that would ruin the feeling we had of the overcast day. It was also very cool probably in the mid to upper fifties and breezy.

Lupine, they are every where along the roads and in the woods.

I was waiting to find a field like this of Bear Grass when I saw a picture of one in the visitor center in West Glacier. This one isn't as pretty as the one in the visitor center but it is the one with the most Bear Grass we have seen. Usually they are more scattered.

This is the lodge on Swiftcurrent Lake.

We found these two falls (this one and the picture below) on our way back home they were just off route 2. We missed them on the first time through because there was no sign for them only a pull off. There was no name given for them that we could see. When we pulled in there was a trucker there eating his lunch. What a great place to have a picnic only trouble is they don't have any picnic tables. Route 2 is the route that you have to take to get to the east side of Glacier. It goes around the south end of the park and over the lowest pass in the Rockies between Canada and Mexico. At least according to the literature I read. The pass is called Marias Pass and is 5214 or 5220 feet high depending on which literature you are reading. The railroad also runs along this route. I mentioned the pass the other day in the blog when we went over it the first time.

This little falls was just 25 yards from the one above and I didn't see it until Peg pointed it out to me. It was hidden behind the trees. When we got back to the west side of the park Peg decided she wanted the pair of shoes she had found in a shop in the park at the Apgar Village a couple of days earlier. She decided she needed them because the ones she was wearing had holes in them. So we went back in the west entrance to the park to get her the shoes. When we got to the entrance gate there was a sign saying that the Going to the Sun Road was now open 29 miles. That's 13 more miles that we had seen and only 3 miles from the top at Logan Pass. We decided that we would drive back up the rest of the way tomorrow.

This is a small part of the Apgar Village. It also has a motel and a few more shops and restaurants.