Friday-Saturday, Sept. 17-18 - Today we scheduled ourselves for a day of rest. We have driven all the roads in the park except the 14 miles going out the West entrance, and the 22 miles going out the South entrance, which we will pick up as we leave. So we did laundry this morning, then Joe greased the RV, we had lunch at the General Store and shopped a little. We have new Yellowstone baseball caps - buy one, get second one free! Then we went to the Visitor Center at Fishing Bridge and took in a ranger talk on moose and elk. We actually learned a few things from his talk. We went back to camp and rested (I took a nap, Joe read). We have been so lucky here with the weather. After having so much rain all summer, we were blessed with sunshine every day here, temperatures in the 60s/70s. We took no pictures today, saw no animals, and just rested up.
Saturday, we were on the road by 9:00 a.m, and drove out of Yellowstone through the South Entrance. We passed Heart Lake, saw a deer on the bank of Yellowstone Lake right beside the steaming hotspots. We didn't get a picture, which I really regretted because that would have been an awesome picture. I could probably have submitted it to some kind of contest. Oh well.
Then we crossed the Snake River, which comes out of the Tetons.
As we exited Yellowstone, we drove the 8 miles on the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Highway into Grand Teton National Park, and got our first glimpse of these magnificent mountains.
We got into our campground around 11:00, then drove over to the Colter Bay Lodge to look around. They have huge windows overlooking a grassy/shrub meadow and then Jackson Lake. Someone had spotted a moose in the meadow, so we scoped that out. All we could see of him was his massive antlers, the scrub brush was that tall. Then we saw one lone elk, and shortly after that we spotted a small herd of elk, maybe 6-8. We had lunch at the lodge and just enjoyed the scenery and sunshine for a couple hours, then we headed out for a drive.
We drove back a couple side roads, then headed up to the summit of Signal Mountain. The campground host had told us there had been black bear activity on Signal Mountain, but they must have all been napping when we were there. But the views were awesome.
We stopped at Jackson Lake Dam, on the Snake River, and got a great picture of a raven sitting on the fence.
There were people fishing this river, and I decided to put my foot in it. I missed Mazie, she is now 2 sights behind on the "toes in the water."
We took another side road, a 2-mile dirt road that actually took us out of the park and into the Bridger-Teton National Forest, but then the road dead-ended. As we drove back to camp, we circled in and out of a couple other campgrounds. We saw 2 deer, one that posed nicely for a picture.
We have a great campsite here, with the woods beside us. It was finally warm enough to eat outside, so I fixed us some soup and we ate outside, watching other campers trying to park their rigs.
No comments:
Post a Comment