Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Around West Yellowstone

This morning we had to move sites. I got up early and made a pot of chili and finished yesterday‘s blog. The Campground host came by about 8:00 and told us she had a site for us with electric but only for one night.  We turned that down and said we would just take one of the first- come/first- serve sites as they became available today, even though they are dry camping. We didn't want to have to move every day.  She said she hadn’t checked those yet but about an hour later, she came back by and said she had found a couple and asked Joe to go take a ride with her to decide which one he wanted.  They left and he came back with a new site for us, we got our stuff put away and moved over there.  This site is as nice as the last one. This Campground takes bears seriously, it has bear-proof food storage boxes at every site. 

 Then we decided to do laundry today and take a day off from sightseeing, so we gathered up the laundry and headed into town for breakfast and the laundromat. We were both pretty tired from our last three days of long drives, and sleepless nights.  We took the afternoon off but Joe decided he wanted pizza so about 4:00 we did go back into town. We were lucky we went early because they were lined up when we left.    I walked into one shop, but didn't buy anything.

Then we took a little drive on down the highway past the campground.  We didn’t see anything although the road took us down along Madison River. It was the Madison River Rim Road, the road was bumpy. It started to rain so we came back and called it a night. We’re having trouble getting Internet at our new site so we’ll see how that goes. We have four nights in this site.

.

It rained pretty good for a while, then quit.  But we had a beautiful rainbow.  And it rained again during the night.  They need the rain here, so that was good.  

.

I'm having trouble with the internet, so I'm not sure how this blogging will go. And we had some issues switching from electric to generator, but we hope we have those all resolved.  Heading back into the park tomorrow.

 Monday, July 29, 2024

Around Yellowstone

It got down to 43 last night, and for some reason, we didn't turn the heat on.  It was a bit chilly (57) inside when I got up, but we are loving the weather here.  

We didn't head into the park until afternoon.  We passed the "entering Wyoming " just inside the park at 12:42 after fueling and picking up lunch at Subway for a picnic later.  

At the Madison intersection, we turned south today, which is still on the Grand Loop.  We took the first turn off to Fire Hole Canyon Road.  On our first trip to Yellowstone in 2010, we actually walked out in the water here and sat on these rocks.  We did not attempt that this year.  We saw a huge bird nest up in the tree on our way out of this side road, and it looked like an osprey was in it.

Then we took another side road down Fire Hole Lake Drive. This is really a big geyser area.  Some of the geysers were actually going off, others were bubbling. We could sure smell the sulfur back here. There was a small bike group that came through here.  We spotted two sandhill cranes back here in this area. That was a surprise. 

Traffic is definitely thicker here in July than it was on our two previous trips in September. Some of the turnouts for the geysers are so backed up that it’s blocking traffic out on the main road.  We skipped those!

Biscuit Basin on Fire Hole River is the one that blew up a couple weeks ago. They have that road all closed off. We drove up to the side of it. There was a traffic jam parked along the road here.

Our next stop was Old Faithful.  We got there at the worst possible time (2:38).   It was going off just as we pulled into the parking lot. We brought our Subway picnic with us and sat on a bench and had lunch. We had almost a 2-hour wait before the next eruption.  But it’s a very pleasant day and this is a good place to people-watch. A lot of non-English speaking people in the crowds.  Eventually, we went into the Visitor Center behind us. There was a movie showing so that helped us pass the time. We waited it out, and Old Faithful went off about 4:10, 13 minutes earlier than predicted.   It only goes off for about a minute every 90-120 minutes, but we were happy to see it for the third time.  Our other two visits to Old Faithful were on my birthday.  

.

Moving on, we crossed the Continental Divide (twice) at an elevation of 8,800. It’s really been a nice day, sunny, little breezy, but it’s very comfortable. It’s 66° in West Yellowstone. We’re a little higher so we might be a little cooler.

From Madison Junction to Old Faithful is where most of the geysers in Yellowstone are located.  From Old Faithful on around up to Bridge Bay and Lake Village, it’s mostly heavy forest.  At this point, we’ve only seen one lone Buffalo today and the two sandhill cranes.

 

We turned north at West Thumb and headed up toward Bridge Bay, Lake Village, and Fishing Bridge.  We’re  driving along beautiful Yellowstone Lake on this road. This is a huge lake, very pretty. It is the largest high-elevation lake in the lower 48. We went through a fire-damaged here.  Looks like the lake stopped the fire on this side.

About 5:30, we turned off at the Bridge Bay Marina turnoff, and Joe spotted a huge bull elk right after we turned off the main road. We certainly weren’t expecting that.  After we stopped and gawked, we drove on and turned around, and spotted a second bull elk in the trees.  We were very excited about this -- these were the first bulls we have seen in Yellowstone.

Our next side trip was to Fishing Bridge.  They were actually fishing off the bridge.  We had ice cream cones at Fishing Bridge, then drove through the campground. It looks like they have added on quite a bit to the Campground.  When we were here 14 years ago, the campground parking slots were back to back, two deep. It was really just a parking lot. We actually camped here.  This new section has several long rows of single pull-throughs.   Very nice. I’m sure it’s very pricey too. 

 As we were leaving the parking lot, we saw our first deer of the day.

Our next stop were the mud bogs. We heard a story at Fishing Bridge that there was a incident at the Mud Bogs last night. A buffalo was standing in the mud and a grizzly charged him. We did not hear the outcome. 

.

We see geese around almost every body of water.  We don't know if they live here permanently or are migrating, but there are a ton of them around. 

Just past the Mud Bog is Hayden Valley and we saw three or four buffalo there on the other side of the river. Then we came up on our first Buffalo jam in Yellowstone.  We saw a lot of buffalo in Hayden Valley, one big herd and one small herd.  This one had a calf with it.

We got to the Canyon Village intersection just about 7:00. We’re about 40 miles from the campground.  We were on this road last night.  We took a side road to Virginia Cascade.  We took this road last night too, but there were too many cars to get a picture. And you can see there's no passing room here.

We turned onto Madison River Road (West Entrance Road) at 7:52, thinking we might have better luck tonight seeing some action at the river.  But the pattern of the elk on the river seems to have changed this time. We came through at 8:00 and didn’t see any at the river. However, at the end of the river, where we saw them last night, we saw a small herd of 10 cow elk and calves.  We are deducing that when we were here before, in September, the bulls were in rut.  That probably explains why we would see a bull herding the cows across the river.  Apparently, the bulls are not with the cows yet and the cows are able to graze on their own.  This is our unscientific deduction.   

When we pulled out of that pull out, we took the River Drive down just a little ways off to the right.  This was a road Joe had wanted to drive.  As soon as we turned in,  we spotted seven more cow elk across the river here.  One of them was up on the ridge, maybe as a lookout.

It was 9:00 by the time we got home, and we were both exhausted.  But we had a good day today -- another 140 miles in the Jeep. Tomorrow morning we have to move to a different spot, so that will get our morning started.  

 Sunday, July 28, 2024

Off to Yellowstone

We took our time this morning because we knew we only had 88 miles to go and were not sure what time check-in was.  But Joe got up early so we were on the road, fed and fueled, by 9:40.  We knew we had our pretty drive again so we were up for that.  Traffic was pretty heavy on 191 this morning. It was moving about 50 miles an hour until we got past the turnoff to Big Sky, then it picked up a bit.  Joe said it was a lot of driving, even though not many miles, because it was 2-lane, with lots of curves, up and down hill, and traffic.  He was tired.  

I told myself I wasn't going to take any pictures of the drive since I had done that yesterday, but . . .

Here's the zip line.  Looks like there is a crowd waiting for that.

This is the cliff face I was trying to get -- the river is right at the bottom.

Fishermen are out today.

And so are the rafters.

We stopped at a pull-off right beside the river.  A nice little stream was running down the mountain into the river, and a field of beautiful horses was right behind us.

We reached the first Yellowstone boundary about 11 o’clock on the highway.  We got to our campground about 11:30, and our site was empty so we got pulled in. The site was short, but Joe got it backed in and off the road.  But we drove up to the camp host before we set up to see if anything else was available, and to see if there was a possibility of moving over on Tuesday to a first-come/first-serve site.  She told us to drive through the campground looking for sites that might become available on Tuesday and make a list of ones that we could use.  The hostess said she would keep an eye out and if something became available, she would notify us.  Our reservations are only for two nights with electricity here, so in order to stay longer, we will have to move. All the other electric ones are reserved but we might be able to move into a first-come/first-serve dry camping (no electricity) on Tuesday.

The campground, Baker's Hole in Gallatin National Forest, is very nice.  We stayed here several years ago with Jeff and Brenda.  But it only has a few electric sites, which is too bad.  No other hookups.

We went into West Yellowstone for dinner about 4 o’clock. Had a nice lunch/dinner at Outpost.  Shortly after we got seated, it started absolutely pouring. There was a table of 6 motorcycle guys, and when they heard someone say that it was pouring, they all raced out because they left their helmets upside down on their bikes. Unfortunately, it was too late. The helmets  all got wet .

 Once inside the park, we crossed the state line into Wyoming at 4:50, so the entrance is barely in Montana. 

15 minutes later, we saw our first elk a cow sleeping in the grass near the road.   We drove on, and when we went around the corner, a buffalo was walking in the road, holding up traffic.  He moseyed over to the grass and into the trees.  We got past him and pulled into the turnout and watched him for a while.  He had some itches and just kept rubbing against a small tree.  

We finally drove on and got to the intersection at Madison, and headed north to Norris.  We took the Grand Loop Road which covers the northwest corner of the park to the middle, including Canyon Village, Tower-Roosevelt, Mammoth Hot Springs, and back to Norris, then Madison.  It turned out to be 134 miles.  Joe said "you know, anywhere we drive in this park, it's always at least 100 miles."  Again, he was right.  

We saw our first wolf, but not very good. He was laying down in the grass near the road, but there were lots of cars parked there. By the time we got turned around, he had gotten up and we just caught a glimpse of him moving into the trees. 

The next time we saw a group of people stopped along the road, Joe looked back and said it was a deer or maybe a cow elk. I couldn’t even see it and there was no place to stop. 

We had a little rain shower and it started getting dark on us about 7:30. We were not yet to Mammoth in our loop so we had several miles to go. We have seen 3 lone buffalo, after the one with the itch, and  we’ve seen three cow elk by now. Plus the wolf that we barely saw.  This elk crossed the road right in front of us.

After we got through Mammoth and headed south, we came upon four cow elk, real close to the road.  Just a little further, Joe spotted a whole herd, but they were a little further and now it’s pouring down rain so we didn’t get a picture.  He thought there was probably 40 or 50,  probably all cows again.

By this time, we had passed several geysers and steaming pools of water.  We had seen them all before, so we didn't stop.

It cleared off a little bit after the rain storm so we were able to have visibility for a little bit longer, although it continued to rain off and on.  We got to the turn off at the Madison River about 8:40, still a little bit of daylight. This is usually where the action is. We’ll see if the wildlife are at Madison River and causing a traffic jam tonight or if we’re late enough to clear it.  This is a 14 mile stretch to get to West Yellowstone and it can take an hour and a half sometimes if there’s lots of traffic pulled over watching the elk or the Buffalo. Well, there was no traffic jam, but we did see two elk -- cow and a calf - - so we pulled into one of the turnouts, but it was getting pretty dark. In the clearing where the river narrowed and turned, there were a few more elk scattered around. We never found any buffalo herds today, but we did find a herd of elk.

We stopped back in West Yellowstone for a quick bite.  We had skipped lunch and our 4:00 meal was several hours ago.  We just went into McDonalds, which was a zoo.  I think maybe a bus had unloaded, or the Cinemax just got out.  Business was certainly booming.  

We found our way back to the campground without incident, although we were on alert because they have signs about buffalo roaming the highway.  Our campground host had told us there had been a grizzly roaming around in the campground just a couple day ago, also a moose and her baby had been down by the river, which is just behind the campground.  Also a lot of foxes in the campground.  But we saw nothing.

It was a long day.  We have to figure out how to manage our time better so we aren't on these long drives, but I think every day here will be over 100 miles.  We just need to get started earlier, and make more stops.  Looking forward to it.