Yellowstone, 2011

It is impossible, but I am going to try to document our wonderful week in Yellowstone.  When we left on the trip we didn't have a daily plan, just knew a few things we HAD to do...Old Faithful, Firehole Canyon, and see a bear.  Well, we ended up doing a LOT more than that.  The trick is, how to organize the telling of it!

The Condo, West Yellowstone

First day, we arrived at the condo in West Yellowstone and did the important things like explore every drawer, cupboard, and view from each window.  I also opened the butter, because I was already craving the waffles to come in the morning!  We had a fun park area as well as pool at the condo for a couple of play times to get out the wiggles.  We had a blast our last full day there playing a family game in the pool, as we had it mostly to ourselves...do you want to know the game?  It requires a shallow play area and a beachball.  Designate the goals, divide up in teams, then get the ball in the other persons goal using ONLY your feet, walking around crab style on your hands.  Very fun.  We also played Yahtzee, Hands Down quite a bit in our down time.

The Animals

We saw Buffalo the first day and could not have been more excited!  Animals!  But later they were to become our biggest dread as they were always blocking traffic just when we needed to get somewhere, like a bathroom, or the condo after a 10 hour day in the park.  They themselves took turns using the road as their bathroom and not messing up the acres and acres of land they could  have used.  By the end of the week we were laughing at all the people stopping to photograph the animals, as we knew it MUST be their first day in the park!

We spotted this nest one day, and the eagle another.  The nest was so large it reminded me of the one Katie Anne has built behind the love seat in the living room.

Our friends came home from Yellowstone just a few days before we left and said they had seen 5 (FIVE!) bears and even a cub.  When we went two days without a sighting, I was starting to worry.  We drove to Cody, Wyoming one day (another story, perhaps even it's own post...) and were THRILLED to see a bear, then over the hill came her cub.  Perfect.  I'm sure they were looking for blueberries, just like in Blueberries For Sal, but were in the wrong part of the world for that.  I'm sure they made due.  On Monday we headed to Lamar Valley where we were assured at least one sighting.  Not ten minutes after we left the condo a huge line of cars were stopped.  We assumed buffalo, but again were THRILLED to find a bear, climbing over logs and putting on a decent show just across the street from where our van had stopped.  Lamar Valley proved a disappointment...in the beginning.  I am not going to type THRILLED 5 (FIVE!) more times, but we were each time.  And the bears were close, but not by our own doing, because I am a very cautious rule obeyer.  They were just there, not too far from the sides of the roads.  One grizzly answered the question, "Where does a bear go in the woods?"  and had us, and a bunch of other spectators, laughing as he actually used the acres and acres of woods and NOT the road for his bathroom. 

I'll spare you the pictures (you can watch for them in the slideshow if you really want to) but we also saw elk, pronghorn, mountain sheep, chipmunks, squirrels, the bluest birds, ginormous mosquitos, and ravens, which John dreamed about pinging off one by one everytime we saw one.

Old Faithful

What is a visit to Yellowstone without a viewing of Old Faithful, though there are more amazing geysers, none are as predictable and user friendly as Old Faithful.  We arrived just minutes before it went off and were thrilled as it shot in the air.  It didn't last very long, so we were told the next one wouldn't be too long to wait for, and it would be bigger and better.  We ate our lunch at the benches and wandered the visitor's center then watched it go again.  They were right.  Bigger AND Better.  We browsed the gift shop in the lodge, looked around a bit, then walked around some of the boardwalks leading to other geysers in the area.  We made it back just in time to see Old Faithful go off again.  It is pretty cool!  There are like 500 geysers in the world and 300 of them are in Yellowstone.  As my neice said, Yellowstone is a pretty cool science project!

Waterfalls

We spent a lot of time visiting the grandeur of the waterfalls.  We hiked Uncle Tom's trail, which has been shortened from over 500 stairs to just 328.  Jelly legs anyone?  Especially John who carried Jane AND Katie Anne up several of those flights of stairs.  Long ago you could go clear to the base of the waterfall, like when John and I spent our honeymoon walking those stairs 13 years ago, but due to mudslides and the desire to quit having to rescue people, that is a bygone era.

There's more but for now...

I spent the week feeling completely overwhelmed at not only the beauty that surrounded me, but the absolute diversity of that beauty.  From steaming hot springs that swallowed the life out of trees leaving their stark nakedness to form a silhouette of remembrance of another time, to mud pots, boiling and gurgling  out of a mysterious cave, to soaring snow covered mountains so high and dropping so far below the road, that you could not see both at the same time, if at all.  And me, sitting there perched on the passenger seat in my mini-van trying to take it all in had a feeling of insignificance, and yet knowing in my bones that the same who created such majestic masterpieces, also created me.