More Yellowstone Memories.

Yellowstone's wildlife is amazing. It's everywhere. The only place I've visited where there is more wildlife on display acre-for-acre is Florida. Everywhere we drove and everywhere I hiked I encountered all sorts of animals. They call in "America's Serengeti", and I suppose that's true. And with the return of the wolf to the Park, we have our chief top predator back in the mix.

Wolves were about the only thing we never saw when we were in the Park. We did visit Lamar Valley, where sightings of wolves is most common, but we never did see one. The closest we came to seeing a wolf was a coyote--and that was a young, shy one who hid behind a big evergreen tree and wouldn't come out where I could take a good photo.

My main goal was to see a grizzly bear while we were in Yellowstone. And I saw two of them. Both were from a distance, and one was fast asleep. He was taking a nap along the collapsed banks of the Lamar River. I took his photo from a very great distance, which is the way I always want to see a grizzly bear.

If you look in the center of this photo, you can see the griz asleep in the dirt.

Here's the cropped version of the photo with the sleeping bear.

The true emblem of the faded Pleistocene: the American bison.

I expected to see a lot of pronghorn, but we saw very few of them in Yellowstone. This one, like the griz above, was in the Lamar Valley.

When I go back to Yellowstone, I hope to spend most of the time in the Lamar Valley. It was, to me, the prettiest part of the Park. It was also the least crowded with humans.

There was a trail leading to the top of this peak. I plan to hike it when I return.

To illustrate how fragile the thermal features are in the Park, here is a geyser that was active in the early history of the Park, but which is now cold and dormant.


It took this panorama from the high ridges of a 10K-foot peak (Mount Washburn). It's the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone seen from thousands of feet above the rim of the canyon. The air was hazy in that part of the Park that day because of some forest fires (that quickly faded out by the next day).

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

One of the shorter hikes I took was along the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Here, the Yellowstone River cuts through the soft volcanic ash laid down long ago by various eruptions. The river carved right through this malleable stuff and so we're left to see this impressive gorge through which the river continues to carve its route from Yellowstone Lake and to the lowlands.

The day I hiked this, we'd had a full day of journeying around the Park. I'd gotten up early in the day to hike up Mount Washburn. Then we drove over to Lamar Valley where I did some more short hikes, and then followed that up with a jaunt through Hayden Valley and back to Canyon Village where we parked along the rim to view the waterfalls.

Of course I had to get in a little more hiking. I generally try to keep my hiking totals to about ten miles per day, and I was already past that. But I figured the hike down the staircase trail to view the falls would only add another mile or so. What I didn't realize is that I was hiking in a full two miles above the stairs! In short, I ended up hiking four miles when I could have just driven down the road a short distance and caught the top of the staircase trail.

Walk and learn.

At any rate, I never begrudge a mile hiked. It's my favorite past time, so if I accidentally ended up hiking a little more than usual, that was okay with me. Carole and Andy were tired from the walking they'd done, so they had to wait for me a little longer than what we'd planned.

So it goes.

The colors in the canyon walls are amazing. As the sun changes angle, so do the colors.

I took this one from the Rim Trail.

You can see people standing beside the lip of the falls on the overlook on the other side. But you have to wonder when--and it will eventually happen--that ledge of stone is going to give way and the waterfall will advance upstream a little farther.

After hiking for two needless miles, I come to the top of the staircase leading down.

Yep. That there is a bunch of stairs. Just one leg of the series.

The sun was setting, lighting up the canyon with all sorts of new tints and shadows.

Looking back up the vast staircase on my way back to the rim of the canyon.

From the rim I could look back on Mount Washburn which I had climbed that morning.

I took this one from the other end of the rim trail.

More color.

What a place! The river in the bottom was like a ribbon of blue-green.