Day 40 – Yellowstone NP WY

And yet another awesome day in Yellowstone. We entered the park at 9am intent on driving the northeast entrance road from Tower Junction to Cooke City MT. We saw two bald eagles across the Madison River sitting on top of two trees. At Canyon we saw a coyote in the meadow. It started to amble towards us, and we stopped. It came right in front of us, looked both ways, and then crossed the road. Amazing.

The we drove our favorite drive in Yellowstone from Canyon to Tower Junction. It was so beautiful. As I was taking a photo of wild flowers, a man told us there was a grizzly people were watching around a corner, so off we went. We could only really see it through the binoculars, but we did see it down in the valley wandering around eating grass. Awesome!

Then we took off on the northeast entrance road. Lamar Valley is the incredibly large valley, and we saw huge herds of buffalo. One was even up by the road grazing. We saw calves running and playing across the Lamar River. And there were no crowds, no ‘animal dams’. All in this beautiful valley. We also saw our first pronghorn antelope in Yellowstone.

We stopped by the Soda Butte Creek for a picnic. Bill had made sandwiches, and we enjoyed ourselves. There was a family group of about 13 people at the table next to us. They all had matching shirts, and I had to ask. They were in Yellowstone celebrating their parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. The parents came over to talk to us since they had seen our NC license plate. They were from Raleigh, too. The dad asked where we were originally from, and when we told him, he went off on a historical chat of Indiana basketball including Everett Case.

At the end of Lamar Valley, we entered a narrow, pine-bordered area and climbed out of the park to Cooke City. This is a small town of 100 people with a 2-block main street. We went in to a small general store that was built in 1907. Bill has been looking for cigars for a week now, and amazingly, he found some good ones here. He was ecstatic.

Then we made the trek back through all the gorgeous valleys and mountains back to the RV. We have basically seen most of what there is to see in Yellowstone. We have traveled on most of the roads, seen most animals except a moose and a wolf. This is one amazing national park.

I posted some more photos on the Yellowstone 4 link to the left from today’s adventures.