On Thursday, we drove back to the East Entrance of Yellowstone, our fourth trip on this road. We only stopped once in the park on this day, at LeHardys Rapids on the Yellowstone River. I saw on eBird that Harlequin Ducks are seen there regularly, but on this morning, I could only find a single female. Still … I also finally saw a Dipper.
We drove south out of the park on the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway and into Grand Teton National Park. We never planned on staying long. Our goal was to see the mountains. Here are some of the places (north to south) from where we did just that. They are beautiful, of course, but we still can’t see what the French dudes who names the place imagined they saw.
We stopped at Colter Bay Village, walked around a bit, bought some souvenirs, and, rather spontaneously, decided to eat lunch at the John Colter Ranch House restaurant. We split a burger, a order of nachos, and a piece of huckleberry cheesecake. It was ridiculously expensive, as all food in National Parks is. It was also very tasty, as all food (that I’ve had anyway) in National Parks generally is.
As we drove south through the park, we saw some Bison and a few of the famous Jackson Hole Elk. We also stopped at an overlook above the Snake River, where Ansel Adams took his famous photo. There was a sign board telling exactly where he stood.
Here’s his photo.
Here’s mine.
Naturally, I took it in color. The clouds added a dramatic element.
My wife wanted to see Jackson, so we drove through town without stopping. I know there’s more to Grand Teton than that, but we’d seen what we came to see. Our route south through Wyoming was amazing at first, and we figured we’d lucked on another drive as pretty as our destination, but things soon flattened out. Before we got to our hotel in Rock Springs, the world was flat and brown and dull. We bought McDonald’s and ate it in our room. I wandered around Rock Springs in search of birds, but saw nothing worth the walk.
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We drove through Lamar Valley at Yellowstone looking for animals (but especially for wolves). We saw several ground squirrels run across the road in front of the car. On one of the occasions when we pulled over, my wife said there was one in the grass just below her car window. I got out to try for a photo, but they (there were at least two in the immediate area) kept mostly hidden, with just a glimpse now and again as they dashed between clumps of vegetation. That is until one climbed up in a sage bush about 20 feet away and posed for me.
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We had two goals at Yellowstone today — to look for wolves and other wildlife in Lamar Valley and to see the falls of the Yellowstone River. To avoid retracing our path from the day before, we drove to the Northeast Entrance of the park via the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway. This was 47 miles of paved, nearly empty road with beautiful scenery. And just before we got to the park, the road popped up into Montana, a state my wife hadn’t been in before.
Before long, we were in Lamar Valley. We soon happened upon a couple who were watching Mountain Goats on the cliffs to the north. They said, and I later confirmed, that the goats are not native to the park but have wandered in from introduced populations in Montana.
We saw Mule Deer, Bison, Pronghorns (a few), and way off in the distance, a couple Elk. We did not see any wolves. I found a guy who was set up next to the road with a scope and camera. He didn’t have a lot to say, but he seemed to know what he was doing. He had a dachshund chained to a wire cage. The dog kept dragging the cage off into the sage in pursuit of Uinta Ground Squirrels. The guy told me he’d seen wolves earlier that day, but then he proceeded to tell me why it was unlikely that I’d see any, so he may have been talking through his hat.
It was a beautiful morning, a little chilly but much warmer than the day before. And Lamar Valley was beautiful, even without wolves.
Later in the day, when we’d looked for wolves in all the most likely places and had pretty much resigned ourselves to not seeing any, we were in a gift shop when I heard a woman in neon sweatpants say to a friend, “Did you see that black wolf that was standing in the middle of the road this morning?” I resented her then, and I still resent her now.
We came across a large crowd of people looking at a Black Bear. I pulled over and joined the throng and saw this. It was about 40 yards back in the woods.
The next two photos are the views from two overlooks where we stopped. I’m not sure exactly where we were. At the first site, a pair of Osprey were nesting right across the canyon.
Our drive took us up and over Dunraven Pass (8,859 feet) past Mount Washburn (10,243 feet). Nowhere on this trip did I have any issues with altitude, apart from being a little out of breath a few times when climbing stairs and such.
Just south of Canyon Village, a Black Bear was grazing in the grass right next to the road. People were stopping to look, and a ranger in a little golf cart was honking his horn to get people to keep moving. It was not exactly idyllic. To keep from adding to the problem, I just had my wife take some photos out the car window as we passed.
A little further, we found another large crowd watching a herd of Elk in a clearing. I noticed, with a lot of these animal sightings, a ranger was right there controlling the people and answering questions. I’m guessing many of the animals are tagged so the park can keep track of them and get to the spot when they get close to people. I took one photo, again without stopping, to prove we saw them. It’s pretty obvious that at least one of them was tagged.
Our next stop was the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. This was indeed impressive. Except maybe for the woman standing next to us who pointed to the people just visible on a platform next to the brink. She said, “Those people, is that where we were? Make sure you get a photo of those people. I’m going to take a photo of those people, those people standing next to the falls. We need to get a photo of them because that’s where we were.” She kept on like this for an annoyingly long time — so long that my wife gave up on the view and wandered off. This falls is 308 feet high.
We drove around to the other side of the rive to see the 109-foot Upper Falls. It wasn’t as impressive, but still pretty.
We drove through Hayden Valley again (we’d been there the day before) without seeing any wildlife more exciting than Sandhill Cranes and Barrow’s Goldeneyes — which wasn’t bad. We stopped at Fishing Bridge to buy stuff at the gift shop and then headed back toward Cody.
We passed Yellowstone Lake and the spot where we’d seen the Grizzly the day before when we happened upon a herd of maybe eight Bighorn Sheep. They were crossing the road and taking their time about it.
A younger one walked out in front of our car, turned around and reared up. I caught it on video and later took a screenshot of that exact moment to make it look like it was walking on its hind legs. Everyone I showed the photo to thought it was photo-shopped.
Just outside the park, just after we’d seen two Grizzly Bears, we pulled over at a picnic area so I could look for a Dipper. I didn’t see one. My wife took over the driving and, a minute later, we saw another Grizzly. More about that here.
We got back to Cody much earlier than we had the night before. We decided on a sit-down meal and ended up at a little place on the backside of town called the Hungry Bear. It served Italian comfort food, and it was very good. It was also obviously a hangout for locals and not a big tourist hotspot, which was nice.
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Nine Mile Trailhead – Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Tuesday, June 18, 2024 – 6:13 pm
We spent the entire day in the park looking at waterfalls and geysers and boiling ponds. We didn’t concentrate on seeing wildlife, but we kept our eyes open — especially for lines of cars pulled over along the road.
We had just passed Yellowstone Lake on the East Entrance Road when we saw a line. I slowed down next to a car with a young boy sitting on the windowsill. I asked him what he was looking at, and he said he didn’t know. I pulled forward into an open spot next to some orange cones and asked the three or four people there what they were seeing. A guy told me it was a bear.
I looked down into an area along the lake that had recently been burned. Many of the trees were down. Not far off, I could see a brown bear nosing along the ground.
I hadn’t done a lot of planning for this trip, which meant that I had no idea what I was most likely to see. I thought Black Bears were the obvious bears in the park, and that Grizzlies kept out of sight. So I assumed this was a Black Bear. Then I noticed the hump.
About this time, a ranger drove up. He yelled at a couple people who had gone beyond the orange cones. It turns out that they were there to warn of bears in the area. My guess is that the bears are electronically tagged and that the park keeps pretty close tabs on where they wander. I asked him, and he confirmed that it was a Grizzly. He said the Grizzlies were much more likely to be seen in open areas like this and that Black Bears keep to the woods.
The bear didn’t really do much, just moved slowly while foraging among the downed trees. We stayed perhaps five minutes, then headed back to our hotel in Cody.
The next day we went to Lamar Valley to look for wildlife. A tour guide was showing his group a sow Grizzly with two cubs way up on a mountainside. I could see them through my binoculars, but it wasn’t a very satisfactory view.
The real action happened later in the afternoon, after we had actually left the park. Three or four cars were parked along the North Fork Highway. Six or seven people were standing there looking at two young Grizzlies about 20 yards up the hillside across the road. We were really too close. One of the guys said that was about as close to a Grizzly as he wanted to get. They were partly hidden in the grass at first, then they walked up the hillside into the woods. The first one didn’t stop, but the second one paused and gave us a good looking-over before he followed his friend. I don’t know how old they were, but they certainly weren’t as big as the one I’d seen the day before, or anywhere near as big as they can get.
I stopped a little way further up at a pullover to look for Dippers in the creek that ran along the road. Sally took over the driving, and we’d only gone a short way when I spotted yet another Grizzly right along the road on the other side. I had Sally pull over, and while she yelled at me to stay in the car, I got out and began taking photos — making sure the car was between me and the bear. It was a small bear, even smaller than the two others I’d just seen.
I had only taken a couple shots when it started across the road. I suddenly found myself 15 yards from a wild Grizzly Bear with no car between us. I took one last photo and scrambled into the car. (I’d kept the door open.) Because of my bum knee, my scramble wasn’t swift or graceful. I looked in the mirror to see how narrow an escape I’d had, only to see the Grizzly make a fast dash at an angle away from me and into the woods.
I saw a total of seven Grizzlies. There are close to 1,000 in the greater Yellowstone area, with perhaps as many as 200 living in the park full-time. We also saw two Black Bears.
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I’ve seen lots of bison in state and national parks, but I waited until I saw them at Yellowstone before I added them to my list. The bison at Yellowstone are pure, without any cattle blood. And they are the only bison herd in the U.S. that is wild and that has always lived here. Of course they are closely monitored and controlled, but still this is as close to a wild bison as you can get.
They aren’t hard to see. There are almost 5,000 in the park. I saw individual scattered throughout the northern half of the park — in valleys, on hillsides, in small clearings. Some were alone, some were in loose groups of just a few bison, and some were in big herds. There were a lot of newborn calves around.
The bison paid no attention to humans. They grazed right along the roads and even wander out into traffic. We were stuck in a jam for about 30 minutes later on this day while a herd crossed a busy road. One large bull walked slowly through the parking lot and across the road at the Fishing Pier store and disappeared into the woods.
Here’s the first one I saw.
The rest of these photos were taken at various times in the park on this day and the next.
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