Where the Buffalos Roam

Day 4: Yellowstone National Park, WY - North Loop. Trip Total 1,683 miles.

We survive the night, and wake up to another cold morning: 41F. It’s a lot more relaxed not having to pack up the tent and attempt to get my sleeping bag back in it’s back (yesterday took 3 attempts to roll it tight enough, much to my brothers amusement). We eat, and plan to have the easiest day of the trip so far – just drive the north loop of the park today - around 150 miles. Katie is excited, can’t wait to see her first Buffalo, and really wants to see a bear and a wolf.

Almost immediately after leaving the campsite, we stop to look at a river running along the road, turns out this river runs through the Hudson Valley, and we’ll be driving alongside it for much of the morning.

Back in the car, and within another mile we are stopped again with a bunch of other cars – this time it’s Elk crossing the road, with dozens of tourists taking pictures, so we join in.

Then a couple more miles, and we are at the spectacular Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and get out for a walk around, surrounded by many more tourists with cameras.

Back on the road, and straight into an area containing numerous hot springs, where we see our first Buffalo. And second. And third. And forth…. Walking on the road in front of cars, walking through the parking lots, sitting next to the wooden walkways preventing people from going up, or down the hill.

Then on through the valley, the rolling countryside filled with herd after herd of buffalo.

After a while, having stopped about 4 times a mile, and taken several thousand pictures, you realize you are basically looking at a herd of cows. Big, scary looking cows with horns that weigh half a ton and can run at 30mph, but still cows. I comment to my brother that whenever I look at big game, my first thought is about what they taste like, or what they might taste like if I’ve never eaten them. Being a veggie, he couldn’t relate.

We decide to skip further buffalo’s, and look for other animals instead. We take turns driving, while the other person and Katie scans the woods for animals. It’s amazing how many stumps look like animals at first glance, but we do find the occasional animal.

And then there is my brother:

“Per-aps if I sell more onions, I’ll be able to buy a real beret!”

A little further round there are lots of parked cars, and a warden directing traffic – we stop, turns out we’ve just missed a black bear that just headed off into the woods. Katie is disappointed – I explain again that this is my third time there and I’ve never seen a bear in the park, so don’t get disappointed but we’ll keep looking. We drive a little further round the corner and park, since the bear is heading roughly this way, and get up on the roof of the car to see if we can see it. Pretty much every car that passes stops and asks us if we can see the bear. After about 10 minutes we give up, and go back to searching for stumps. We make several other stops, mainly for stumps, before having lunch at the Roosevelt Lodge. People are talking about the bear we missed, and a Grizzly that was fishing in the river earlier in the day, very close to our campsite. Wonderful.

Then shortly after lunch, we hit the jackpot. Numerous cars parked by the side of the road, a couple of wardens directing traffic, and a black bear down in a field below the road. And an extremely excited Katie. I get out my Nikon D300, put on the Nikon 200-400mm Lens with 1.7x teleconverter, and spend the next half hour watching the bear walk across the field, cross a ditch, climb a hillside and disappear into the trees, then re-emerge right below us. Katie is ecstatic, and extremely patient just sitting there with us watching the bear.

Eventually the bear wanders off, and we head on round to the impressive Mammoth Hot Springs. I'll let the pictures do the talking:

By the time we walk all the way to the top up, the altitude is really getting to me, Katie is complaining her legs ache and she can’t walk any further, and we find a second parking lot at the very top. With great amusement, my brother volunteers to go get the car and bring it up for us, while reminding me that I’ll be 40 soon and he understands I’m getting old. He walks back the way we came, laughing. Git.

We continue round the north loop, the terrain gets rockier and steeper, searching for more animals, finding mostly stumps, and lots of Buffalo. And then in the final part of the drive back we make two sudden stops:

The first one, a coyote runs across the road in front of us, and up to the right of us – I grab the camera my brother is using and take pictures out of the car window. Katie is thrilled, and goes back to her wolf impressions - that is until we reminder her, that according to the paperwork they gave us when we arrived, it is actually illegal to make animal calls in the park.

Then as I’m driving the final stretch, my brother gets excited saying there is something big down there drinking out of the river. We stop the car quickly, I grab the Nikon D300 and the big Nikon 200-400mm Lens, and focus on the animal. My brother is standing behind me, asking excitedly “what is it?”. I take a picture and let him have the camera to see for himself. He laughs - yet another stump:

We head on back to the camp, finding more stumps, and get back with plenty of time to get a fire going and eat before sundown. I spend most of the evening transferring over 2,000 photos to my laptop then backing up to a couple of external drives, while my brother entertains Katie (or is that the other way round) by the campfire. I notice my brother has a significant number of pictures of animal’s rears, so I ask him if there is anything he’s not telling me.

For the past couple of nights, Katie and my brother have been regularly tripping over the tent pegs much to my amusement. So they find it rather funny when shortly after dark a tent peg sends me flying and nearly brings the tent down.

By about 11:00pm the fire has dies down, it’s got cold, Katie is so happy she’s seen her bear and a coyote (almost a wolf), and time for another night in the tent.