27 July 2008

Ruth and I went to Yellowstone National Park last week. We left on Sunday the 20th and returned on the 24th. We traveled to Ragbag, Idaho on Sunday and stayed the night. Monday we proceeded to Yellowstone via the Messa Falls Loop. It took about an hour longer to get through that way but the scenery was spectacular. It was well worth the extra time.

We had reservations at the Canyon Lodge area in one of the cabins. I can’t say much for the accommodations. They were quite primitive. The water was just barely warm. We did see a big bull elk in the cabin area as we drove in but we couldn't’t get a good picture of it through the trees.

Our first stop was at the Upper Yellowstone Falls and then the Lower Yellowstone Falls.
It rained and we had to wait for the next morning to get the picture of the Lower Yellowstone Falls . We proceeded down the East side of the falls where we stopped at the Sulphur Cauldron, Mud Volcano and Dragon's mouth. We saw hundreds of Buffalos and a Coyote. We then stopped at Old Faithful area to see Old Faithful go off. There must have been over a thousand people there when we were. Every where we went the park was crowed with people from all over the world. After Leaving the Old Faithful area we continued up the West side of the park stopping along the way at the Middle Geyser Basin and the Paint Pots. All along the way we saw bison everywhere. We saw elk, deer and beautiful wild flowers of all kinds. It was hot during the day and it rained each night about 6:00 p. m. We could not have had a prettier time to be there. The only drawback was the crowds of people.

We proceeded to the Manmouth Springs area where we went to the Yellowstone Park Museum. While there a cow elk walked through the crowd and peacefully lay down under a tree in front of one of the buildings. We didn’t stay long at Manmouth since we wanted to get back to Star Valley that evening, but we did stop at Lewis Fall and took a picture of the Grand Teton
Mountains as we passed. There was a traffic tie up as we passed the grand Tetons, someone had hit a large black wolf and it was laying in the middle of the road as we passed.

We spent the night in Thayne, Wyoming and visited with Ruth's family the next day before retuning home. As always the time went to fast and we didn’t get to see everything we would have liked too..

Dad

(I reformatted this a bit to help it show up better online. -Newel)