The Yellowstone Adventure

Welcome to the very long, very pictorial, chronicle of our adventures.  Here we go:

Here is Miss Boo, the way she was for much of the trip, on Daddy's back.  We took one of the days before we went to the park and went to a local recreation area near Grandma's house.

A pretty recreation area, with a lake and picnic tables.  Gave us some practice, although we had an incident in one of the bathrooms...

...there was a phantom pooper who neither aimed nor apparently tried to aim, but just went au naturel in the middle of the outhouse floor.  Hope the state park people have caught him by now...

Luckily the Poo Phantom couldn't befoul the outdoors.  It was a gorgeous day.

Some of us did some fishing (those of us with licenses).

Others just enjoyed the scenery.

Another little hike in the vicinity of Grandma's house, this one started off next to a pasture full of Angus cattle.  I mooed at them for the entertainment of the Husband's 12-year-old cousin, and they mooed back, to her delight.  By the end of the trip she would learn I can bleat like a goat, too.

Here is how Brother rode most of the time.  (Actually, since Miss Boo has decided his new official nickname is Buddy, we'll call him Buddy from now on, ok?)

I include this picture, which was actually meant to be a picture of the party, because some of you reading the blog may not be as innured to pictures of mountains as I am.  Those are real; we saw them all the time.  Pretty, aren't they?  At this point we were still only around 4800 ft. above sea level; by the end of the trip we'd be at 10,000 ft above sea level.

Same mountains, just a picture of the cow pasture.

Miss Boo fell asleep alot.

This is Yellowstone, near the thermal features, aka puddles of pretty-colored, steaming water that can boil your skin off if you fall in.  (Really.  People die from being par-boiled in there and there are warning signs all over the place telling you to KEEP ON THE PATH, for THE LOVE OF PETE, KEEP ON THE EVER-LOVIN' PATH, THAT'S WHY WE PUT THE PATH THERE!!!!)

You can kinda see a thermal feature in the distance here, that bluish thing to the left middle of the picture.  I think there might be one near the 12-year-old cousin, there, too, the alkali dirt.

We all got gravel in our shoes, from carefully keeping on the path.

Opa, Grandma, and the other cousin, with a thermal feature in the upper left-hand-corner.  That thermal feature trickles out across the path, but there are stepping-stone sort of dealies and apparently it's not so hot by the time the trickle reaches the path.  You hope.

Me and Buddy (asleep) with a thermal feature (steaming) in the background.  It was a hot day.

I didn't take a picture of Old Faithful, perhaps the most famous thermal feature, because anyone can see pictures of Old Faithful with the help of Google.  Instead, here is a picture of Miss Boo and Grandma inside Old Faithful Lodge, looking up at the clock.  Yes, the fireplace really is that big.  (I don't know whose leg that is.  We didn't know him.  I was sitting down.)

Miss Boo loved the Lodge.

She walked around and around the fireplace with Grandma, a welcome change from being either in a carseat or a backpack...

...and even made it look so fun that random kids kept wandering up to be near her.

I had one of my pregnancy-related sinking spells in the Lodge, and had to have an icy Coke or I would have melted into a puddle of goo.  So, although I had to pay $2.10 for a fountain pop (plus tax) that probably cost the soda counter all of 23 cents, I did get an icy drink and I did get to watch Old Faithful erupt from the balcony at the Lodge, instead of schlepping around the walkway at the foot of the geyser.  So it all worked out.

That night we stayed at Grant Village.  The mosquitoes were breeding in a happy frenzy on the lake and swarmed us every time we went outside, so we stayed inside until dinner time and let the kids try on our hats.  Miss Boo is a hat person.

So is Buddy, to a somewhat lesser extent.

We had lots of toys and snacks in the backseat.  I started off the vacation with a clean car.

It was not clean by the end of the vacation.  This is Buddy's reaction to having to wait in the car while Daddy gets the keys to the hotel room.  Not.  Cool.

We got this little paper when we stopped, telling us the history of Grant Village.  Actually we got a little paper everywhere we stopped in the park, all of which were informational and historical and all.  If you examine this page:

you will find a sentence which claims that the National Parks system was "the best idea America ever had" which sort of gave me pause.  Really?  Better than, like, ending slavery, or giving the vote to women, or the Bill of Rights?  Better than the airplane?  Better than the light bulb and electricity?

But there it is, in black and white.  Hm.

Here's a little buck deer in velvet.  We'd just entered the animal-heavy part of the park and we were picture happy.

Here's a pretty lake I don't remember the name of, and my hand in the side mirror because I was taking the picture out of the window of a moving car.

Here's a group of very silly tourists from a nation that shall remain nameless but which consumes the most sushi per capita in the world.  They are holding up traffic and ignoring a basic commandment of Yellowstone Park:

When you enter the park, you're given a stack of paper and a little thing to hang on your rear-view mirror, and they all say one thing very clearly in six languages:

"DO NOT APPROACH THE BUFFALO!"

and

"MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN GORED BY BUFFALO!"

and

These warnings are accompanied by a drawing of a guy getting gored in the butt, with a splutch of blood coming out of the goring.  So why were they standing four feet from this big angry buffalo bull, eh?

Catch us standing near the buffalo.  We drove on to the mud volcanoes, pools of hot bubbling mud that nevertheless are frequented by...

...you guessed it, big mean stinky buffalo.  We did not approach them, though they did look very irritable.  It was a hot day.  Can't imagine how hot it would be in a buffalo robe.

Here's the mud volcano.  (Note: not a real volcano, it just shoots mud in the air sometimes.  Presumably it's really a kind of geyser.)

Some more buffalo...

...one in a wallow...

...a whole herd of irritable, hot, cranky, tourist-goring buffalo.

Here's a picture of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from the next day.  We stayed at Canyon Village that night, a nice little hotel with a lot of winding trails around the rim of the canyon.

A rock mysteriously balanced on a pinacle of rock, which makes you want to blow really hard and try to tip it.  (It didn't work.)

It's hard to feel the scale, but trust me, this was big.

Opa with the canyon in the background, at a place we hiked to see some waterfalls...

The waterfalls..

And me, proving I was up that high and didn't faint or die.

Here's some people walking up and down these itty-bitty stairs on one side of the canyon, trying to get to the brink of the lower falls.  We sensibly took the paved, switch-back trail, the one with benches to stop and rest.  Here is what the brink looked like:

...and I was there, so ha!  I did it, and I didn't faint or die.

Here's the river.  Green, isn't it?

This is a smudge.  But in real life, it was a baby black bear.  Sorry the smudge is all I have.

We went driving one evening and saw a couple of grizzly bears, but Buddy was in a screaming fit in the back seat because he couldn't figure out how to fall asleep, so this is the only picture I took.  I still think sunset in Yellowstone is pretty, even if I didn't get the grizzlies.

Buddy didn't like being woken up in the carrier.

Oma, and...

...Miss Boo and Uncle Deeve all at the brink of the upper falls, the next day.

A bull elk in velvet.

Another bear smudge...

There were two rangers with radios standing beside the road.  We asked them why, and the pointed to this:

A black bear, which looked like a baby to us but which they said was about two.  Apparently it had been released from captivity not long before, or was an orphan, or something.  We weren't entirely clear.  However, for some reason two rangers had to be present to protect a bear.  Maybe the tourists who were bothering the buffalo were lurking in the underbrush.  If their butts had recovered, that is.

Then we hiked around the rim of another canyon, up and up and up a windy trail until we found these mountain goats.  The 12-year-old cousin asked if I could call to the goats, so I raised my nose and bleated plaintively like our milk goats used to.

They listened.

Then I felt it was going to rain so we all booked it down off the mountain, and sure enough wham!  We had just reached the car when big splatting drops started coming down, filling the air with the scent of sage and making us wet.  It was time to drive a bit.

We passed a coyote, which I include merely because we thought, until he stood up and yapped at a fly, that he might have been a wolf.  But standing, he was undoubtedly a coyote.  The only wolves we saw were in a zoo/animal sanctuary in West Yellowstone, of which Miss Boo's favorite part was a concrete "wolf cave" she got to go in and out of.

We drove up, and up, and up, to 10,000 ft. above sealevel, into the Beartooth Mountains, and ended up at a place called Top of the World.  (I think the real top of the world is in the Himalayas, but who's counting."

And here's the happy family (in the wind, my hair doesn't really do that), on our last night in the wilderness.

After all this, we drove via Red Lodge (where we had ice cream) back to Grandma's house, ate at a Mexican restaurant (where Buddy discovered he really likes beans and Miss Boo discovered she really likes maracas), and then made our weary way home, to collect the dog from the vet's.

(He had barked himself hoarse, and couldn't whine without coughing, but we were able to keep him quiet with cookies until his throat got better.)

Yellowstone was exciting, but there's no place like home.

Cheers,

Breanna