More Yellowstone

When we left Deb at the airport we headed back to Yellowstone. On the way we stopped to watch a bear either playing or taking a bath in a pond. When finished the bear promptly left and walked away. I got a good picture but we are still up in the air as to whether it is a grizzly or black bear because he is soaking wet. His ears are down which makes me think it is a grizzly.

Boy, I can tell that I am getting older. I think we slept for 11 hours that night. We did recover enough to visit some other areas of Yellowstone. We went to the Roosevelt area. It is more rustic and there are stagecoach and trail rides from there. Again we saw a deep canyon cut by the Yellowstone River.

I have been to a number of parks where moose are supposed to be but I have not been able to see one. It has turned into a big joke. So we bought a little stuffed moose at the General Store in Roosevelt. I guess that will have to do for a while.

The area of Mammoth Hot Springs was also very interesting. I could not believe the beauty of the springs. They are very white and tiered like shelves or steps.

We watched three elk graze on the lawn near the visitor center while we ate our picnic lunch.

Then there was this cute little creature that kept coming out from under the porch. We asked and found out that it was a Uinta ground squirrel. He was even joined by a second one.

We drove through the Upper, Middle and Lower Geyser sections north of Old Faithful.

There was even a swimming area on the Firehole River. As we returned home we saw a female elk and two of her young crossing the road.

It began to get colder each night and we finally gave in and turned on the heater the last two nights. We enjoyed playing some cards each evening. We also had dinner on Friday night with our special friends from Indiana – Lanie & Rhonda and Chris & Donna.

Oh, and the other special animal was a squirrel. He came to visit us each evening around 8:30. Except we never saw him, just heard him. He was up in the ceiling of our cabin. We figured he was busy storing up nuts for the winter. Here is Bob’s picture of the squirrel. (You just have to be able to see through the tree trunk).

It was 44 degrees when we left Yellowstone Park on Saturday. We had a long, long drive to Glacier National Park in Montana, over 470 miles. It was a good day and we even stopped at another national park in Deer Lodge. It was a working ranch of 1600 acres where we spent about 1 ½ hours. We could have looked for another couple of hours but we needed to get on the road again. We reached our destination at 9:30 p.m. and the temperature was over 90. Not quite what we were expecting.