Yellowstone is full of Rivers, Lakes and Waterfalls ...
... Mountains and Valleys ...
...and Thermal Activity. This my 8th or 9th visit to Yellowstone, Marcia's 4th or 5th. One can take pictures of the scenery. Once you have seen Old Faithful shoot off a dozen times, you don't have as much enthusiasm to sit around and wait for it to go off again. We both agree that the one thing that you can't get enough of is the wild animals. So over the course of three different trips in the park this visit, we tried to get pictures of different animals. Below is a pictorial of our visit.
BEAR
All the bears we saw were in the general area of where the turnoff to the Lamar Valley was. Each time there were Park Rangers, once three of them, keeping the traffic moving, and keeping people inside their cars. Rules are, you must be 100 yards away (or more) from the bears. Looked like one of them was a Grizzly Bear (4th picture).
DEER
This is the only picture we got of any Deer, and I think there are four in the picture. This was taken on the road to Lamar Valley, about 1-2 miles in from the Loop Road. (If you have never been to Yellowstone, there are two loops which touch, forming a rough looking number "8", with five other roads connecting into the loops, two on the top loop of the "8" and three on the bottom loop of the "8".) We "might" have seen deer three or four other times on our whole trip from Florida...what's up with that???
ELK
The Elk we saw was in the Madison River Area. You need to look close at the first Elk picture, there are three Elk in that picture, two are down in a small stream and you can barely make them out. We did not see the herd of Elk that are typically found Mammoth Hot Springs area, but we did not go north of the Visitor Center, and they could have been up there.
PRONGHORN
In the bottom picture there is a mother, and two newborns...but the mother is hovering over one of the newborns and you can't see it very well. The other newborn is attempting to stand. These Pronghorns were at the start of the Lamar Valley.
SANDHILL CRANE
I did not know that there are Sandhill Cranes in Yellowstone. Our first sighting had the Cranes way out in the meadow...I did not get any good pictures...but later in the same area we found a few much closer. The Cranes were the Norris area.
BUFFALO
Buffalo can be seen all over the park. In May most of them are still in the "Herd" that is in Lamar Valley. But you can also find them along the road, or out in groups of 2-5 Buffalo out in a meadow. We saw some near Old Faithful, near Madison, near Mammoth ... but most of them were still in the Lamar Valley. Give them another month or two and they will be clogging up the roadways, bringing traffic to a standstill. They are a magnificent beast.
I have now been to Yellowstone in May, June, July, August and September. Each month brings a new view of Yellowstone...as I am sure the views during the other months do too.
We moved from West Yellowstone to the Bill Frome Memorial RV Park along the western side of Henrys Lake....$15 per night with no utilities. It was a very peaceful place. Today we moved to a park we found in 2020, the Juniper Campground near Idaho Falls. We will be here through Sunday, then back to Salt Lake City, then head back to Sacramento.
