Sam and Kate

Yellowstone

, 1.03.2012

We went to Yellowstone for our anniversary slash new year slash annual escape.  When we got here we were both nursing colds so for the first couple days we just drank tea and watched Star Trek Voyager on Netflix.  Luckily for us, we started feeling better right when the weather cleared up.

Saturday - we went xc skiing around West Yellowstone.  There are ski trails everywhere, and we took one that took us down to the Madison River - the Riverside Up trail.  The trail was groomed about half-way until a Y, where the trail split to Up and Down trails.  Only the down trail was groomed. We took the road less traveled because the groomed trail was already murdered by a beginner skate skier ahead of us that left diagonal gashes everywhere.  We're glad we did.  The path was skinny - just the grooves left by lots of skiers.  It rolled gently downhill until the it curved to run parallel to the river.  After a few miles along the river, the nice grooves disappeared.  We found our way thanks to orange tags and arrows that marked the path, and you could see where skiers had gone most of the time, but it had snowed quite a bit since anyone went this way.   There was fresh powder from the last 24 hours of snowfall. The trail turned back up into the hillside and we had to climb a really steep hill, which is awkward in skis, until joining up to a trail at the top that took us through the trees and into Yellowstone park.  There were rabbit and coyote prints winding through the trees.  It was nice to escape the sound of snow-mobiles, and nice to do something physically challenging.

Sunday - we jumped in the car and headed further into Montana.  We drove toward Ennis, along the Madison River and past Hebgen and Earthquake Lakes.  We slowed down when Sam spotted a bighorn sheep on the road.  We stopped and stared for a while, angry we'd forgotten the camera.  Then we continued, and about 100 feet later, we saw a huge herd of bighorn sheep, at the bottom of someone's ranch road.  At first we counted about fifty, but then more joined up.  I think we saw close to one hundred big horn sheep, male, female, and juveniles.  I loved the baby bighorns - they had fuzzy necks and downy coats.  It was such an impressive sight.  They were digging through the snow to find grasses and roots to eat.  Now I was really disappointed we'd forgotten the camera.  We continued on toward Ennis, past Cameron, where you could see the towering peaks at Big Sky to the east.    We planned on looping back by heading east at Norris and then back south to W. Yellowstone through the pass that goes by Big Sky, but a big accident halted all traffic both ways and we had to double back the way we came.  We stopped and ate at a pizza place for dinner and browsed the real estate magazines they had there.  A 20-acre ranch for $200,000?  Yes, please!

Monday - we took a snowmobile tour into Yellowstone Park.  We left around 8:30am and the temperature was hovering around zero (fahrenheit).  We had bundled up but that first leg was so cold I could barely keep my eyes open.  But the day was beautiful, and the snowmobile trail followed the Madison River upstream to the Firehole.  We stopped at Firehole Falls and our camera wasn't working.  (The cold weather makes our camera think it's out of battery).  So we got no pictures until later when the day had warmed up and our camera came back to life.  Anyway.  Firehole Falls looked like a scene straight out of Narnia during the White Witch's reign.  In fact, the whole parked looked like a fantasy/sci-fi world.  Firehole falls is a medium-sized waterfall, and the early morning mist was rising off the water and the wind from the falls sent it billowing over our heads.  The spray covered every rock and branch with white crystals.

As we climbed uphill, the mist got so thick in places we could barely see the snowmobile in front of us - just thick white fog.  We made a couple more stops to look out points and thermal features and the day started to warm up.  We got to Old Faithful around 11, and watched the geyser erupt.  It starts with sputtering some water, then again, only taller spray, and then it starts roaring and rumbling and shoots water dozens of feet in the air.  The mist from the water was so thick you couldn't really see the water, but the roaring was impressive.  We ate our lunches of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and tried to warm up in the stove-warmed yurts near Old Faithful.  We stayed and watched a second eruption of Old Faithful, and this one was bigger and louder.  We also found out about a few more geysers that are cooler, bigger, louder, and better, but they're either less predictable or they only erupt every 14 hours.

We boarded our snowmobiles once more, and headed to a look-out point.  This would have been the quintessential Yellowstone photo, if it weren't for our silly camera.  Imagine, if you will, a panorama of mountains, a cold but still totally unfrozen river winding through a valley where dozens of bison roam, the mist from the hotspots winding through the trees...  It was really pretty.

The next stop was the Fountain Paint pots, where we discovered our camera had woken up!  This place, I can finally present a picture or two:



These pots are essentially little mounds of boiling mud. They sound so nice as well, glub glub glub.

We walked from there down a boardwalk that took us through two geysers that happened to be erupting at the same time, on either side of us.





 And to this one.


From here we stopped once or twice more for wildlife or photos.  Here are some of the photos of the ride home.