From Moving Road Trip

Me and Bunsen in front of Bunsen Peak. And yes, that's really what it's called. Destiny, I'm telling you.

Sorry for the paucity of posts over the last couple of days - Yellowstone kind of requires long days and early starts to get the most out of it. The photos we've been posting link to our photo album from the trip, so you can check out a ton more snaps of animals, geothermal sites (ooooh, science!), waterfalls, and other neat stuff. Highlights include a 12-point bull elk, dueling pronghorns, extreme bison closeups, and my attempts to learn to skip rocks at Yellowstone Lake. We were really fortunate to get to see a lot more animals (I think we saw all the large mammals other than grizzlies, moose, and wolves) that the pictures show - a lot of times the animals are just too far away or the lighting's too bad to get decent images. We saw a couple of coyotes, but they tend to live in sagebrush meadows and don't show up in the photos really at all because of the plant cover.

While at Yellowstone we stayed in Gardiner, MT, which is right above the north entrance and probably one of the least happening towns I've ever been in, but what a view! It's just a few miles from Mammoth Hot Springs inside the park, and we got quite a surprise driving through the Springs Saturday afternoon when we saw a herd of elk (cows and calves) just hanging out on the lawn of the visitor's center, much to the chagrin of park staff. We also got to experience a couple of bison traffic jams while out in the Lamar Valley Sunday morning - I still haven't determined if it's proper road etiquette to pass a bison on the right, and also feeling a little guilty for startling a calf as we weaved our way through a herd crossing the road.

Yellowstone really is a massively cool place. I'm no camping-and-roughing-it nature girl, but it's hard not be impressed by the sheer magnitude of the place and how much the landscape and wildlife changes as you move through the park. The pictures really don't do it justice - there's this depth and vibrancy to the landscape and the light that gets lost in translation. At some point over the last couple of days I ran out of superlatives to describe it, so just trust me when I say that this is one place that you need to visit at some point during your lifetime. Yes, it's in the middle of nowhere, but that's the beauty of it. I'm certainly the type to roll my eyes at breathless exhortations to preserve the wilderness when thinking about it in the abstract, but seeing Yellowstone up close leads me to get the concept a little better, even if I do still think that the granola crowd gets a little carried away sometimes.

And for fun, here's another photo - this is the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River:

From Moving Road Trip