Yellowstone NP --- Lamar Valley

The photo above was taken in the Lamar Valley, on the northeast side of the park.  The tiny black dots are actually bison – there were so many!  

Today was our last full day in Yellowstone.  We woke up to find that it had snowed overnight, and the temperature at 9:30 am was a chilly 35 degrees.  There were icicles hanging from the front bumper of the van, and our site’s picnic table was blanketed with a fluffy white layer of snow.

We made a quick stop at the Canyon Lodge to use the internet.  There isn’t any free wi-fi here in Yellowstone ($5 for an hour – ouch!).  So we took the opportunity to update the blog with a few new posts (thanks for your patience, dear readers!).  We also managed to re-arrange our reservations for Denali National Park in Alaska, based on some advice from one of our neighbors (a wildlife photographer who’s been going there for 50 years and advised us to change our campground choice from Riley Creek to Teklanika.  Which we were able to do – we got the last RV site available, too -- yay!)  We still don’t have a cell phone signal anywhere in the park even though we’ve seen folks with Verizon and AT&T yakking away on their phones.  Thanks a lot, T-Mobile.

Once we got all that business out of the way, the sun finally decided to come out and we headed off for the Lamar Valley.  But first we had to cross Dunraven Pass, the highest road in the park.  Not for the faint of heart, it climbs to an elevation of 8,859 feet with sheer drop-offs and no guard rails in some sections.  Of course it was my day to drive (why I always get stuck with the hair-raising drives, I don’t know).  I would rather have been driving anyway, since most of the scary-steep drop-offs were on Kevin’s side of the car.  At the top of the pass, we were rewarded with a gorgeous view of snow-capped mountain peaks.

We knew we were arriving at the Lamar Valley at the wrong time of day to see big predators like wolves and grizzlies – most of the activity takes place in the early morning hours or in the late evening.  In the afternoon you mostly get plenty of pronghorns, one or two elk, and bison as far as the eye can see.  We enjoyed just doing the drive very much, though.  The scenery was incredible and I especially liked seeing all the adorable baby buffaloes tagging along after their less cuddly-looking moms.

We’ve had a great time here in Yellowstone, and I think we’ve managed to see everything that was on our list, and then some.  We took a risk coming here in early June (at this time last year the place was still covered in four feet of snow, one ranger said).  But I think it paid off – the weather was pretty great, the crowds weren’t too bad, and traffic wasn’t a problem at all.  Seeing Yellowstone in all its glory sure makes me appreciate our country’s fantastic national parks system – we’ve loved the ones we’ve been to so far on the trip, but it was really something special to have a chance to fully explore the park that started it all.