4/16/14

This morning we had a few visitors to the campground. They stayed about an hour.
 

I was going to walk up to the camp office to complete our check-in, since it was closed by the time we pulled in last night, but our visitors were on the road between us and the campground office and I decided not to bother them while they were eating.

Later in the morning we decided to make a supply run to Bozeman. While we were traveling from Kansas to Montana, we maintained minimal supplies in the trailer, to keep the weight down. Since we will be quite a ways away from any town once we get to the Madison campground and won't be able to go shopping any time we want to, we figured we should stock up, so we can at least go a couple of weeks without having to go to the store. We also wanted to find some shoes that would be good for long periods of standing and hiking. 

Bozeman is about 80 miles away from where we are staying now and the drive is through some beautiful country. 

We had to sit and wait for about 15 minutes while the park rangers "herded" some bison off private land, back towards Yellowstone park. Herded is not the most accurate word in the case of bison, since they go where they want to. Hazing is the term used by the rangers. They just try to get them moving and hope it's in the right direction. 

As to my claim of beautiful country -

 

and that was just between our campsite and Livingston MT (the nearest town on I-90).

We hit some light snow storms along the way as you can see in the distance in this photo.

 

The temperature only got as low as 38 degrees, so nothing was sticking to the roads, but it snowed off and on all the way to, and in, Bozeman. By the time we headed back to camp all the snow storms had passed.

For those of you that like to fly fish (Phil), there's an outfitter on the edge of town in Livingston.

The scenery is just as beautiful looking south on the way back to camp as it was looking north on the way into town.

 

 

We passed some more wildlife on the way back to camp too.

  

The road to the campground follows the Yellowstone river from Livingston to Gardiner, in a valley between high mountain peaks. A place where the bison and elk like to winter over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We're thinking this retirement thing is great idea. We probably should have started sooner.