4/22/14 - 4/24/14 

The weather has been decent these last few days. A little snow Tuesday. A little wind a couple of days. Otherwise, beautiful weather with temperatures in the 40's and 50's. This is the scenery we woke up to Wednesday. As you can see, it snowed but didn't leave too much at our elevation.

These are the hills to the east of the city of Gardiner.

 

And here are the hills directly behind our campsite, the other side of the Yellowstone River.

 

Wednesday was our day off, so we went to Livingston to get a few groceries, get a little cash and go to a vet to get some things for Tucker. Penny took a few more pictures along the way.

 

  

On the way back, we stopped at some of the turn-offs between Livingston and the campground. There are some great views and historical markers along the way.

One view point overlooks a large rock in the middle of the Yellowstone River. It's at least the size of a VW bug.

 On the other side of the road is a craggy outcropping that looks ready to drop huge chunks of rock on whoever or whatever is below them.

Penny had most of the days off, since her training is better done on the job. Don had full days of classroom training most days and half days a couple of times, with more general training taking up the other half, that everyone had to attend. Everyone is still struggling with the un-intuitive program we are forced to use to check in guests. Don's been trying to type up crib notes that are easier to understand than the instruction manual, but pulling out the information from the instruction manual is a chore, to say the least. Many of the other students are interested in getting a copy of them when he finishes typing them. 

The afternoon of Thursday the 25th, we all moved to the Madison Campground, where we're going to be working, after we completed a morning of practice with the program. It was a beautiful drive, traveling down the west side of the loop drive in Yellowstone. There's quite a bit of snow throughout the park. The roads to the east side of the park have yet to be plowed. The only road open to the east is the north road, which is kept clear all winter. Here are a few pictures Penny took during the drive to Madison Campground.

The Mammoth Hot Springs are still beautiful, even though they aren't putting out as much water as they were when we were here ten years ago.

 

The features we've seen in the summer months, when we've been here before, have a different look when they have snow on them.

 

On the drive to the campground we gained considerable elevation, so the snow was deeper than at Mammoth or Gardiner.

 

 

The campground also has snow in it. A couple of feet in some of the shadier areas, but the loops have been plowed. They apparently got an additional three inches yesterday. It's a beautiful setting.  

 

Our site and a few others have clear site to the various television satellites, even though there isn't much worth watching. There's plenty to see and do outside, so I don't expect to be watching much TV. Can't wait for a clear night, so we can watch the stars.

The campground manager gave us the largest site in the park, since we have the largest rig. Our trailer would have fit nicely in the site if we could have gotten it in. It was a back-in site, on a curve, with trees near the road on both sides. We couldn't turn the truck enough to get the trailer to swing into the site without taking out a couple of trees. Two sites down, there was a slightly shorter site, but it was at the end of a straight section of the loop, so once we got past it, we could back almost straight in. We traded sites with the coworker that had the easy entry site, since he has a much shorter travel trailer. It still took a couple of tries to get him into the site we originally were going to be in and we had to move him well to the right of the site so his slides wouldn't hit the hook-up posts.

We had to park our trailer just right in the site we ended up in because there's a tree that the back end of the living room slide could hit, yet we had to be as far back in the site as possible, to be able to park our truck in the site without blocking the road. We still have to back the truck in under the fifth wheel pin box to get in far enough. Enough of the snow has been cleared that we don't have to step in snow when we leave the trailer, but the snow is half way up our shins when we walk around the back of the trailer.

 

 The company we work for is provided dinner tonight and they threw us a pizza party for dinner last Monday afternoon.

Tomorrow is the first day we get to work in the campground, getting it ready for campers. Sunday we will be taking a bus tour of the parts of Yellowstone that are open. We're supposed to learn about the things we can direct the campers too. After that, we get to start practicing what we learned in the real setting, with our coworkers acting as campers making reservations and checking in. Hopefully we'll get it all figured out before real campers start checking in.

4/26/14

When we got up to go to work this morning, we noticed that it had snowed up on the peaks around the campground. We had been listening to the rain on our roof when we woke up. It wasn't easy to get a good picture of the snow, but this is what we got.

 

Work today consisted of cleanup work in the campground office, getting rid of six months of dirt and cobwebs, and putting out the supplies we'll be using when working, etc. Penny walked the A & B loops with the another attendant, trying to find campsites where the snow had melted enough to allow campers in them. They found 18 campsites open enough, out of 68 sites in the two loops. Still a lot of snow to melt before many people can camp here. Like most of the workers here, we can't find our fire ring for all the snow in our campsite. Two other workers walked the C & D loop. Don't know how many sites they found open. No one bothered walking the other four loops. Too much snow to even try.

It rained all afternoon, so we just stayed in the trailer. We watched TV and listened to music. Penny made chicken soup for dinner.

4/27/14

Woke up this morning to fresh snow on the ground. Not much on the roads, but the tree branches have a nice dusting and what bare ground we had is now covered with a quarter inch of snow.

 

 It was still snowing lightly as we left for the bus tour at 8:15 this morning. It snowed off and on all day during the tour and again this evening.

Because of road closures due to snow, we couldn't make the entire lower loop. We first went to Old Faithful, which had just erupted before we got there. We didn't have time to wait the hour it would have taken until the next eruption, so we left there and headed back towards the campground. Then we took the west side of the loop north to the Canyon cutoff and east to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

It's interesting to see the differences in Yellowstone between summer and winter, yet they are very much the same when you look closely.

 

 

Here are a few pictures of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone lower falls from the north rim.

 

 This shows the depth of the snow at Canyon Lodge.

 We got to see one of the first Red Dogs (baby bison) in the park. They should really be fowling in the next couple of weeks.

 

Lake Yellowstone is completely frozen over.
 

Driving through the Hayden valley, there was a great deal of snow and a coyote and a number of Heron.

 

 

On the way back, we stopped on the south rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone to see the upper falls.

 

 Then the lower falls and canyon from the south rim.

 

 There's an Osprey nest on the top of a pinnacle near one of the viewing spots on the south rim.

 

We got back to the campground at 5:00 this afternoon.