5/28/14

The weather has been great this week. Mornings around 40 degrees and afternoons into the 60's and 70's. Due to the altitude we're at, it seems warmer than it is, but we're not complaining. The snow is nearly completely melted on the west side of the park. All roads are now open and the number of visitors have picked up steadily. The campground was completely full Friday, Saturday and Sunday and nearly full on Monday.

Yesterday, Penny and I and another couple working in the campground took a tour, free to Zanterra employees and run by the Yellowstone association, to the Lamar Valley. There were a dozen people taking the tour. The only problem we had was that they had inadvertently left our names off the list of participants. With a limit of 14 people, we could have been left sitting at Madison, with no seat on the bus. We called the tour office this morning to make sure they hadn't left our names off the list of any of the other tours we signed up for.

We saw on of a pair of black bear cubs, just as we got to the east end of the town of Mammoth. The rangers think they were at the age where their mother kicks them out of the den so they can go live on their own, since the mother was nowhere in sight.

 

 A little farther out of town, we saw a pair of elk bucks in velvet.

 

 Not much farther we saw another, older black bear.

 

Just before we got to the Lamar Valley proper, we stopped to see an Osprey's nest across the Lamar River.

We just missed seeing wolves lunching on a bison carcass, but at the east end of the valley we saw three moose in the willows near the river. Unfortunately, they were too far away to get a decent picture of them.

On our way back toward Mammoth, the tour guide took us on a one mile (round trip) hike to an abandoned wolf's den. It was the den used by the first natural wolf pack (after wolf reintroduction) in the park, back in the late 1990's.

 

We had to hike around a herd of bison that decided to use the meadow we were going to hike through to get to the den.

 

By the time we were hiking back to the bus, the bison had decided to take a siesta.

 

I think I finally got my camera lenses clean.