There were signs like this wherever there were large concentrations of bison around. It was the last day in the park before I managed to get a picture of one.
Here are the bison that they were warning everyone about. This is actually one of the few times we saw a bunch of bison together. Normally they kept in small groups of about 2-4 and a lot of times were off by themselves. This was the only time we saw any young bison though. The young are the lighter colored ones.
This was only our second moose of our Yellowstone adventure and it was as we were leaving the park at the entrance. He looks like he is looking right at the camera.
We also finally got a picture of Tucker with the sign on our way out of the park.
After having only seen 2 moose the entire 3 days, we saw our third only a couple of miles after seeing the second one. This was actually outside the boundary of Yellowstone. This one appears to be a little younger than the other two we saw.
Western Wyoming had a lot of visible rock formations that were labeled to show how old and during what periods they were formed. We passed by one formation that had been dated during the Pre-Cambrian period at 2.5 billion years old.
This was the Shell Falls that we saw in the Bighorn National Forest on our way through Wyoming. It was very cool and apparently helps supply the west-central Wyoming area with a lot of power and irrigation.
We went up to an elevation of 9,330 feet at Granite Pass before we started to come down again. This was the second highest elevation of our trip after Monarch Pass in Colorado at 11,312 feet.
We stayed the night in Buffalo, WY, a town of about 8,500 people.
This is the Grizzly Bear mother that we saw between our campsite at Indian Creek and Mammoth Hot Spring. She had four cubs, which is very rare.
She seemed to plod along while the cubs bounced around her all the time. We thought that having four cubs probably made her life pretty difficult.
Here Katy got one of the cubs standing up out of the grass.
These are some elk that we saw headed toward Mammoth Hot Spring. This area was the prime place to see elk in the park and they were everywhere, even in amongst the buildings at the Mammoth Village.
This bull elk was the only one that we saw during our visit that had antlers. We had to stand around for a few minutes before he would lift his head up enough for Katy to get a good picture of his antlers. He was actually very close to the road.
We finally saw our first moose on the second day. He was in typical moose form, standing in a shallow pond, grazing on plants in and around the water.
There was a short drive loop where we saw a petrified tree stump that was still standing.
This is Tower Falls near the Roosevelt Lodge on the Northeast side of the park.
Here is me extending my snowball making streak to the 20th of June. I actually had the chance to make one on the first day of summer, but we didn't stop to make one.
Pretty much all day this day, it was cloudy and rainy. Most of our pictures we tried to get in the sunny parts where we actually got out of the car.
This is one of the geysers at the Norris Geyser Basin. Norris is the most active geyser basin in the park.
There were dozens of geysers and hot spring pools in any given place around the Norris geyser basin. This was very cool to see and photograph, but not so good on the nose, with all the hydrogen sulfide gas.
Inside many of the pools you can tell how hot they are by the colors of the bacteria that grow in them. If it is so hot that there are no bacteria, usually over 133 degrees Fahrenheit, the pool will generally be blue like any other water. If you can see shades of red or yellow, the pool is of medium heat, about 100-133 degrees Fahrenheit. If there are any greens, those are thermophillic algae and they only grow in the cooler (relatively) waters at below 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The chipmunks that we saw out west all had tails. They seemed to like the attention at Yellowstone and often came out for photos.
This is the lower falls at the Artist's Point. We had a great view of the canyon below and of the falls.
The bison that we saw in the park were usually laying down, and didn't seem to mind being close to the roadways.
I managed to get a good picture of Tucker looking out the side window trying to see one of his own kind.
Here is Old Faithful before it erupted. We actually got to the geyser as it was finishing one eruption and had to wait around an hour and a half to see the next one.
And here is Old Faithful at it tallest when it first started to erupt.
The eruption went on for about 2 or 3 minutes until it got back down to a small shower.
This is picture of the Red Spouter, a hot spring that is very muddy with clay and therefore has a red color.
These are some elk that we saw near our campsite area at Indian Creek.
This was our campsite at Three Island Crossing State Park. The site was very nice, but it was more of a weekend camp area for locals from Idaho than it was a tourist destination.
We passed lots of dairy farms in Idaho, so I had to get a picture of the cows there.
We hadn't actually ever heard of Shoshone Falls until about three weeks before we got out of school. One of our friends said she heard it was great and we researched and went. The falls were amazing and the water was actually really low when we were there. We saw some pictures of the falls at higher water volume and it was very large.
Here is a picture of a waterfall that was on the way to our campsite at Indian Creek.
Terrace Spring was a set of hot springs and geysers that funneled out and formed many terraces down a nearby hill.
The lady in this picture got too close to this elk and the elk began to chase her down the hill. This is why you don't get too close to the elk.
This bison was fit to be put on a buffalo nickel.
Here were some of the first elk we saw in the park.
And here is our campsite at the Indian Creek Campground. We had some very nice neighbors and the site was very nice. We had a great time all three days we were there except for when the fire grate fell on my toe and Katy got sick the first night.
