Yellowstone, Ivan's First Time

We saw these Big Horn Sheep
on our way to the park. We like
to take the drive past Quake Lake
and usually see some sheeps there.

The first bear sighting
of the visit.
This one's a grizzly we
saw on the way to Old Faithful

We got this national parks pass in February knowing how often we visit Yellowstone and how much we would like to visit other parks nearby, like Glacier NP in Montana, Teton NP adjacent to Yellowstone, and I want to visit the parks in southern Utah, we'll see. This pass also covers all the state parks across the country and is good for a year. So we took the opportunity to take some friends of ours on our annual Yellowstone trip. The first week of the season, Yellowstone is open for free. Only a couple main roads are open then, because of the snow, but all the animals are out because there aren't that many people and it's still cool enough for them to be out of the mountains. This is the best time of the year to go, by far. We always see tons of animals, even bears! 

We did just a pretty quick drive through of the park, seeing lots of stuff on the way, and stopped at Old Faithful. I think it's pretty cool to see that much water shoot into the air like a fire hose just because nature wanted to do it. We had good timing, sorta, and barely missed the geyser going off as we pulled into the parking lot. Kristen, one of the friends we brought, hasn't ever been so we wanted to make sure she got to see that. Since it took us a little bit of time to get there, and there's like an hour wait for the next viewing, we had lunch there. A really good lunch, too. String cheese, deli meat sandwiches with all the fixings, cookies, chips, gatorade, yep that was good stuff. Michael and I normally just take some snacks like trail mix and chips and that's all we eat all day. We got to walk around the visitor's center, which is really awesome, they have a few taxidermy animals and different educational models with cool lights and things to play with. Ivan was content to just crawl around the floor. 

One of the coyotes hanging around the buffalo in the same place as the bear.

Bear #2

After we left there we went through Mammoth, which is usually where you see a ton of elk. There is a herd that lives there year-round, but we didn't see any there. We drove towards the Lamar valley and saw a bunch of cars pulled over. We stopped before we got to the cars and Michael and Nathaniel got out and ran through the sagebrush trying to see if they could see the big attraction from the other side. I think they saw some buffalo and were a little disappointed if that was what people were stopping for. So we got in the car and kept going. We drove past all the people and saw a camera crew and a park ranger, so we knew it had to be something good. We had to park forever away though and walk to it with the suspense building of just what it could be. We got there and looked around. There were a few buffalo out in the field and a couple of coyotes (how do you say coyote?) trying to chase them. Then we looked over to the road and there was a black bear right there! He was so close and just snoozing under a tree. Of course there were some crazies there that had been there for like 5 hours or more, just watching, but we came, we saw, we left. 

Just a few of the elk we saw.

We saw some antelope (my favorite!), a moose (the first time I've ever seen one in Yellowstone), more bears, tons of elk, buffalo, a beaver, deer, a few big horn sheep, and too much sage brush for comfort. Altogether it was a fun trip. Kristen and I both had a short nap in the afternoon, all that driving just makes you tired. And I thought it was more fun than our usual trips to have some friends go with us. 

So funny story... We stopped and saw the waterfall in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and attempted to take a close up of me and Michael with the falls in the background... Didn't work out so well.

Here's the falls we wanted a picture of as our backdrop. Ivan was asleep in the car and we didn't want to lug him out just for a five minute viewing. So we took turns between which couple was viewing and which was waiting in the car with the baby.

Some guy asked if we wanted him to take our picture, since he could see we were obviously struggling. We said yea! Yay for the opportunity to have the falls in the background. This is the picture the guy got. Do you see any water? Guess we should be more specific next time.

Elk already getting big fuzzy antlers. 

It's a moose, it's a moose!

Bear #3, it's a grizzly.

Bear #4, we couldn't decide which kind this one was. Looks like a black bear to me.

Bear #5, another grizzly. This guy was kinda close to the road and there was some guy stopped and out of his car taking pictures! I though he was too close to even roll our window down.