Yellowstone – Day 6

Day 6 started out, as has been the case every day this trip, early.  We got dressed, went to check out, and then headed back up toward the Fishing Bridge area, where we stopped to use the bathroom and did some shopping at the General Store.

We headed out toward the East Entrance hoping to spot a bears or two.  The Fishing Bridge/Lake area is prime grizzly territory.  In fact, we’d already heard two bear sighting reports since we’d been on the road that morning, including one near the employee dorms along the Lake/Grant Village Road.

On our drive around Yellowstone Lake, we encountered little except traffic.  We made it out all the way to Sylvan Pass, which was still largely snow covered.  I stopped to take a photo of one of the itinerant falls that crops up during the spring snow melt.  You can see there’s still a good bit of snow there.

On the way back down toward Fishing Bridge, we got word on the scanner that there was a bear jam near the Lake Butte Overlook.  Off we went, passing the slow ass tourists who got in our way (where it was safe to do so, of course).  We made it in time to see a yearling grizzly foraging for food on a hill above the road.

Eventually, the bear wandered off over the hill and everyone left, including the ranger there directing traffic.  Nikki and I discussed that we might backtrack a bit and go back up the road we just came down; maybe he might make an appearance on the other side of the hill there.  So we headed down the road, turned around at one of the pulloffs, went back about a mile, turned around again and headed back down to where we’d been.  We struck gold!

The bear had started to come back down a hill right toward the road.  He was still a good 50 yards up from the roadway, so we pulled off, Nikki leaned out of the window and started staking photos of him at work.  As we were sitting there, the ranger came driving back by in the opposite direction.  I waved at him and pointed up at the bear.  He thanked me and went up to where we’d turned around, and came back to direct traffic.

Nikki probably shot over 50 photos of the bear and got some spectacular pictures, including this one.  This is probably the single best photo of our trip, and easily the best animal shot that’s been taken on any trip I’ve been on.

We sat there and watched until he went back over the hill again, then headed off into Hayden Valley toward Canyon again.  We stopped in at the Canyon VC to see if maybe Chittenden Road had been opened a day or two early, but no such luck.  So we once again took off south through the Valley towards the southern entrance.  We spotted little wildlife on the way out.

We decided to take a quick detour through Gull Point Drive, which affords a drive right along the shore of Yellowstone Lake.  As we pulled into the drive, two snowshoe rabbits ran across the road right in front of us.  They were gray and had white feet and white poofy tails.  We stopped to watch them run through the woods for a few seconds, then continued on our way.  They went off too fast for us to even get the camera and get a pic of them.

We continued down toward West Thumb, and had planned to stop and tour that area as well.  The effing rain wouldn’t let up, though, so we skipped it for this trip.  We kept on going down the South Entrance Road, stopping at Lewis Falls to get a better shot than before since there was better light on it.

Once we finished there, we passed through Yellowstone’s South Entrance, leaving the park behind.  We checked into our Flagg Ranch cabin and got all our shit settled.  When we were done, we headed out on Grassy Lake Road to explore a bit.  This road leads to a little known southwest entrance to Yellowstone near Bechler Falls.  Sadly, about a mile into the trip, we encountered a “road closed” sign.  I’m not sure why they couldn’t have posted a notice at the entrance to the road, but this bumpy, dirt/gravel road will take you all the way to Ashton, Idaho.  If you can’t go this way, you have to drive all the way down to Jackson Hole or up to West Yellowstone to get to Ashton.  I’d be pissed if I had planned to take this route only to find out it was closed.

So we turned back around and headed out toward Grand Teton National Park.  We had to wait for several minutes in a construction zone again, but finally made it through (taking about thirty minutes to go 5 miles).  We made it down to Colter Bay, stopped and shopped at the store there, then headed back for dinner.

We headed back to the cabin and I worked on offloading the photos we’d taken the past few days onto the computer.  Flagg has no TVs, and no data connectivity whatsoever, so we just sat around talking for a bit, then fucked and headed to bed.  We woke up around 3:30AM, got up, took showers, and had planned to head into Grand Teton National Park.  But I got lazy and started dozing again.  Nikki crawled into bed, snuggled up next to me and we went back to sleep until 8AM. 

So we got up for real, packed our stuff, checked out, and headed into GTNP.  And for what it’s worth, in my opinion, Flagg Ranch is WAY over priced.  We paid less for our rooms inside Yellowstone, and had all the scenery and other things to do inside the park that just weren’t present at Flagg.  The room was not worth the $200 we paid for it.

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Tagged as: Alexa, Nikki, Yellowstone