Le Grand Adventure -- Yellowstone National Park!

Well, in my slow piecemeal updating about Le Grand Adventure, I have finally come up to where we got to Yellowstone National Park. We were there five days, but I will compact it with LOTS OF PICTURES! YAY!

We stopped in Cody, Wyoming, which is a town about an hour outside of Yellowstone, the last town before the Park. We bought pasta salad and trail mix. Then Ben took over driving because he wanted me to be free to gawk at everything properly.



I suppose we took this picture because it was pretty and a neat drop-off thingy. I really like big dropoffs!


VERY soon after we got into the park, we saw a grizzly bear. They're supposed to be the less common ones. And it was prowling along the curb of the road. Usually people use binoculars to see them.

There were tons of us there gawking at it from a few yards away, then some park rangers came zooming up and sent everyone across the street from it. You're supposed to be 100 yards away, technically!



Do you see the bear, between those two other people?
Do you see the old guy checking me out on the right-hand side? Heehee. That's what my dear sweet mum says, at least. ;-)


As we drove further in/up, toward our campsite (in the Canyon area), it, um...
IT WAS BLIZZARDING, YO.
So as soon as we got to the gift shop at Canyon, we bought (that is, um, Ben bought) sweatshirts for both of us.
"June isn't like this in Chicago..." Ben said awkwardly to the cashier.
"YEAH!" she said. "My kids live in Chicago and they told me it's 90 degrees over there!"
"Heh. Great," we said. Then looked forlornly at the snow swirling out the window.

We saw pretty much the whole park in our five days there!


We wandered around nearby before dark and saw this sweet waterfall.


This is a mud pot. It's a boiling... um... pot of mud. Pretty cool!


That brown stuff on the ground is NOT EARTH, it's bacteria!
Ben thought it would be funny if I posed like this. Mmm, yummy. ;-)
This is definitely my facebook profile picture now.

Oh... yeah... and those are my pajama pants. The only pants I had.


Gasp. It's the entrance to Hell.
Actually it's more like a big crater belching sulfuric gas out of it.
The whole park belches sulfuric gas, actually.

See?
Actually... in certain places it was hard to see because of all the sulfury steam!

Of course I must tell you what it smells like: hard boiled eggs.


Morning Glory Pool. It's very blue and Ben thinks it looks like a giant mouth which is why it makes him so happy and adorable.


There were lots of these sorts of things. I liked this one because it was rather red.


On the third day, the sun came out, so Ben took me to see Yellowstone's Grand Canyon. This is Artist's Point, where you can see that sweeet waterfall.

I loved this all so much that I made sure to come back another day! (I really have a thing for big drop offs, like I said! What's a bigger drop off than a "grand canyon"?!)


Aww.


The second-to-last day, we took a hike to this "Point Sublime" place. This is my favorite view of all, a spot on the way to Point Sublime!


Aaaand Point Sublime itself.


We hiked every day. The first full day there, we hiked for a couple hours in the snow! We planned to go to the end of the trail, a ranger station, but then the path just sort of... ended. We think because snow covered it.

There were some BEAUTIFUL hikes.

Ben surmised that I "have a thing for moss." Because, yeah, I look at all the big impressive things with a due sense of awe, but every bit of moss I saw I would pause and stoop down and examine it very carefully. :D I never get the least bit bored of moss.

"You should be a biology teacher," Ben said.
"I'll have to take a biology class first," I replied.

On the second-to-last day, we wanted to take an easier hike, to rest before taking a really steep 11-mile hike the last day. But on the second hike of that day, we ended up taking a detour to that Point Sublime which I pictured above, which ended up being a difficult extra mile or mile and a half each way. Soooo not restful. But soooo fun. :)

On the last day, I wasn't feeling up for much anymore, but I read in the hike book about this fabulous petrified forest, 1.5-million years old, WOW. It was the long, steep hike, but I just decided to take ibuprofen and take it because that's amazing!!

:-/...

We found the base of the trail. There were a couple guys with telescope things there, who told us to look through them.

There was a grizzly bear pacing across the path.

We opted out of that one.
:( How sad.
(Oh, how sad, we didn't get mauled by a grizzly bear.)

A group of hikers had just headed up that way, we saw them, but they hadn't gotten to the bear yet, they didn't know it was there.

The animal watchers said, "I hope they don't run into it and get killed. The last thing I need is to have my vacation ruined by some ignorant hikers." He paused, and said to us, "I don't mean you guys, you guys are cool!"

I suppose if their vacation were ruined, we would have heard about it, so I suppose they saw the bear and turned back. We just left and looked for another hike.

At least every hike in Yellowstone is great -- I mean stunning! -- and my legs didn't snap in half. :) Yay life! Always look on the bright side.