Road Trip - Part 4

To continue our road trip stories - we left the Grand Tetons and arrived in Yellowstone on Tuesday (I think - the days are blending together for me).

Someone was nice enough to take our picture in front of the sign.


If you have never been to Yellowstone, it is an experience that is very difficult to explain. As you walk around, there are parts of the ground that has water boiling up from the earth. The smell is very similar to rotten eggs, due to the sulfur in the water.


We saw all kinds of wild life. Here's a marmot that popped out from some rocks to say hello.


We hiked up a trail to get a bird's eye view of Old Faithful. From this vantage point, we could see the surrounding valley. Also, you can see all of the people that gather to see Old Faithful go off.



The buildings you see above are the visitor center, and the Old Faithful Inn. Yellowstone is the first National Park and some of the buildings are very old.

A nice couple from England took our picture up at the top of the hill.



Later that day, we went to a different part of the park where we overlooked Yellowstone Lake. The boardwalks are placed for everyone to walk on - because the ground is so unstable in this area.


Here's an elk with some fuzzy antlers. We saw tons of elk all over the park.

Here's a spot where the water just suddenly starts boiling up into the air. Very strange.

We drove around in the park and came to a valley where the buffalo and their new babies gather. These guys (and galls) are huge.

I'm taking these pictures from my van. Rominal was driving and I was standing up through the sunroof of our van taking pictures. There are quite a lot of warnings all over the park of how people get gored by buffalo each year and how you are not to approach them.

Some people don't head those warnings and tried to get closer to get a picture. This guy even brought out his baby!

Here's what the valley looks like - again this picture was taken from the safety of my van.

We drove out of the valley and ran into the biggest traffic jam I've ever seen!

I couldn't believe it - so much traffic in a national park!

Well, it wasn't your usual traffic.

We got stuck in at least 150 buffalo moving down towards the valley that we had just left.

It was simply amazing. This was one of the highlights of our trip.

The buffalo just kept coming and coming. They would simply walk around the cars.

We were there for at least 30 minutes as they passed.

Towards the end of the group, this big fellow came through. He was so large, bigger than all of the others.

I took a picture of him after he passed our van, to try to show how much bigger than our van he was.

We have now started the long drive home, but I still have tons of pictures to post. It's been a fantastic vacation and quite an adventure.

I'll post more once we get home, and I've gotten some of the mounds of dirty laundry done.