Yellowstone NP - Rained Out

No, actually I’d love to have the rain go away but I know how much this area needs rain. It is dry and need the rain badly. Luckily there have been no forest fires in this area but there are forest fires all around us, Montana, Washington, California but none here that I’ve heard of. But,then, we’ve been off-line and off the grid for a while now. We haven’t had TV reception since we left Grand Coulee on July 5th and that was for only 3 days. We didn’t realize that we wouldn’t have any Verizon service, neither telephone nor Internet when we got here on the 21st. When we went to the lodge for breakfast several days ago, we asked if we could buy a newspaper but were told that there were no newspapers on the premises. Our only source of news is our Sirius radio, both in the Jeep and in the RV. I don’t mind not having the TV, we don’t watch much anyway, but I do mind not being on line. We are hoping that Fishing Bridge Campground in Yellowstone is near some wi-fi. I’d check on line to see if it is but...

Yesterday, we were talking with our neighbors here in the campground who were leaving to canoe across Leigh Lake in the Tetons and then hiking up and camping out for a few days. Now, they’ve got rain. Then there are all the tourists from abroad who have 1 or 2 days in Yellowstone on their tour bus and it’s raining. Well, Old Faithful is shooting off anyway but it’s not nearly as much fun to watch it in the rain.

We’ve had marvelous weather the two weeks that we have been in the Tetons and in Yellowstone - but today that luck went south. Today it rained, and, not just a light come-and-go rain but an all-day, never-let-up rain. Great for the park which changed the fire danger chart from high to moderate but not so great for us. We had planned to visit Norris Geyser Basin and actually got over there but - the rain combined with the heavy humidity and low cloud cover gave us views like this. Eerie and other-worldly but sometimes the steam and the rain were so thick that we could see nothing.

After walking around a bit and not seeing much and getting wet, we decided to call it a day and head on back to the RV. There will be another time in Yellowstone and this will be high on our list of places to visit.

We also learned that our water resistant jackets were no match for an all day rain. Drizzle - sure, but rain - nope. Our next rain gear will have the words ‘Gore Tex’ as part of the description.

On the way back to our RV, we stopped at an area that had been burned in the fires of 1988, those that burned about 1/3 of the park. Here is a map showing recent fires in Yellowstone. The dark red colors show the 1988 fires. Imagine seeing Yellowstone in 1987 and then visiting after the fires in 1988. You ‘know’ that the forests will regenerate but you don’t really ‘know’ it.

They talked about the fire but had 4 panels that showed the changes from burned to growing again. The first picture sets the scene, showing the forests in the area having been a heavy wind shear.

Lodgepole pines, the most prevalent tree in Yellowstone, grows from a cone which is tightly shut until a fire hits it and then it opens up to sprout. You can see how closed these pine cones are - just waiting for a fire like the ones in 1988.

This is what we saw when we were reading the panels - almost hard to tell that there was a devastating fire.

Here is an area that was burned recently and - look - see the new trees sprouting.

By the way, did the rain let up on Tuesday - not on your tintype. Oh, we had a few minutes when it was not raining but these were few and far between and not long enough to make it worth while to do any touring. We did get in our daily walk but just around the Fishing Bridge area. We walked to the Fishing Bridge VC with its old ‘parkitecture’

and the burls in the wood

and watched a Ranger give a talk on the connections between the forest, the animals and us. Here he is with a group of children in the audience with a bison hide.

Then we took off into the forest around us, walking mostly in the areas where there were lots of people but then found a dirt road up through the woods in back of our campsite. We walked and walked, knowing that we were walking parallel to our campground and looking for a trail over to it. Finally, we found one, very seldom used but there were 5’ orange-tipped stakes in the ground leading to the campground and we decided to follow them rather than retrace our footsteps. Of course we’re singing all the way: my favorite was ‘Adestes Fideles’ and I was surprised at how much I remembered. Gary picked up two sticks and banged them together every now and then. We also kept up a conversation and were hardly quiet at all.

Why all the noise? Bear territory, you know.

We finally reached our RV, shook out our ‘rain resistant’ gear and whipped inside to get warm, dry out our socks and shoes and relax.

Yellowstone NP - Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side of the Road?

We began the day with a bison jam and a coyote pup jam and ended with a motorcycle jam and a grizzly jam. In between we climbed Mt. Washburn, saw the narrows of the Yellowstone River and drove under the overhanging cliff. Little bit of rain, little bit of sun, little bit of clouds - a quintessential Yellowstone day.

We’re staying in Fishing Bridge campground right on the northeast shore of Lake Yellowstone and, as we headed out to the Loop road to get to Mt. Washburn, we ran into a bison jam. Usually, they’re up the road in Hayden Valley but last night they journeyed down to our area to give us a morning show. We ran through the steps for the Yellowstone Two Step and got a picture of one large bison who was absolutely sure that the grass was greener on the other side of the road. And, there he was, stuck in the middle again. Which way to go? Which way to go? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Finally a park employee, who deals with this situation all the time, drove up, nudged closer to the bison, waved something out of the window and the bison made his decision.

But there must have been at least 75 roaming around, lying down, rolling in the grass and just hanging out near Fishing Bridge. By the way - they used to regularly fish for cutthroat trout off the bridge, usually shoulder to shoulder, until the park realized that this was the primary spawning round and that they were catching so many that the number of trout was rapidly diminishing.

Besides, the Rangers were getting pretty expert at removing hooks from fingers - with so many fishermen so close together. They stopped the fishing in 1973 and now the number of cutthroat has come back - oops, someone introduced lake trout, a voracious predator, into the lake in 1994 and it is demolishing the cutthroat trout again. Cutthroat trout are food for bear, eagles, ospreys and other birds while lake trout are not. Regulations require that it you catch a lake trout, you must kill it and the park itself has a gill netting program to catch the lake trout.

Our area was clear but a few miles up the road we saw bison on the valley in the fog.

About 5 miles up the road, we got to practice our Yellowstone Two Step again: saw lots of brake lights, we stopped, parked, I ran out with my camera and - then asked what was there. Ah, 4 coyote/grey wolf pups playing and running around, just having a great time. Sure enough, romping and rolling around, Cute jam. Probably coyote since they are more common but no one seemed to know for sure. 

We ran into another bison right jam after this but the bison was sauntering along the side of the road rather than down the middle and not causing too much chaos. After a stop at the Canyon area to buy some coffee we headed up to the turn-off for our hike. Our goal was the fire lookout tower on top of Mount Washburn, named for Henry D. Washburn, a Civil War veteran and the one who led the expedition which is credited with the ‘discovery’ of Yellowstone (as if the Native Americans hadn’t already ‘discovered’ it.) The members of the expedition named the mountain after him when he ascended the mountain and confirmed that they were not lost. Unfortunately, soon after the expedition ended, he returned to Indiana and died of consumption which he had contracted on the trip.

The ‘trail’ was really the road which goes up to the fire lookout tower to resupply it and maintain the equipment there. There is actually a fire volunteer who stays for the summer until September and watches for fire. He also greets everyone who climbs up. The trail did as roads do, went straight up, forget those silly, time-consuming switchbacks.

We saw Washburn Springs off to the right along with the following sign near the road.

We saw a cute little pica, a member of the rabbit family which looks more like a small chipmunk, He (or she) was carrying a flower in its mouth, scurrying over the rocks on the slope to take the flower into its home to build a nest for winter.

Great views all the way up though. Finally we rounded the corner, got to the top and found the 3-story lookout. First story had the bathrooms (wowsa, wowsa) and an enclosed lookout with a telescope, pictures showing what mountains you were looking at out the window and a history of the place, the second story had an outdoor lookout and the third story is where the fire lookout lived. Very cosy.

The views were marvelous, we could see as far as the Tetons.

The trip down was as straight down as the trip up was straight up. We did meet a few pouting teenagers on the way down. One was with his mother (the father died when the boy was 2) who wanted to hike this mountain. He did not, pouted and turned back to sit by the car and wait for her to return. Others just didn’t have a smile for anyone. Oh, well.

We watched the thunderheads blossom up over the mountain as we headed back. We knew what was coming.

Wildflowers

and hillsides that had been through a wildfire.

Hike done, we continued on down the road to a waterfall area with a convenience store/souvenir store/ grill/ice cream shop and whatever else the store could sell. We bought some sodas and ate lunch.

Further on up the road, we found this overhanging cliff.

Wow. Here’s the explanation that I found in a book ‘Yellowstone, Expedition Guide. ‘Sitting atop a gravelly layer of ancient river deposits, is a 1.3 million-year-old layer of columnar basalt. It formed when a volcanic eruption flooded the area with a layer of basalt lava 25’ thick. the rock cooled and cracked, forming the signature polygonal pillars. Later glaciers helped truncate the columns and left deposits that now form the topsoil.’ And, if you understand this you know more about geology than I ever will. I just know that I think it’s really neat. And, it’s on both sides of the Yellowstone Canyon at the same level. At the bottom of the canyon is the Yellowstone River and I’ll just bet you that there was a lot of erosion by the river. Over millions of years, it just wore down the rock and material between the two canyon sides.

However, geologists aren’t completely sure what caused the distinct ‘V’ shape of this canyon. They think that erosion played a part but they also think that a huge ice dam upriver brought on by the melting of the glaciers, broke suddenly and the water came rocketing through the canyon, breaking off every weak link and carrying them downstream.

Our second goal of the trip was to drive through Lamar Valley, renown for its wildlife. But all we saw were bison. But, think a minute, about how amazing that is - that we can get caught in a bison jam, that we can see them right out side our RV, that we can stop and watch the herds of bison grazing in the meadows around here, one of the few places in the world that you can see this happen. It’s believed that there were 60,000,000 bison roaming the plains of North America in the 1800’s. Close your eyes and imagine those great herds of bison roaming around. By 1900, the bison were almost extinct with only 24 remaining in the park. Many hunted the bison to feed railroad crews and the US Army wanted to wipe out the bison in a misguided program to force Native Americans into reservations. Today, there are about 4700 in Yellowstone alone because of a deliberate program to increase their numbers begun back in the early 1900’s.

But we had another chance for wildlife sightings on our way back to the campground. We had noticed that on one turnout which overlooks a large valley with the Yellowstone River running through it were a lot of people with BIG telescopes. We’ve seen them at least 4 nights as we have driven that road home. Tonight we stopped to see what they were spotting. Grizzlies and grey wolves, they said and very generously asked if we wanted to look through their 60 power telescopes. They even offered to adjust them for us. What nice people. And we saw the grizzly they were watching. I then took our own 10 power binoculars and - lo and behold - there was another grizzly on the river bank. Again, this is somewhat of a miracle given the low numbers of grizzlies in America and the opposition to reintroducing them into Yellowstone.

Ursus arctos horribilis - Latin for grizzly bear. probably not someone you’d want to meet on a trail and, in truth, grizzly - human contacts are very rare. It’s just that those few contacts make the news so that’s all we think about. Like plane crashes, very rare but we do read about them more than all the safe flights. Bears used to be fed in Yellowstone, Back in the 1920’s when the very rich took coaches through the park, the coach companies used to toss their garbage our and then take people by these garbage dumps to show them the bears scavenging through them. Even as late as the 1960’s rangers used to sit by ‘lunch counters’ for the bears and have stadium seating for the feeding. Bears used to frequent the roads through the parks, begging for food from any and all cars that rolled by.

In the 1970’s the Park Service, realizing that this was harming the bears because now they would not know how to forage for food and was also causing injuries to humans, closed the dumps, stopped using the bears for entertainment and discouraged feeding of the bears. The phrase now is ‘a fed bear is a dead bear.’

But now it’s time to head home - and we only had to go through two bison jams - looks like they all think that the grass IS greener on the other side of the road. When we arrived a few days ago, the mating season was just beginning. Now, a few days later, it looks like many of the bison have paired up.

And, then there was the motorcycle jam - a guy on a motorcycle who was a bit intimidated by the slow gradual hill we all had to go down. He was going about 10 - 15 mph lower than the speed limit of 45 and we were the 5th car in back of him. Behind us were at least 16 other cars. Was he going to use a turn out- to let us go by him? Not a chance. He kept us all well under the speed limit for about 10 miles.

7 1570’