Yellowstone Park Adventures

June 19 and 21

It's kind of hard to see, but there are two cubs and a mama bear in the picture above. It was pretty cool and fun to watch the cubs playing with each other, and then both the cubs climbed way up into that tree where they stayed. We left before they came back down. Mama Bear sat at the bottom of the tree and looked like she was taking a nap.

This is only the second year that we've seen bears in Yellowstone Park. Apparently, June is the time to see them on the stretch between Tower and Mammoth. That's where we've seen them both times. We saw a black bear wandering along very near to the road as well. There were plenty of bison and elk out. A deer ran across the road right in front of us while we were driving in the afternoon. 

Jacob and the girls were all over checking off animals that we saw in the park both days we were there. I think we saw everything but the marmot, coyote, and wolf this time. That's pretty good! There's lots of animals on that list!

One new adventure in the park was getting a flat tire. Brian said that something didn't feel right and we pulled over at the nearest pull out. I should have realized that we weren't driving on the wake up strip along the side of the road - I don't even think there were any. Sure enough, when we got out to see what was wrong, our tire was completely flat. It was a great opportunity for us to learn how to put the spare on. Thank goodness there is a service station at Canyon and they weren't busy when we pulled in, so they immediately took care of us. After two new tires (another tire was almost as bad as the one that went flat), lunch on a big log next to the service station, and browsing through the Canyon gift shop while we waited, we were good to go again.

Mammoth Hot Springs is so beautiful! There are lots of fun wooden paths and stairs to go on and explore the place. Jacob loves going on the pathways, and by the time we were done wandering around these hot springs, he was happy to be done for the day. Emma and I were counting stairs, and we reached over 500 before we got back to the car.

On Thursday, we drove to Old Faithful. We walked around the pathways, and saw lots of geyser activity. This picture shows the distant view of Old Faithful going off. The kids were energized and wanting to walk all the wooden pathways again. In fact, we didn't walk enough of them before we had to head out of the park to make it to the Playmill Theatre for the 7:30pm play, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels".

On our way back to West Yellowstone, we stopped at this pretty place for a dinner picnic.

Back at West Yellowstone, we had a little time to browse the gift stores before the show started. This was a funny hat moment.