What a Day! (Days 29-30 - Part 2)

And then?? Then I got the most amazing opportunities to get pictures of some of God's creatures. I was just across a two-lane road from a mother elk and her baby, although a grossly noisy truck drove by and spooked them. Actually, I'd been walking toward the pair when the momma elk began walking towards me, but as she got closer, I began to question the wisdom of getting too close and chose to cross the road in case she didn't like my being in her path and to get a better picture of her since straight-on head shots don't show much.

Not long after viewing Old Faithful, I got even closer to a gorgeous female elk, and not much farther down the road we saw a bull elk with great antlers calmly grazing in a grassy median, despite the fact that he was surrounded by cars and people. Driving on down the road and around a curve, we came upon a HUGE buffalo that was munching on grass at the side of the road, so we got a picture of him as we drove by. Frankly, I was thankful we could see him from the car, because the information we received on entering Yellowstone says that those big guys weigh up to 2,000 pounds, are quite tempermental, and can sprint at 30 miles per hour, which is a whole lot faster than I can sprint!


To keep things truthful, the big guy above was not the buffalo we saw our first night at Yellowstone, to whom we actually got closer than we did to this one, but we loved that you can actually see this guy's tongue, licking his lips, if you look closely.

P.S. How could I forget this sighting? I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had forgotten to mention one more adventure. Driving down the two-lane highway -- for you Southern Californians who might have forgotten these, a two-lane highway means one lane in each direction and a center line designed to tell you whether you are allowed to try to pass the slower-moving vehicle in front of you. Anyway, we were driving down the two-lane highway between Cody, WY, and Yellowstone, enjoyng the gorgeous mountains and rock formations. At the Bill Cody Dam, the rocks are so massive that stopping to look back, the tunnel opening for the highway looked like a mouse hole.

Rounding a bend and heading into a straight-away, we saw maybe a dozen cars stopped along both sides of the road and a bunch of people clustered on one side. We figured there was either an emergency of some sort or something exciting, so we stopped, too, only to realize that someone must have spotted something because nobody was moving or saying a single word, and the people all had cameras -- surprisingly, some of the the biggest camera set-ups we have ever seen, tripods and all. When we joined the watchers, one Native American woman was nice enough to point into the woods to show me the huge black bear who was oblivious to all of us sneaking a peek as he ate lunch. Wow! Our camera definitely is not powerful enough to catch a black bear in the shaded woods, nor did I hear the click of other cameras going off, although we all would have loved proof of that sighting and a great picture for our memory books. Unfortunately, a few seconds later, Mr. Bear either laid down or went down a bank, so we headed on while most of the others waited patiently and hopefully for a good picture of the big black hulk.