Tuesday, June 30, 2009

We started the day in the Hayden Valley. At Otter Creek the beaver was back on the side of the road. It was actually lifting up into the pine trees to eat.

Further south, the Hayden bison herd decided to cross the road and created a pretty good jam.


We went all the way to the south pullout in the Hayden because we saw some elk that were looking nervous. Sure enough, across the river was a nice sized grizzly. Then we got reports of another grizzly on the other side of the road. This turned out to be the grizzly from last night, because it had a limp, but was much closer to the road at Elk Antler Creek.


By this time, a morning thunderstorm moved in, so we headed out to Fishing Bridge. In Pelican Creek we saw an odd congregation of pelicans swimming and fishing in unison, we thought it was strange, but it was interesting.

We poked around Washburn, but no luck and I needed to do laundry, so back to Canyon we went.

That afternoon we headed over to Mammoth to see what we could, and we were able to see the bighorn sheep on the way to Gardiner with their lambs.


We stopped at Helen’s Hamburgers for a buffalo burger and an afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.

We drove over to Roosevelt without seeing any action and I decided to go to the Yellowstone picnic area and check for the bighorn ram, but he wasn’t about. Then we were going on to the Lamar when we saw a group of people just past the specimen ridge trail head, so of course we asked, “What do you see?” They saw a black bear on the hill just to the east of the picnic area, but it had gone over the ridge. I was trying to remember the shape of the hill, and thought we should return to the picnic area and look at the ridge, and not five minutes later, Dori saw the black bear come over the hill top. This bear was pretty cooperative and we spent well over an hour with him.


While talking with the ranger, we were able to overhear reports of other jams. There was one at Rainy Lake, and we checked out one at Tower Junction, where another black went over the hill to the north of the junction. Then out toward Petrified Tree where we spent time with a black sow and her COY.

It was time to head back to Canyon and on the northwest slopes of Washburn we saw another fairly large grizzly.

I hope to see you under the Western Skies.