Musings From Yellowstone National Park

Laurie and I did a week in Yellowstone — which is obvious if you’ve seen what’s being posted to Flickr.

One little amusement was that I read this piece in the hotel room in West Yellowstone, before we moved into grant’s village for a few days and completely off the net. It really echoed what we saw in many ways.

Musings From Yellowstone National Park | National Parks Traveler:


Despite all the issues that constantly swirl around the National Park System — funding constraints, staffing woes, rising fees — there’s still more to be proud about than disappointed.

For instance, after 136 years you can still find more than enough room in Yellowstone National Park that feels raw, wild, and untrampled by humans. True, the front country can feel over-run, particularly if you’re there in July or August. But during my week-long trip earlier this month the crowds were not suffocating, the bison jams not too plentiful — although, we did wonder about the folks parking partway on and off the road to view a single mule deer — and the insects wonderfully vanquished by the frosty overnights.

Definitely. We had a herd of bison around fishing bridge for a few days that made traffic really interesting, but they finally moved a bit off the road. there was also a small herd of mountain goats that decided that the road was a LOT less work than the back country, and was wandering around the Tower area — we saw them one day just walking up the grand loop, smiling at cars, and the next day, in a pullout attempting to weed it for the rangers. The rangers weren’t amused.

Ditto lone bison, who we saw frequently using the grand loop to get from here to there — slowly — with that “and what the hell are you going to DO about it?” attitude.

More on Yellowstone as I get it written up, but I had to point out this piece:


* Never underestimate a raven. In the parking lot at Norris some travelers in a Toyota Tacoma had left their soft-shell cooler in the bed of their truck. It didn’t take long for a pair of ravens to find it, open it, and settle down to lunch. Even after someone placed a case of water bottles atop the cooler the birds found a way in. Note: Ravens don’t like cold cuts; they pulled out and dropped to the side both ham and turkey.

* Some Americans can be truly baffling. One drove up to us in the Norris parking lot and asked whether there was anything interesting to see.

I kid you not. I read this post, and then the next day, we went exploring Norris Geyser Basin. When we got there, we heard the cawing of a raven, and there it was, sitting on the back of a pickup truck which was full of stuff and covered with a tarp:

A Raven attempting to break into a cooler in a car, Yellowstone National Park=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

we saw and watched it for a good five minutes as it explored the back of the truck. It finally located the cooler, and made a concerted attempt to uncover it, including pulling at the ropes and working on the knots to see if it could get anything loose. Every so often, it’d stop and stare at us watching it as if wondering if we were going to try to stop it (nope, we were too amused). We finally decided it wasn’t going to succeed and went off for our hike around the basis, but as we were leaving, it let out a series of vocalizations, which were answered from another part of the parking lot. As we headed towards the boardwalks, we passed a second raven walking up the parking lot asphalt in the direction of the pickup truck.

Evidently he called in some help.

No, we don’t know if they got in — probably not — because the truck was gone when we got back.

And got help us, this was ALSO true. After our walk through the basis and along the upper edges of Porcelain basin, I huffed my way up to the museum area and was standing there catching my breath (the altititude KICKED MY BUTT, but we’ll talk of that later), someone walked up to another person in the museum and said “hey, is there anything to see here?”

Um, no, not really…

It’d been over 15 years since we’d made our first visit to Yellowstone, and damn, was it a wonderful week — but I’m not going back until I lose 100 pounds, because at 8,000 feet and trying to get some serious walking in, it fought back. But it was worth it…

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