No Way!

We said good-bye to the Tetons yesterday, and I have to say, I was a little sad. In the past, we were really on the move during our vacations, rarely staying more than two or three days in any one place. We feel like we nested in our little cottage on Jackson Lake. Here's the last mountain picture (promise). We woke up yesterday and saw these for the last time:

Bye, mountains!

Bye, Todd VI, Jackson Lake Lodge Mascot!

From there, we headed north into Yellowstone and checked out the geysers--other-worldly for sure. Old Faithful, was just that--faithful. It blew when it was supposed to. It's hard to show any scale in pictures, and therefore, pictures portray it as quite unimpressive. The Grand Prismatic Spring, however, was pretty cool:

This picture required a climb to an overlook that was completely off the trail. It was another victory to get three-fourths of the way up the hill. Tim got all the way up!

That brings us to today. Through the magic of Facebook, I found out that it just so happened that a friend of mine would be in Yellowstone for her last full day on our first full day. I texted her when I knew our plan, knowing that the cell service in Yellowstone is awful. I didn't hear back from her--no surprise.

We got up this morning at the crack of dawn (literally) to get to Lamar Valley for wildlife viewing at this time:

Yes, you're reading that correctly--6:25 a.m., 39 degrees--brrr!

We came upon a traffic jam where folks with really big scopes and camera lenses were shooting pictures of a black and a gray wolf. There's more to that whole story, but what's really important is that, as I'm looking in the binoculars, trying to find the wolf, I hear someone outside my car window (which was open) say to me, "Can you tell us what everyone's looking at?" I took my binoculars away from my face, and turned to looked when I'm cut off with, "AMY COX! NO WAY!"

Yellowstone is huge. (If I wasn't so tired, I'd look up the square footage.) Of all the places in the Park for there to be, Kathy Gibbons and I are in the exact same place--down to her walking up to our car and asking about wildlife spotting. Providence at its best, for sure! Tim and I talked about it the rest of the morning and into the afternoon--crazy!

Speaking of wildlife spottings--today we saw EIGHT bears, a multitude of bison (some blocking the road), many elk, and a good number of pronghorn antelope. We saw two wolves and a few mountain goats--not at all bad for one day in Yellowstone.

I'll write (and upload pictures) more about Yellowstone tomorrow, but for now, I need sleep. We'll get up in the morning, take one more swing through Lamar Valley, then turn towards home!