Our third trip into the park was to drive into Mammoth Hot Springs (http://www.nps.gov/yell/tours/mammoth/) and drive through to Tower-Roosevelt and on to Lamar Valley. You can google for both Roosevelt at Yellowstone and Lamar Valley and find all kinds of information on both. We drove all the way out to the southeast entrance, turned around and came back. It was a beautiful drive the whole way, but we didn’t stop to take pictures much.Driving through Lamar Valley, we saw a few Bison, but that’s about it. Lamar Valley is home to one of Yellowstone’s largest wolf packs and you can sometime
s see them there. No such luck for us, but maybe it’s because we weren’t willing to get up at dawn and sit for hours and hours and hours, waiting to see if they decided to show up. Sitting all day in 90-100 degree weather waiting in the blazing sun for the wolves to not show up just wasn’t our thing. So, we drove on and stopped at Tower Falls on the way back.We took some of Tower Falls and walked a trail that leads 1mile straight down…and of course…straight back up. It was a bit more strenuous than I had thought it would be. The view at the bottom was ok, you couldn’t see the falls from the trail, but you could see the river and that was pretty, it would have been better if you could see the falls.
After the falls we drove back up into Mammoth and walked the Upper Terrace trails and drove the Upper Terrace drive. It was pretty cool. A little humbling when you stop and read about why these features are the way they are and realize that you standing in the middle of a giant volcano that had erupted and collapsed, very humbling!
So that was our third day, again we saw lot’s of Elk, but didn’t stop to take pictures of them, not really much on the Bison front, no Wolves or Bears. I saw some Giant white Swan, and a deer. Oh, and we saw a Coyote.
Tune in next time for the last bit of Yellowstone and our INSANE trip across the country.
Hugs~
;-)K
