Seeing your way through Yellowstone National Park

And as you get up in the morning Old Faithful is letting off her steam as you walk to breakfast.  The sun is just coming up over the Absaroka Mountains and the thin alpine air has a crispness about it that is nothing like what you are used to on a day in the middle of May.

A quick bite to eat and in the car you go in search of what ever this gigantic volcano/park has to offer.  As you head out of the parking lot you turn south and east (this seems counter-intuitive) heading for Grant Village.  Along the way, the maximum speed limit in the park is 45 miles per hour, you see small herds of buffalo and several stray elk singles. The cow elk have not yet dropped their calves and appear heavy and their gate is awkward but they always stay well away from the many tourist.  You observe that even though the park is mostly closed there seem to be a good number of tourists out and about.  If you have not been in the park in July you have no idea what crowds will be arriving in just a few short weeks. Enjoy the “light” crowds as they only continue to build all through the season and until Labor Day, when they will again wane until this time next year.

A quick note about the wild life.  You are spending time amongst a set of wildlife that you may have only seen in zoos and pictures. You are in their living room and should be respectful of their wildness.  It is after all the thing you came to see.  Please don’t take your fancy cameras and other optics and try to get 10 feet away from these critters.  They are wild! They have a set of rules and requirements you likely do not understand. They are in a life and death game of survival and if they do not eat this afternoon then they are in danger of not surviving. This is true of all of the parks’ animal life.  Some are hunters and some are hunted but all must have safety and food to survive.  Leave them alone and observe them for their beauty at a distance. The higher on the food chain the creature the more important it is to keep your distance.  You have no idea how quickly a mature grizzly can cover 100 yards. Suffice it to say a human can do it 10 seconds and a grizzly can do it about twice that fast! Just consider how far you can move in 5 seconds.  Can you get back to your car? Find your car keys, unlock the car and get in? What about the baby?, your spouse. These are wild animals with food, safety and territorial issues on their minds.  You are just a curious food source to them, and while they are conditioned to avoid you because you cause them problems, if they are unwell, super hungry or unable to catch their normal prey you can become their next meal without any regrets.  It happens several times a year in one of our parks that humans are the victim of grizzly attacks. Imagine if they can kill another 400 – 600 pound grizzly, that you, defenseless as you are, are an easy target for them.  You are not their primary food source but if you are all they have for food, you will do nicely, thank you very much. So please be careful and respectful of their wildness.

So we finally get to Grant Village and head north toward Hayden Valley.  As we round a curve we see 20 cars all stopped in the road and another 50 cars pulled off to the side in both directions.  Park forest rangers are directing traffic and every make of camera is in someones hand and everyone is walking at a fast clip up the hill to see whatever is causing all of this commotion. Bears are less than 30 days out of hibernation and it is mating season so it might be a bear. It could be a grizzly or a black bear. It might just be a herd of American bison blocking the road. They often just lay down in the roadway and chew their cud for 30 – 60 minutes The rangers have a special recording they use to entice the sleeping buffalo to move on.  This in itself is an interesting photo op. Maybe it is wolves or something even more interesting. It could be mountain lion which would make this a truly rare event.  Their are less than 50 lions in all of the Yellowstone National Park eco-system.  No, it is even stranger than all of those, it is a cow moose and her young calf.  The last few years have seen a resurgence of moose in the park.  For a number of years they were almost as rare as lions and now are seen pretty regularly. They are solitary critters so you won’t likely see more than a couple at a time but they are quite a find. So you grab a couple of quick snap shots and back in the car heading north toward the valley.  On your right is the beautiful Yellowstone Lake and as you near Fishing Bridge you begin to look for the osprey nest you heard someone talking about during dinner last night. You ask yourself, “what in the dickens does an osprey look like?” Your co-pilot whips out their phone to try and make an internet connect to check Wikipedia for a picture of an osprey. No such luck, even with Verizon, cell service is pretty spotty. None the less on the right side of the road is a nest the size of your hotel room and that must be it.  Alas the osprey is out shopping for groceries and you do not get a glimpse of the pair for now.

As you head further north you see a few folks with spotting scopes all trained to the east into a flat area along the Yellowstone River.  DO NOT STOP, THIS IS THE SIRENS SONG AND IT WILL COST YOU DEARLY, BE FOREWARNED. You stop anyway and with camera and binos (remember the binos from yesterday’s discussion?) you casually walk up to where everyone is intent on something off in the distance. Then someone says, “there he is, man is he a beauty.  Is that his kill or did the Haydens make that kill last night?” meanwhile you have your eyes crawling through the glass of your binoculars trying to see what they are seeing.  Your brand new 7 x 50 Bushnell binoculars are not getting the job done (the guy at Wal-Mart said he uses these all the time to ”glass for deer” and has found them to be the best binos he has ever owned” as your eyes strain to see anything that looks like what they are talking about.  Finally you do what every one of us has done before and say “what are we looking at? and where is it we are looking?” A woman says “a grizzly is laying on an elk kill made over night by the Hayden Pack and he ran off the last of the wolves about 30 minutes ago and has been feeding and laying on the elk ever since.” And then she says something that until you hear it it makes no sense and once you do it makes total sense.  “OK, can you see the two fir trees with the fallen down log next to them down by the river’s edge? Go about 50 yards further beyond that and there is a big clump of brown grass. The bear is right behind that.  I can’t seem him right now but that is where the kill is.” This dialog will go on all day long so enjoy it for the small piece of Yellowstonecana it is. Describing where something in the park is to someone, when that object is more than 400 yards away maybe even more than 1,000 yards away is a lingo all its own and is almost as useless as it reads.  But most park visitors understand that we are all here to observe nature on its’ own terms so they want to assist you in finding the object of discussion.  Unfortunately most of us have little or no prior experience viewing objects at that distance and our vocabulary at describing natural landscape items and flora is woefully inadequate. And thus these silly but necessary conversations occur.  And amazingly enough you finally find the object in your binos and almost instantly say something like “boy that is so small it can’t be a bear” or ” are you sure that is a grizzly?” You have watched The National Geographic channel as they watch grizzlies in Alaska and they are HUGE! This thing is so small you can’t even describe where it is and with the naked eye it is almost impossible to see.

Then your spouse ask the woman who has been assisting you in your viewing challenge if she can look through her spotting scope.  Then your wife says “oh, yeah, he is a pretty light golden color” “boy he is a big one isn’t he.” You are about to make one of those watershed decisions, and I encourage you to think this through completely before doing it.  But you won’t, you turn to the woman and say, “mind if I have a look?” Don’t do it.  I beg you don’t do it.  At least think it through.  But no, you bend over and peer into the telescope shaped thingy and all you see is a black circle that keeps moving around. She says “can you see it?” Your spouse says “it is right by that clump of grass by the log. You say, “I don;t see a thing.” ”The lady suggests you take off your glasses ands have a look.”  You indicate you have not had you glasses off during waking hours except to clean them, in years.  The woman smiles and says “we can adjust the diopter for your eyesight” and quickly turns a knob and….. low and behold (wives please note this moment in time as it was one of those several thousand dollar moments) you say, “ohhhhhhhhhh, there it is.  Holly sh-t look at that.  It is like he is right here.”  You ask, “can I move this around a little” and you say, “ahhhhhhh, geez is this cool?”

I will leave you with one thought.  I warned you about doing it and you went ahead and did it. You ignored my advice and heeded the Siren’s song.  That is what free will is all about, but it is gonna cost ya. So for the next few days maybe weeks and maybe months you will spend a significant amount of time on the web checking on spotting scopes and grovelling for a few extra bucks in the budget so you can buy your first scope.  I warned you.  A little later in the week I will talk some about scopes, their features and uses and the ways you may be able to talk the CFO into letting you spring for an “inexpensive” one.  Note to all CFO: you are aware their are no inexpensive ones that will meet his needs but play along and let him squirm a little, it is as much a part of the process as the research he is doing.

Anyway enjoy the rest of your day in the Hayden Valley and take lots of pictures as this is an especially scenic part of the park (not the most scenic but it is very scenic) and get back in time for a good dinner and a restful nights’ sleep.  You will be dreaming about spotting scopes and wolves, and grizzlies and whatever else you saw today.  But sleep well my fellow park visitor as tomorrow you will have an opportunity to see the most beautiful (in my opinion) section of the park and the wildlife will be more abundant than anywhere to this point and you are without a spotting scope! I warned you.

You must be up early as you have almost 2 hours of driving to get to your next destination.

None the less, have a good night sleep listening to Old Faithful erupting as you drift off…………..