Sunday, September 23, 2012

Yellowstone/Billings Vacation - Part II

Day two of vacation was also spent exploring Yellowstone. We crammed as much in as we could before venturing up north to Billings.
 
 
 
 Gibbon Falls
 
My handsome fella
 Someone was a touch grumpy....guesses?
 The buffalo were out in full force this day.....grazing and napping.
 We stopped to see the paint pots. The pictures of these online are greatly exaggerated - or maybe we didn't see them at their greatest. They were quite boring and certainly not the bright colors the online pictures depict.
 
 A bubbling mud pit.
 
 
We also stopped to see the canyon. I remember this waterfall from a childhood vacation. I wanted to hike down to the lower observation deck to get the same picture with my kids, but that hike is more than a leisurely stroll down the mountain.
 
 We really weren't feeling it with the kids, so I set up the camera on a rock and snapped a quick picture of the four of us.
 The pictures from the top observation don't even do the canyon justice. It's quite a scene and I stood up there for quite some time, taking in the magnitude of what mother nature had accomplished.
 
 After the canyon, we made our way up to the northeast entrance/exit of the park.  We encountered LOTS of buffalo and the kids were pointing them out left and right.
 
 This one is a little blurry....Eric had the camera and this guy was literally two feet away. I was pulling the car away from the side of the road - I didn't want this beast to nudge me! And let me say, these animals SMELL.
 
 The mud volcano.
 The Dragon's Mouth - this pit must extend down into an underground cavern because the rolling wave and belching sounds really did sound like a low, grumbling dragon.
 Fisherman's Bridge - which ironically boasted a sign saying "no fishing". How nice of them.
Traffic was halted a few times to make way for the wandering pedestrians.
  
 
 
 
 
Stay tuned for our adventure up Beartooth Highway!

1 comment:

CreativeMish said...

Its been years since I've been to Yellowstone. I need to drag Bill there one of these years. Someday we'll have to go for the Fall Photography retreat...