Third Post

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

I’ve been lax in getting blog entries posted. Sorry, but it has been busy here.

First I have a couple of pictures of Tower Falls, which is the highest one in the park, and is the closest one to us at Mammoth. [Note: Jim Macdonald points out in a comment that Tower is not the tallest. I thought I had read that somewhere. Thanks Jim.] I took these two pictures from the top of the path to the bottom of the falls. We walked all the way to the bottom only to find that the part of the trail that allowed you to actually see the falls from the bottom had been closed due to slides. We figured the hike back up was good for us, but it took some resting along the way. We did get some great views of the Yellowstone River in its canyon, however.

We made a stop near Tower Falls to look at the canyon, and there were some small Bighorn Sheep right over the edge of the overlook. At one point they walked right up to us in order to get to a better perch (along the near-vertical wall of the canyon).

We get some pretty fierce storms here, and I have a couple of pictures of the clouds near Mammoth as we were on our way to Tower Falls. Click on the pictures to enlarge them and get the full effect. Lorraine was trying (unsuccessfully) to catch the frequent bolts of lightning with her camera. She did get some neat pictures of the clouds, however.

Lorraine and I caught some elk in interesting poses. It turns out that when you are as big as they are, with long spindly legs, getting up and down is a complicated process as Lorraine's picture shows. Some of them succeed, however, as evidenced by the two flattened against the ground. They are really interesting animals!

We went to Livingston, MT, the small city 55 miles north of us, and climbed the hill overlooking the city for the following two pictures. The first is of the downtown area , and the second looks through the pass toward Yellowstone at the snowcapped Absaroka Mtns. We never tire of the mountains, and the city has charmed us. We had dinner at a local restaurant, Stockman, and were surprised to see a Bon Appetit recommendation on the wall. The food made it clear why they were singled out. I had the best chicken fried steak I’ve ever tasted.

We had a pretty good snow on Sunday, June 7. The pictures are of Lorraine with friends Don and Carol, The Dining Room (my workplace), the Visitor Center with snowman, Mt. Everts across the Gardner River, and Lorraine, Don, Wayne, Carol and Pat as we were leaving the Mammoth Chapel where we had attended church.

We enjoyed the snow, but were glad that it disappeard as quickly as it had come.

I’ll end with some more animal pictures. First is one of our new elk calves. I’ve only see four of them, but there are still pregnant females around. I caught a Magpie in flight. They are ubiquitous around here and will fly right at you and swoop up at the last second. They are pretty nasty birds, but are beautiful in flight.

Finally, some more close-ups of Bighorn sheep. These are females on the road to Gardiner. [Note that the town is spelled with an “i”, whereas the river does without the “i”.] At this point we hadn’t seen any male bighorn sheep because they separate themselves from the females and kids most of the time. However, we did see a couple on the side of the hill when we were on our way out of town to attend our son Evan’s wedding last Thurs. I’ll add that picture in a future blog.

That’s all for now. My next entry will have some pictures from Evan’s wedding.