Yellowstone

Yellowstone

Sunset at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

We are camping out in the backcountry and are both awake in the middle of the night when we hear the deadliest animal in Yellowstone grunting and walking around our tent.  Before we got to this point, we had driven up to Yellowstone and called Josh, mom gave us his phone number. Apparently our grandpa was his grandpa's best man back in PA. He's been working in Yellowstone the last 2 summers with his girlfriend, Angie. They were awesome and let us stay a night in their dorm and the next night we went backpacking with another one of their friends, Jared.

Josh & Angie overlooking Grand Prismatic

We hiked in about 4 miles to a Fairy Falls. On the way we got to see all these awesome geysers. We walked through Midway Geyser Basin and saw Grand Prismatic Spring, which is so colorful and unlike anything in this world I've ever seen. The whole park of Yellowstone is really out of this world. The grand canyon of Yellowstone and it's impressive waterfalls. Geysers shooting water up out of the earth, steam flowing up into the sky all over the place. It was like the movie Land Before Time. We hiked to one crystal blue geyser that had a constant burst of water that would get up to 20 ft. at times. Then there were these mud bubbles around and they make this noise that sounds like demons talking from the depths of the earth and sulfur smell was horrendous.

A geyser near our campsite

On our trail to our camp site we came across the deadliest animal in the park. He was standing right in our path. The great american bison stood there looking right at us. Then another one appeared. We had heard all the stories of the people being gorged and killed by buffalo. More people die from that than bears or wolves or anything else in the park. We were able to walk our way around them, but they were never far from the campsite. While we were sitting around the fire one walked within 15 yards of us. He was one of ½ dozen that had encircled us. Fortunately we didn't seem to bother them. 

deadliest animal in Yellowstone

 Late that evening we could hear the elf bugling.  September is their mating season. We saw the big bull on the edge of the tree line and sure enough shortly after first hearing him we saw a cow running through the field. Then right behind her there was another bull! We thought there may be a possibility of witnessing a fight. When the big bull on the hill finally made his way down the guy trailing the cow disappeared and the big bull was left with his entourage of 4 cows! It got dark before we saw any more action than that. The stars came up and we were truly in big sky country. There were more stars than I've ever seen. It was like we were in an old western movie. Sitting around the campfire, telling stories, and drinking whiskey out of the bottle. We could still hear the elk and the waterfall in the distance. An almost full moon came up over the mountains and lit ups the entire valley. We were able to see the mountains in the distance and could see a few of the geysers steaming. It was a pretty magical camping trip. Sleeping wasn't so great though. Our tent isn't exactly waterproof and I have a cheap sleeping bag that works great in PA in the summer, but not so great for a freezing night at 8000ft. That's why we were awake when the buffalo came walking around our tent and scared us to death!

Our campsite with Fairy Falls and a buffalo in the background