Yellowstone National Park: Where Mosquito is queen and Bison is king (and occasionally jerky)

Gonna keep this one short since the last blog was a short novel.

Yellowstone is an impressive park. It's no wonder Teddy (we're tight like that) decided to make it the first national park (in the world). It's full of wonder and intrigue, the likes of which are gonna ROCK any visitor.

Eat your heart out, Ansel Adams.

Yellowstone is also quite a large park. We ended up driving almost as many hours as we slept (which actually isn't that impressive since it rained both nights we were there and the tent we had wasn't exactly water-tight). Anyway, Bison (aka Buffalo) are all over the park. The wander the roads causing traffic jams at various points in the park. They also seem to be found in abundance at all the park food stores in jerky form. I can see now why they almost became extinct from people heading west...they are slow as hell and don't seem to run from anything; not exactly a tough game to hunt.

"Go around, ya bunch of crazies!"

So, Corey and I ended up doing this long hike that brought us right to the face of a pretty impressive waterfall. The only problem with hikes into canyons is that you hike down first. This is almost more psychologically daunting than physically because the more you end up hiking steeply downward, the more you know you have to go back up it (sadly, physical law stood true, and hiking back up was brutal).

We were able to get pretty close to it. Also were able to get  pretty soaked.

The hike was worth it; getting that close to such an impressive falls. The only downside to the whole thing was this one mile long stretch of the hike that went through a wetland area. Until that day, I did not realize that mosquitoes could attack in swarms. Corey and I were literally forced to run through this section of the hike because gangs of mosquitoes were attacking us in bee-like swarms. Running is really not fun after 15 miles of hiking (and, again, running out of water...we obviously did not learn from this while at Glacier National either). After this unwanted blood-letting marathon through mosquito alley, we finally made it to the car. Inside was some delicious uncomfortably hot water to drink (I guess that happens when you leave it in the car for hours). We drank it anyway and headed to Old Faithful to see if we could catch it before nightfall.

We parked. I went to grab some gatorades because Corey was not doing so well - severe dehydration during hiking seemed to be a trend on this trip. Corey took a little nap to try and recuperate while I grabbed his camera to see if I could catch a photo of the famous geyser blow its load. Lucky for me it didn't take long (that's what she said). Literally right after I got to the geyser it, sure enough, started steaming and then blasted its reserve some 40 feet into the sky to a chorus of ooo's and aaah's from all the slack-jawwed yokels standing around.

Insert sexual innuendo here.

Corey eventually came too (thanks in part to gatorade, "It's got electrolytes. It's what Corey's crave"). We ended up getting a real dinner (since we earned it) and actually not having beer that night (that's how dehydrated we were here people).

"It's what plants crave!"...the movie Idiocracy, anyone?

We left yellowstone and headed to Glacier national park (see previous blog post) continuing on our journey. Overall, Yellowstone is a gorgeous park and immensely huge. I'm quite sure we didn't even see the half of it but still thought it was spectacular. Here are some panoramics from the trip. Enjoy

Our hike down to the waterfall. It was a long way down.

Yellowstone Lake

  

More Yellowstone panoramic views.