May 30, 2005
As soon as we got into yellowstone we saw a bald eagles nest that had at
least one adult ans quite a few baby eagles in it. It was pretty cool.
Then a few minutes later we saw some elk crossing a river right along the
side of the road. We stopped to get out and look and take pictures andall
of a sudden there was also a buffalo like 30 yards from us. we hadn’t seen
it initially or we probably wouldn’t have gotten out of the car considering
the “buffalos maul people” warning pamphlet we got when we entered the
park. As is though, nothing happened, and we had a close encounter with a
giant animal.
The one disappointment of the day was Old Faithful. They had predicted it
to erupt at 1:01 pm give or take 10 minutes. At 1:10 it started spouting
small amounts of water but just for a few seconds at a time. It would
promptly go back to just steaming for another few minutes.
It didn’t finally erupt like we expected until about 1:20 and then I think
it had spewed so much water doing small eruptions that when it finally
erupted like we hoped it was only for about 30 seconds. This along with
the fact that the wind was blowing straight at us for most of the eruption
so the steam was blowing towards us and we couldn’t see the geyser. Oh
well.
We saw a bunch of hot pools some of which were amazingly clear, others were
totally mud, which was really cool too. There were a few pools that mase
lots of noise from where the steam is coming out of the rocks.
We did a two mile hike to Mystic falls. It was a really cool hike, very
easy and fast. We did it just carrying Austin on our backs or shoulders.
The waterfall is really cool at the end of the hike. Austin really enjoyed
the hike because he got to walk part of it, he got to throw rocks in the
river, and he got to kick buffalo poo. One of his uncles taught him what
buffalo poo was and he saw me kicking it so he wanted to kick it too.
Unfortunately, one of the piles I picked for him to kick was a little
fresher than I thought so he dirtied his new white shoes with green buffalo
poo. Fortunately the dirt we were walking yhrough at that point was white
so he just covered up the poo by kicking white dirt all over his shoes. He
figured that one out all by himself. Good job Aust!
ON the way home (to the cabin where we are right now), there were a bunch of
buffalo just walking in the middle of the road so and everyone had to stop.
They really didn’t seem concernrd at all with the cars all around them, it
was really interesting. Tim got to stand up through our sunroof with my
videocamera and we got some really good video footage of the buffalo right
next to our car.
Good day!
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