Yellowstone National Park--May 24,2010

The drive into Yellowstone, of course, was spectacular!! We drove thru Buffalo Bill State Park and Shashone National Forest thru the east entrance. We went up beautiful Sylvan Pass at 8,530' with lots of snow on the mountains, but not the road. Coming in the east entrance you go along the stop of Yellowstone Lake and it was still frozen over but just beginning to thaw along the edges. All along our trip we have seen the devastation caused by the pine bark beatle and Yellowstone was no exception but you also had lots and lots of the fire damage from the 1988 fire and others. Things are growing back and some areas are better than others. According to someone we talked to the beatle runs on a 20 year cycle and we are on year 13. We stayed in the park at the only campground that said they had full hook-ups which means electric, water and sewer; however when we arrived we were informed that the electric was unsafe and couldn't be used. We are self contained so that is ok but the price didn't change that we were charged, but we figured that to travel back and forth in and out of the park would cost us more time and money . Then the kicker---we could only run our generators(which give us electric power to run our heat system) from 8am to 8pm. Our generators run on our diesel just as our engines and we are gone all day and may not get home until 6pm so unless we ran it all day while we were gone we had a problem. Guess what the weather was like? It was in the 30's and 40's and it snowed two of the three nights we were there and there was already plenty of snow on the ground. This campsite was limited to hard sided campers. In almost every campground we have EVER been in you could run your generators beginning at 6am and up until 10pm. We like to froze our behinds off. We could run some heat and other things off of our inverter(I think that means our batteries but they must be recharged by the generator) but with the cold temps and not being able to use the generator more often we ended up one day with our batteries dead(house batteries not engine); therefore, we had to leave our engine run until we could recharge the house batteries enough to start the generator. That is the first time we ever had that problem. You learn from every problem. The lack of heat was the major disappointment with Yellowstone---burrrrrrr!!! We were at 7000' + at the time.

We saw lots of mule and white tailed deer coming into the park and lots of buffalo throughout the park. They are definitely the rulers of the park. They go wherever they want to at any time. An interesting statistic is that about 100 large animals are killed every year with $155,000 in property damage per year.

The first full day we decided to drive down to Jackson which is also called Jackson Hole, WY. We drove south out of the park and saw many thermals along the way with steam billowing out of them and began to see more elk. We drove down John D. Rockfeller,Jr. Memorial Parkway and then thru the Grand Teton National Park. Due to the inclimate weather and heavy clouds they were barely visible which was a disappointment. While in Jackson Hole we were going to go out of town to a chair lift to go up on the mountains but it was useless---we could not have seen anything. It sleeted while we were in, but got to the see square where on each corner there is an archway built of elk horns. The boy scouts go out one time a year when the elk shed their old horns and they pick them up, bring them back into town and people literaly come from around the world and they are auctioned off. People make furniture, art work and probably anything you can imagine out of these. We ate lunch at a little place called The Bunnery and boy was it good. They make their own breads and desserts and the food was delicious. Afterwards we walked around town and took a few pictures which can be difficult with a bus load of tourists roaming the streets also doing the same thing. The nice thing about travelling at this time is that you beat the big crowds; however, the down side is that some things don't open till Memorial Day. Our new montra is "not till Memorial Day".

On the way back into the park via the southern entrance the ranger at the entrance told us that a bear had been sighted just ahead after we turn right so we hurriedly headed that way and saw a school bus of kids plus some others looking over into a pasture across the Lewis River so everyone piled out and we got our binoculars and my spotting scope and even with the naked eye you could see him. Unfortunately by the time we quickly got to see him and his cub he decided to become illusive and went behind some trees so I never got my scope on him. I think the ranger said it was a grizzly. That was exciting. As we travelled back to Fishing Bridge Campground we also saw beautiful Lewis Falls and Lake. We also saw elk just walking down the road and finally saw some with new young.