Amy and Ricky's Excellent Adventure...

A couple weeks ago Ricky and I went on a trip of a lifetime to Montana and Wyoming, to visit Yellowstone N.P. and celebrate our 10th anniversary
Saturday, August 31st Ricky and I packed up and drove down to NJ to drop the kids at my parents house and get them settled in.  My dad drove us over to the Philly airport so they would be able to keep our Suburban for the week.  We hadn't been on a plane ride in over 10 years (the last time was for our honeymoon!) so I was nervous about how everything would work out... would all our tickets be right? Would our bags get checked OK? Would we lose our luggage? Would the flight go OK? etc, etc, etc.  We got in the airport and through security very fast though so that helped to relieve my anxieties somewhat.
We paced walked around the airport some and watched them load our plane and get it ready to go:

Waiting nervously excitedly:

After we got up into the air my fears eased up a lot too, why had I been so nervous in the first place? I love flying! Haha!  We had a very short layover in Minnesota and then it was off to Bozeman.  Ricky was so nice to let me have the window seat on the way in.  I think I was looking out the window the whole time, I just couldn't believe how mountainous it all was!  And spacious too, no houses or anything for miles!

We touched down in Bozeman at 8 in the evening, but they are 2 hours behind us so we were pretty tired.

We picked up our bags and then went to get our rental car.  I had gotten a really good online deal before hand but they didn't tell me what kind of car we would be getting.  Well it turned out that we were given a really nice, convertible Camero!  Ricky was pretty excited :)  That evening we stayed at a Super8 near the airport and ended up waking up at 4am the next morning (not on purpose!)  We had arranged to go to a friend's house at 8am for breakfast so we just hung around the hotel for a while.  I walked up and down the stairs a ton of times to get coffee in the lobbey and talk to the front desk girl, etc.  We were surprised to find that the hotel didn't have an elevator, and we were on the 3rd floor.  In talking to the front desk girl I found our that NONE of the hotels have elevators around there.  It just struck me as unusual.
So around 7:30 we checked out and drove around a while until we found our friend's house.  It was so nice to visit with them a little, and Lauren made us a super delicious breakfast.  We got on the road again around 10 am and moseyed on down to our cabin in Silver Gate, MT.  We stopped for lunch along the way and had to drive through the northern part of Yellowstone so it took us a while to get there but we sure enjoyed the drive!

[Yellowstone entrance]
Driving with the top down!

We saw a bunch of Elk and Bison along that drive.

And of course the mountains were so beautiful

Yellowstone river:

I really enjoyed all the unusual and interesting wildflowers all week:

The rental car!:

Haha:

We saw a lot of mountain sheep on this peak all week:

We got into our cabin around 4 and unpacked a little before heading back out to get some groceries in Cooke City.  We had the tiniest cabin ever but it had a nice view!

This was the bridge into the cabins:

After we got groceries we went back for dinner and then headed back into Yellowstone to the Lamar Valley.  We saw lots and lots of Bison again and also an antelope crossing the road.

The first few days we were there we could see the smoke from the wildfires, although we never saw any actual fires.

The Lamar Valley has been called "the American Serengeti" because of the quantity and variety of large animals living there.

The bison sure do actual like they own the place :P

I thought this Soda Butte was interesting:

It's pretty much inactive now but all of that travertine was formed only about 100 years ago!

The birds like making nests on it now:

It still stinks like rotten eggs really bad though!

Saw another elk far, far away on the way back to the cabin:

And some sheep on that peak:

Monday was labor day and we thought it would be best to avoid the park that day.  We called the kids first thing in the morning and then drove the famous Beartooth Highway all the way to the town of Red Lodge, MT.  It is said to be one of the most beautiful high elevation highways in the world, and it was really incredible!  We stopped a lot of times to take pictures and look for wildlife.

This view is from a bridge that we stopped to look over.  It was pretty scary to look down because the bridge was probably 100' high!  It was dizzying!

At one point on the Highway you are at almost 11,000' above sea level! 

[see the cowboy?]

And then the switchbacks start and it's pretty nerve wracking to get down to the town.  you can see part of the road below in this picture:

We stopped at a rest stop/lookout...

It was an incredible trip.  We walked around red lodge a while and then had lunch at a pizza place before heading back to Silver Gate.  The trip back was even more nerve wracking because it was raining!  Ricky did a fantastic job driving though and we made it back safely around 2:30.  I took these pictures of the scorched ground on the way back:

The wildfires had gotten pretty close to the town we had lunch in.

And I thought this aerial shot of the Beartooth highway from a magazine was pretty cool too:

After a short rest we went back into Yellowstone to see what animals we could see.  The clouds were just lifting from the rains:

Some Osprey:

Their nests just look like a jumbled mess, don't they?!

Tuesday we spent the whole day driving around Yellowstone.

We were pretty excited to see a lone wolf first thing in the morning:

and a couple mule deer:

Our first stop was Tower Fall:

The basalt columns helped to name Tower fall... they are formed when thick lava flows cool and contract, creating shrinkage cracks resulting in predominantly polygonal columns:

Next stop was the Grand canyon of Yellowstone:

The color of the canyon was very interesting.
It was really incredible to see.

The next spot was the sulphur caldron and mud volcano.  We were so amazed by these!

Of course they stunk like crazy

I lost Ricky a couple times...

This one was called the dragons mouth cauldron and it made a thundering noise every time it pushed a wave of steaming/boiling water out of the cave:

More Bison on the road:

We had been riding around with the top down and just got it up in time before they started fanning out around our car!

You could hear them grumbling and grunting, Ricky was nervous :P

This was directly out my car window, I didn't zoom in even a little:

After we got past the bison the next stop was West Thumb along Yellowstone lake.

Then we made our way over to Old Faithful. We were kind of overwhelmed by the huge complex and bustle of activity.  It's a town bigger than the one we were staying in!  We were able to find out the time of the next eruption and since it was going to be soon we went out and waited with all the other tourists :)

Ricky was very excited:

After that excitement we drove up to the Midway Geyser Basin and walked around there.  I think the grand prismatic spring was one of my favorite things to see.

After that it was getting pretty late and we were pretty tired so we just drove the two hours back to our cabin without stopping too much more.  We did stop to watch the antelope some though:

Apparently they use very old fire trucks in MT:

[this was our cabin road]

Walking back from the general store:

Wednesday we decided to spend the day in the park again since we didn't get to see everything we wanted to on Tuesday.  Our first stop was the petrified tree...

It didn't really do a whole lot so we didn't stay there long ;)
We took a little side road called the Blacktail Plateau drive in hopes of seeing some wildlife but all we saw were some pretty wildflowers.  Ricky indulged me by pulling over so I could take pictures:

This is called Indian Paintbrush:

Doesn't that little bug look kind of like a stinkbug?

When we got back on the main road we drove a little way and then caught a glimpse of a little black bear cub scampering through a field of sage brush!

We were very excited about that spotting :)

Undine falls:

We were making our way to Mammoth Springs when we saw this white thing off in the distance... it was the hot springs terraces!

The view on the other side of the road was pretty nice too :)

The elk like to hang out in the "town" of Mammoth because of the green grass.

Mammoth Hot Springs was named for its intricate hot springs and travertine terraces.  It has served as the parks headquarters since the first building was built in 1879.

The springs are forming travertine at a phenomenal rate with pools and terraces changing constantly, leaving extinct terraces and mounds.  Old springs plug up, new springs emerge, and occasionally old springs come back to life.  They are constantly having to move their boardwalks around.  It is estimated that two tons of travertine are being deposited per day!  Although averaging eight inches terraces can build up as much as two feet per year.  At such rates the present accumulation of travertine could have been deposited in only a few thousand years!

It was quite the hike around the terraces with lots of stairs and a high elevation, my legs were shaky for a while afterwards!
This is another terrace, although I forget the name of it:

oh, it was Roaring Mt, that's what it was :P

We stopped at this little pull off to have our lunch and enjoyed the beautiful day and the gorgeous weather...

We spent the rest of the day looking for animals and driving around some more.
Thursday we had to check out of our cabin by 10am.  I made a nice breakfast for us of pancakes with huckleberry ice cream and eggs.  We were sitting at our little table with the door open because the cabin would get all smokey and stuffy when you cooked and all of a sudden Ricky yelled, "Look out!"  I had been sitting with my back to the door and glanced behind me and saw something furry at the door and quickly slammed it shut. At first I thought it had been one of the dogs that had been wandering around the camp but then Ricky informed me that it was a fox and had almost been in the cabin with us!  We looked out the window and it had just sat down on our porch and seemed as though he was waiting for some food or something!  Haha!
After we cleaned up and packed we moseyed on back into Bozeman, MT. and checked into our hotel room for the evening.  Our flight left very early Friday morning at 6am.  Our flight and check in and everything went very smoothly and we were soon back with our kids in our house.  We had missed them so much and it was very nice to be home! Here is the tally list of animals sightings for the week:

And I'm excited to plant these this fall!:

It was an amazing trip and I'm so glad we were able to see everything that we did.  If you ever decide to go out there I HIGHLY recommend the True North Series Guide to Yellowstone, it's written from a creationist perspective and very well done!  A lot of the facts and info from my post came from that book :)
It's nice to be back home to our GREEN rolling hills of Lancaster county though :)