Yellowstone Wildlife

The Yellowstone posts are going to be quite long, so I'm splitting them up. I'm starting with the easiest: wildlife.

Elk were the first animal we saw entering Yellowstone. I was just on the other side of the river taking pictures. I thought they were deer so I was extremely impressed by their size, but I guess they were elk... and that's a normal size for elk. I'm still impressed. There were a few more adults and two babies.

The next animal we saw (besides the normal crane and squirrels) was a coyote running across the road... and that was on our drive out of Yellowstone. We were pretty sad not to have seen anything else on our first day, but the second day made up for it.

This wasn't actually at Yellowstone, but I'm posting it anyway because I really liked these fish. This was in Island Park at Big Springs before we went to Yellowstone that day. Check out the size difference in these two fish (there's one to the left and above the big one).

We went to a couple of big waterfalls in Yellowstone and still hadn't seen much wildlife and then all of a sudden... one right by the car!

This one was right next to the road, walking parallel to the car for a bit. It ended up walking into the road. This is when we first saw it (it's the big dark brown thing in the middle of the picture).

This is when it was walking parallel to the car

And video of it (not the best video because we were in the moving car, plus Joel didn't want to have to look at the bison through the camera). We couldn't stay as long as we wanted because a mean person came up behind us and didn't want to stop.

We thought it was pretty cool that we actually got to see some bison and then we turned a corner and...

tons! It was really pretty. After that turn there were a ton of bison everywhere we went.

Including near one of the geyser trails. This guy was just chilling by the walking trails.This is how close he was (though he seemed closer). (And Kaylee does have clothes on her bottom half. She's wearing a dress with bloomers.)

This next video shows what I had pictured Yellowstone to be like- everyone having to stop in the middle of the road because wildlife was right next to their car.

It was seriously amazing! We didn't see any bears (well, Spencer almost did), but it was still really cool. I felt like such a kid every time I'd see an animal. The bison were huge and it was so neat to be right by them (though I did freak out a few times that they were going to charge us).

Next up: Geysers!