Category: Yellowstone

Trail Ridge Road

Adventures into the wild take us to the most extraordinary places. You will find narrative and photo records of our adventures on our blog. We look forward to your input on the blog articles as we are constantly tracking wildlife sightings across North America.

Our first family trip into the wilderness was in 2012.  We visited Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands.  In all, the trip was amazing!

The photo gallery here is the first photo gallery ever put together for this website.  It consists of our adventures across trail ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park.  The road, constructed in 1921, passes across the northern portion of the Park’s high country.  The adventure spends almost twenty miles above the tree line reaching altitudes over 12,000 feet.

Prior to the road construction, Trail Ridge had been used by Native Americans to cross the mountains between their home lands in the west and hunting areas on the east side. Arapahoe Indians called the trail located on the ridge as “taienbaa” (“Where the Children Walked”) because it was so steep that children could not be carried, but had to walk. The Ute tribe crossing the mountains at Forest Canyon Pass marked their route with stone cairns. The present park Ute Trail follows partially that ancient route.

On the west side, about 1880, a wagon road was constructed along the Kawuneeche Valley from the town of Grand Lake to the mining camps of Lulu City and Gaskill. The camps were abandoned after a few years when short-lived mining boom ended and later the road was used only occasionally by hunters and tourists.

The pictures here were taken on our adventure, the last week of June, 2012.  We hope you enjoy them, and plan on making your own trip to this amazing natural wonder in the middle of our great country.

Wyoming Bear Encounter

During our visit to Yellowstone we were blessed to see bears on three separate occasions, one of which was much closer than we could have expected.  As you can see, the first picture was from over 100 yards.  After the camera clicked, the bear heard the noise and clearly caught a scent.  He came close to check me out – but changed his mind after all when he was about 100 feet away. The gallery below captures the entire event, from the time the bear first headed my way to the time he calmly walked away, heading downstream to stand up and scratch his back on a tree.

Here’s some information about the bears at Yellowstone to go along with the gallery.

An estimated 600 grizzly bears live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  Black bears are common in the park and were a park symbol due to visitor interaction with the bears starting in 1910. Feeding and close contact with bears has not been permitted since the 1960s to reduce their desire for human foods.[100] Yellowstone is one of the few places in the United States where black bears can be seen coexisting with grizzly bears.[100] Black bear observations occur most often in the park’s northern ranges and in the Bechler area which is in the park’s southwestern corner.[101]

What’s the difference between a grizzly and a black bear?

Grizzlies have a hump on their upper back, a rump lower than their shoulders, a ruff of long fur and long claws. Males weigh between 200 and 700 pounds, while females weigh between 200 and 400 pounds. The bears are surprisingly fast, able to run up to 45 miles per hour, and climb trees, although their weight makes this getting up high somewhat difficult. They live up to 30 years. South of Canada, large populations of grizzlies are only found in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and northwest Montana. A single bear will roam over hundreds of square miles.

Grizzly bears are not afraid of humans and are more aggressive than black bears.

Black bears are smaller than grizzlies, with males weighing between 210 and 315 pounds and females weighing between 135 and 200 pounds. Not all black bears are black. Some are brown or blonde. They eat rodents, insects, elk calves, cutthroat trout, pine nuts, grasses and other vegetation and have short, curved claws, making them expert climbers.

Yellowstone is one of the few areas south of Canada where black bears coexist with grizzlies.

What are the odds of seeing a bear on your Yellowstone visit?

Not too bad. Visitors reported more than 40,000 bear sightings between 1980 and 2011. Most grizzly sightings occur at night, dawn and dusk during the spring and early summer. Grizz are most often seen in the Lamar Valley, Gardiners Hole, Antelope Creek meadows, Dunraven Pass, Hayden Valley, and in the wet meadows along the East Entrance Road from Fishing Bridge to the East Entrance of the park. Hoping to see a black bear? Your odds of seeing these smaller bears improve during the daytime, especially when you’re in the northern part of the park along the road between Elk Creek and Tower Falls, on the stretch from Mammoth Hot Springs north to Indian Creek, or in the Bechler region in Yellowstone’s southwest corner.

Sources:  MyYellowstonePark.Com and the Wikipedia page for Yellowstone National Park.

Wyoming Bison

The Yellowstone Park bison herd in Yellowstone National Park is probably the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States. Yellowstone is known for its geothermal activity and large mammals, especially elk, wolves, American bison, bears, pronghorns, moose and bighorn sheep.

The Yellowstone Park bison herd was estimated in 2015 to be 4,900 bison. The bison in the Yellowstone Park bison herd are American bison of the Plains bison subspecies. Yellowstone National Park may be the only location in the United States where free-ranging bison were never extirpated, since they continued to exist in the wild and were not re-introduced, as has been done in most other bison herd areas.

Other large free-ranging, publicly controlled herds of bison in the United States include the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Kansas (2100 to 2600 animals), Wind Cave bison herd (approximately 350 animals), the Antelope Island bison herd (approximately 550 to 700 animals), the Henry Mountains bison herd in Utah (400 to 500 animals), and the National Bison Range herd near Flathead Lake, Montana (400 animals).

Enjoy the following pictures taken during our last visit to Yellowstone.

Yellowstone Geothermals

The geothermal areas of Yellowstone include several geyser basins in Yellowstone National Park as well as other geothermal features such as hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles. The number of thermal features in Yellowstone is estimated at 10,000. A study that was completed in 2011 found that a total of 1,283 geysers have erupted in Yellowstone, 465 of which are active during an average year. These are distributed among nine geyser basins, with a few geysers found in smaller thermal areas throughout the Park. The number of geysers in each geyser basin are as follows: Upper Geyser Basin (410), Midway Geyser Basin (59), Lower Geyser Basin (283), Norris Geyser Basin (193), West Thumb Geyser Basin (84), Gibbon Geyser Basin (24), Lone Star Geyser Basin (21), Shoshone Geyser Basin (107), Heart Lake Geyser Basin (69), other areas (33). Although famous large geysers like Old Faithful are part of the total, most of Yellowstone’s geysers are small, erupting to only a foot or two. The hydrothermal system that supplies the geysers with hot water sits within an ancient active caldera. Many of the thermal features in Yellowstone build up sinter, geyserite, or travertine deposits around and within them.

The various geyser basins are located where rainwater and snowmelt can percolate into the ground, get indirectly superheated by the underlying Yellowstone hotspot, and then erupt at the surface as geysers, hot springs, and fumaroles. Thus flat-bottomed valleys between ancient lava flows and glacial moraines are where most of the large geothermal areas are located. Smaller geothermal areas can be found where fault lines reach the surface, in places along the circular fracture zone around the caldera, and at the base of slopes that collect excess groundwater. Due to the Yellowstone Plateau‘s high elevation the average boiling temperature at Yellowstone’s geyser basins is 199 °F (93 °C). When properly confined and close to the surface it can periodically release some of the built-up pressure in eruptions of hot water and steam that can reach up to 390 feet (120 m) into the air (see Steamboat Geyser, the world’s tallest geyser). Water erupting from Yellowstone’s geysers is superheated above that boiling point to an average of 204 °F (95.5 °C) as it leaves the vent. The water cools significantly while airborne and is no longer scalding hot by the time it strikes the ground, nearby boardwalks, or even spectators. Because of the high temperatures of the water in the features it is important that spectators remain on the boardwalks and designated trails. Several deaths have occurred in the park as a result of falls into hot springs.

Prehistoric Native American artifacts have been found at Mammoth Hot Springs and other geothermal areas in Yellowstone. Some accounts state that the early people used hot water from the geothermal features for bathing and cooking. In the 19th century Father Pierre-Jean De Smet reported that natives he interviewed thought that geyser eruptions were “the result of combat between the infernal spirits.”[5] The Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled north of the Yellowstone area in 1806. Local natives that they came upon seldom dared to enter what we now know is the caldera because of frequent loud noises that sounded like thunder and the belief that the spirits that possessed the area did not like human intrusion into their realm. The first white man known to travel into the caldera and see the geothermal features was John Colter, who had left the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He described what he saw as “hot spring brimstone.” Beaver trapper Joseph Meek recounted in 1830 that the steam rising from the various geyser basins reminded him of smoke coming from industrial smokestacks on a cold winter morning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the 1850s famed trapper Jim Bridger called it “the place where Hell bubbled up.”

We made a family visit to Yellowstone and captured the beauty and power of the geothermal events.  A gallery from the trip is posted below.  Remember that all of our pictures are provided herein with permission to be copied or reproduced to support the preservation and development of natural habitat in North America.