Thursday, August 07, 2008

Yellowstone (Part 5)

Here we go again on Yellowstone Wednesday. First we stopped at the KFC in West Yellowstone to pick up some chicken wings for dinner since we didn't feel like sandwiches.
This picture was hanging in the KFC and I just thought it was SO cute!


Somebody asked my why we only go on Wednesday. Well, it takes almost a full tank of fuel to get there and drive around the park and with they price of fuel we figured once a week was enough. When we got here we decided to go on Wednesday because it's the middle of the week and we thought maybe it would be less crowded. Well, after talking to Linda who works there she said every day is a weekend. The crowds don't let up until August. Yesterday didn't seem to be as crowded either. But then again, we didn't even leave home until 3:00 in the afternoon. We figured we've been everywhere we wanted to go to in the park so our mission was to look for wildlife. We haven't had a whole lot of luck in that department. Wolves were our target yesterday. Well, guess what??? We saw wolves!!! First, a little history of how we knew where they were. I Googled "wolves in Yellowstone" and found a very interesting article about this guy who studies the wolves. It said anywhere you see his yellow Nissan Xterra you'll find wolves. Well, we saw his Xterra yesterday so we stopped and of course there was a HUGE crowd of people. I was surprised how nice this guy was. He had a telescope set up (the wolves were very far away) and he was allowing everybody the chance to look in it. It was so cool to see these black wolves just sitting there and when you looked in the telescope it looked like they were looking right back at you. Pretty amazing experience. That was our highlight of the day.

On our way to the wolves we saw a black bear and then a huge herd of prong horn antelope. While we were sitting in our lawn chairs watching the antelope a coyote came up behind us. He didn't bother us and just went on his way. It's funny that the animals are just as curious about us as we are about them. Last week we saw some deer down in Grand Teton in the woods and we stopped to look at them. They looked right back at us as if to say, "What? Can we help you?" Just cracked me up.

Prong Horned Antelope. I think if you click on the photo you can see him better.

I tell you I have a new respect for wildlife photographers though. It's really hard to take pictures with my little digital camera. I have a 10X zoom and for normal photography it works just fine but for wildlife it's just not enough. I see other people out there with these HUGE cameras with HUGE lenses and I guess I can see why they carry them. I don't want to carry that kind of camera with me nor am I going to set up a tripod. I guess you'll just have to believe me when I tell you about the animals we've seen.

Of course we also saw tons of Bison as well. My friend Dee said the babies are red. Well, the babies we've seen were already brown so I guess they were born a lot earlier. Yesterday we DID see a red one.


More Bison photos



That's it for now. We're on our way to Ennis today for a grocery run before the kids get here. It's 60 miles from here and we're hoping it's a bigger town with more to offer than West Yellowstone.

3 comments:

Speedy said...

Hey you are doing just fine with the camera you have. I feel like I was there with you. I enjoyed the day take me again soon.

Speedy

Leno said...

Sounds like a fun day. Nice pictures. Thanks for sharing them with us.

Tumbleweed Dee said...

Great pictures! You have me all excited about our trips to Yellowstone so I added pictures to my blog today. I'm glad you saw the little red baby buffaloe, they're so cute.
Dee

http://tumbleweed-jimdee.blogspot