Saturday, Aug. 6th

Saturday August 6th, 2011

Today we took a drive to Yellowstone's north entrance at Mammoth Hot
Springs with plans to work our way south and into the Lamar Valley in search of bears. To our surprise we saw three grizzly bears and one black bear along with several mountain goats, large groups of bison (we think about 400 or so), lots of elk (we just learned a group of elk is called a "gang"), pronghorn antelope, two red foxes and one wiley looking coyote.
In the bird category we saw a few Osprey and a couple of not so common Common Cranes and lots of Canada geese.  After our animal watching we did a little trout fishing and got back to our dorm about 10:00 PM.

We're now a bit past the mid point of our stay and some friends and dorm mates are talking about extending thier assignments thru the winter season (Yellowstone actually has about 90,000 visitors each winter compared to an estimated 3.4M vistors this summer). We haven't applied for the winter session and our plans for now should have us back home by early October.

The attached pics include the popular travertine terraces at Mammoth and the hotel built in 1936.  We may have mentioned in an earlier post that the park was originally patrolled by the army and we've included a picture of officers' housing dating back pre-1900. We understand from historians that Mammoth was a very desired military assignment a hundred or so years ago!

The first grizzly we saw was tearing across a mountain side at a pretty good clip and can be better seen (a bit anyway) if you zoom in on it.  The pronghorn were about a mile away from this particular bear but kept their eyes glued to him until he disappeared over the mountainside away from them. Pronghorn are easily the fastest animals in the park but take no chances where bears and wolves are involved. We are told between the bears and the wolves they both kill and eat almost 50% of all newborn elk each year.

We included a couple of pictures of our "bear jams" (traffic jams) which quickly develop whenever a large animal is sighted near a roadway. It's pretty much chaos and confusion and the road is usually blocked until the critter decides to amble away out of camera distance.

The closer bear is also one of the 3 grizzlies we saw and was just about 30 - 40 yards from us...not usually a safe enough distance but a fast flowing  Lamar River was between us and him so everyone felt a bit of extra bravado.  This particular one was a huge mature male and if you look closely you can see the "grizzled" or white tipped hair on his back from where he gets his nickname "grizzly".  Gizzly bears are also larger and have an easily identifiable hump above their front shoulder and a "dish" face compared to black bears. As a side note, the park service just euthanized a grizzly last week near Yellostone Lake as he was harrasing back country hikers and going thru several backpacks.  We heard the rationale for putting him down was that he was getting too familair to people with backpacks and that eventually someone was sure to be injured.  Poor bear.
   
The black bear shown near the end of the pics was barely into a small copse of pines just off the road and we watched him for a good 15 minutes as he rolled over downed trees looking for insects.

The last photos are of a huge solitary bison that was just feet from the road and another of an osprey nest high above the Lamar River.  The nest was empty and we were later told by a guide friend that the new birds had just fledged or left the nest about a week ago.
More to come next week as we find new areas of the park to explore.  Hope every one is doing well.