Greetings once more from Yellowstone. We're getting ever closer to the end of our
summer "assignment" with just a few weeks remaining. Time is racing by.
The hints of the coming Fall are in the air with a couple of frosts this past week, thinning crowds with fewer school age children, the beginning of the bison rut and bull elk beginnig to assemble their "harems", and many of our student-age workers returning to school. Morning temperatures are in the mid-thirties and lately we need to wear light jackets in the mornings and evenings.
The attached pics are of a couple of cow elk we surprised at dusk and a nature hike we took with a Yellowstone ranger this past Saturday at Pelican Point. Our original plan was to hike Storm Point on Yellowstone Lake but that area was closed with posted signs warning us of bears and wolves feeding on an elk carcus near the trailhead. Pelican took us thru marshy lowlands and then into mature lodgepole pine forests and ended along the shore of Yellowstone Lake ....three very disparate ecoysystems with thier own animals and plants. In our group was a mother and daughter from Carmel and
the mom was a scientist with Lilly...quite a small world! 
Later in the day we drove North along the Yellowstone River in search of rutting bison and hiked the "Mud Volcano" area. It's very different than the other geyser areas we've visited in that very high levels of sulfuric acid has dissolved the surrounding rock into boilng mud with a very strong odor of hydrogen sulfide gas.Just after leaving the Mud Volcano area we entered Hayden Valley in search of bison and only saw a few. What we did encounter was a huge traffic jam
of about 200 vehicles and no animals in sight. Suddenly about 50 people
and two park rangers came tearing up a hillside next to us shouting that a grizzly bear and her two cubs were right behind them coming our way! The rangers were literally throwing people back into their cars and campers and slamming doors behind them. We were trying to make sense of all the chaos wondering just where along the huge traffic jam the bears would emerge when suddenly they came over the rise and crossed right in front of our car! We quickly fumbled around with our camera settings and lenses and caught one fair shot of the mother and one of her two cubs. Following that chance encounter we caught an incredibly bad (but free) dinner in the Canyon Village EDR and headed home.
On Sunday we put our hiking boots back on and did a 7 mile hike to Lone Star Geyser just a 15 minute drive from our home at Old Faithful. It was a fairly easy but warm hike along an upper section of the Firehole River and very beautiful. Lone Star was fun to see and our timing was good as it only erupts every 3 hours or so (as compared to Old Faithful which erupts every 90 minutes). Between eruptions we hiked a bit deeper into the forest and came upon a campsite with its food supply hung high in the trees. (Brings back memories doesn't it Mike, Jud, Bill and Sergio??).
In closing, a humerous note. Earlier last week a guest and his family staying in our huge Old Faithful Inn were visited by a mouse around 11:00PM. Being the protector of his family the father quickly let loose with a long blast from his canister of bear spray and within minutes about 40 guests had to be evacuated from their rooms and checked out by our EMTs for breathing problems! Not sure what happened to the mouse... :)
All for now....
Jim and Ann
That bear's fur looks like it could use a good brushing. Could you smell the bear as it walked by your car?
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