Today’s adventure started last night. Ronnie noticed that there was some pink in the sky at sunset, so I flew my DJI Mavic 3 drone and shot some sunset panoramas. I had one that I really liked and that’s the one that I am posting tonight.
Later in the evening after it was completely dark, I went out to do a couple of my star trail images. I really like the two that I did.
It was cold last night. When we woke up it was 38 degrees, and we were looking at a high of 61 degrees. It is very different to the weather that we have been having up until now. One of the pluses of our trip so far has been the lack of rain. We woke up in Dillon CO to some snow and had some rain that morning and other than that we did not have any rain at all on our trip. We were very lucky!
After we left our house and turned onto the highway towards Yellowstone National Park, we spotted a herd of pronghorn antelopes in a field right next to the road. I stopped to take a few photos and we hope that this was an omen of how our day would go.
In our heads, we expected Yellowstone National Park to be loaded with animals and that we would see them everywhere.
On our way into the park, we went through 3 states. We were staying in Idaho and at one point we crossed into Montana and then we ended up in Wyoming where the park was. We used our America the beautiful forever pass and entered the park.
We were driving for about 20 minutes when we saw a wolf cross the road in front of us. We were like, wow, this is going to be great!
They went along the Madison River, and we saw many fly fishermen in the shallow water. There was mist coming off the water as the temperature was low.
The first stop was Gibbon Falls. It was a delight to behold. They had a walkway that led to a very, very good viewpoint of the falls itself.
There are many hot thermal springs, which spew stream, and geysers, which erupt with steaming water. in Yellowstone National Park. There are probably hundreds of them as well as We stopped at one called Beryl Springs. The wind was blowing steam across the roadway making it difficult to see.
I had made the wrong decision when I entered the park. The roadway in the park is shaped like the number 8. There is the northern loop and the southern loop. We went north and never crossed in the middle of the figure eight and continued the southern loop after completing the northern one. We drove for hours without seeing any animals.
We were both disappointed as we really wanted to see large animals. Along one of the rivers, we saw a herd of bison that were at least a quarter of a mile away. Even with my long lens, I couldn’t get a great photo.
We made a stop at the “Grand Canyon of Yellowstone” and saw a beautiful canyon and a majestic waterfall.
We stopped along a river and were mesmerized by its beauty.
Just when we thought that all was lost, we spotted two bison very close to the road. We stopped and I had a blast taking photos.
This image was neat because the bison had a little bird sitting on its back.
Not ten minutes later, we found two more. These were a little off the road but still within thirty yards. We smiled at each other.
We had talked about the beauty in the park and now we had finally had close encounters with a large animal. We didn’t get too close. Others were not as considerate. We had seen a video where a woman tried to take a selfie with a bison and the animal attached her. Lesson learned for us.
We never made it to Old Faithful, but we hope to be there tomorrow as long as starting our route where we ended today and only doing the southern part of the figure eight.
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