I'm finally starting to put up Yellowstone photos. Unfortunately, the volume of pictures is a little daunting, especially since we're getting ready to go out of town again this weekend. I wanted to do a nice summary post of the whole trip, but since I've been slow, I'm only going to tackle the backpacking trip just now. As the capstone to the week, Chris and I spent three days doing the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone, a stretch of the Yellowstone River along the northern edge of the park, ending in Gardiner, Montana (map).
I've got lots of pictures of elk and bison and pronghorn from the first day, but none that are really worth much. You can't really get close enough to the elk up there, so they all just look like way too many dots on the hillsides. Nobody at this altitude had any calves yet, either. We did get a bison running after us when we got stuck trying to go around a herd grazing a very narrow strip along Hellroaring Creek. I did not get a picture of that, but Chris did as I hissed at her to please not worry the animals that obviously are not used to people. An interesting contrast to the bison who let their calves play a dozen feet away from tourists at Old Faithful.
Most of our trail on that first day looked like it was maintained more by ungulates than by people. Only near the trailhead were any bootprints in evidence, and where trailmarkers were knocked over, we wandered onto a few animal trails that didn't look any different than ours. So it was exactly surprising to find a herd anxious to pass by our campsite just after breakfast. This group did have calves, probably very recent. They took quite a while to move past, and then left a male to supervise us as we broke camp, until the whole herd was out of sight.
When we got to our second campsite, we discovered this very scruffy looking goat. The grass was quite nice, and shockingly ungrazed, so he hung around as we set up camp and chit chatted. Then he came back for more lazy grazing in the morning.
We were also surprised by a beaver, foraging in the bushes along the beach by our cooking area. He seemed to be living in a hole under a nearby tree rather than in a dam just yet. Later, in Gardiner, I picked up Decade of the Wolf, a very interesting book on their reintroduction to the park, which claims they're seeing an increase in beaver populations on the Yellowstone as a result. The idea is that elk no longer forage in narrow stretches with limited visibility, leaving willow and cottonwood to grow in those places where they once would've been eaten as shoots. Our campsite would certainly have qualified as elk-unsafe, with just a narrow shelf of grass surrounded by river and hills.
We saw lots of picked-clean carcasses along the trail, which we'd been warned about. Turns out that almost all the elk in the park winter in this valley, and, of course, the weak ones eventually die, drawing all the bears waking up hungry. As long as they're feeding on a carcass, a bear will stay nearby defending his food. In some places the bones were thick on the ground, all clean luckily, but obviously fresh. We didn't see any meat left at all, in fact, until we got within sight of Gardiner, when we passed a couple like this:
Luckily we only saw a few bear tracks, and the only in-person appearances were along the road, like these two cubs wrestling:
And of course, the dozens of parked tourists photographing them. More photos of my own should be up eventually. Can you tell I'm no animal photographer?
